Back to more fun at the San Diego Bird Festival! Last time I talked about all the wood duck action at Santee Lakes. I did get quite a few photos of wood ducks, but the main bird species seen at Santee Lakes (and my hotel) was the American coot. While we were at Santee, families came to "feed the duc...

I'm not sure how much to tell you about the horned guan. I had a vague idea of the challenge of the trail to the guan, but I really don't think I fully grasped how hard it would be to see this bird. Now, I debate with myself: "Do I go on and on about how hard it was and will that prevent someone fro...

I got to debut one of my favorite new birding shirts while at the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival. Can I say how much I love the shirts at Magnificent Frigatebird? I blogged about some of these shirts around the holidays. I love the sense of humor that the company has and I love that the...

We take a small break from gulls to talk about a few other species. I have a few more birds to share from our second field trip that we led to Viera Wetlands while at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. One of the funny things was after I got my lifer limpkin earlier in the week, I kept g...

Before I went to Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, I listed all the field trips that I would be on and one of them was a gull id workshop at at Tomoka Landfill. See all the gulls in the above photo, that landfill was jam packed with birds! I had a bit of a panic, gulls are not my strong sui...

When you go birding in Florida, frost is not what you expect to have to deal with. Before I headed to Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival, I was sent emails regarding the weather. I noticed that the lows were in the thirties with highs in the 50s, but after dealing with -21, I figured I could ...

Check it out, it's an upside downy woodpecker! Har har, I slay myself. I have time to digiscope, but I gotta tell ya' it's hard on those digisocping batteries! It's currently -7 (Fahrenheit) and I'm lucky if I can get one full minute out of my camera batteries--and that's keeping hand warmers around...

Oh, the dangers of talking while digiscoping. I've said it before and I'll say it again, when you digiscope, you get hundreds of not quite perfect photos. If you're just trying it out and you feel that most of your photos are crap, don't feel bad, it takes several tries and maybe even a little tweak...

After several days of butt chilling temperatures, we finally had some warm weather. It started on Christmas Day. Non Birding Bill and I noticed the temps were in the twenties and then stepped outside. It was so warm, we took a walk to Lake Calhoun. By Friday morning the temps were down right balmy i...

When it comes to gull id, I've always depended on the kindness of strangers to point out what birds are in the flock. I haven't had a huge interest in them, they all looked the same and when someone would point out the differences they were seeing on a particular gull, I wasn't seeing those differen...