On a recent Saturday morning, I decided to visit Middle Island, near St. Marys, West Virginia, one of 22 islands making up the Ohio River Islands National Wildlife Refuge. Middle Island is the only island in the refuge with a bridge, making it one of the most popular destinations in the refuge, which stretches from… Read more »
For Halloween, I thought it would be fun to make a list of my top 10 scary birds. Remember the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock classic The Birds? The plot centers on a series of violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California. Most of the birds used in the film were real crows, ravens,… Read more »
On Saturday, October 9, 2021, more than 33,000 birders worldwide participated in October Big Day, using eBird to record the birds they found during the event, which was part of the Global Bird Weekend. I was asked to head up a Bird Watcher’s Digest team and happily accepted the task. My first duty as team… Read more »
My wife and I recently traveled to Maysville, Kentucky, to attend a family wedding. After the wedding, we spent the night on the family farm in Brown County, Ohio. When I woke up the next morning, I could hear birds singing outside the bedroom window. I grabbed my phone, opened Merlin, and started recording the… Read more »
The title I originally planned for this article was “The Woes of Fall Migration,” but I decided instead to focus on the positive. True, fall bird migration can be result in some of the most frustrating birdtography of the year, but along with the challenges can come some rewarding results. Here are four ways migration… Read more »
When I checked my email one recent morning, as I usually do first thing in the morning, I noticed a message from our local birding club. The subject caught my eye: “Avocets.” The email was only a few minutes old and stated that one of our local naturalists had spotted two American avocets on the… Read more »
I recently led a Bird Watcher’s Digest Birdtography Reader Rendezvous in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I arrived a few days ahead of the tour to scout out locations and spend a little time by myself with the birds and bears of the eastern Tennessee, especially in my favorite location, Cades Cove. The Cove’s 11-mile,… Read more »
I enjoy watching and photographing bird behavior. Recently I had the opportunity to photograph a white-breasted nuthatch pair as they prepared to nest in my backyard. Nuthatches make their nests in natural cavities, such as a broken limb or tree trunk or perhaps an old woodpecker hole. My nuthatch pair found a cavity in tree… Read more »
Watching birds in my backyard in the rain last week reminded me of something I heard my grandfather say on more than one occasion: “If the birds in the rain play, it will rain all day.” And sure enough, it rained all day. Remembering this made me wonder: Can birds predict the weather? Are there… Read more »
You may have heard photographers say, “That’s great light.” Or perhaps you have thought: “I think I’ll just stay home today because the light is awful.” Light in winter can be challenging for outdoor photography, and it is a key variable in whether a satisfactory photograph is possible. Light is a basic building block of… Read more »
