Yesterday on Twitter, someone mentioned some stunning pictures of chickens. Which immediately made me think of Las Vegas. A few years ago, a friend and I were in Las Vegas for a business convention. One day we had a free morning, and not being interested in casinos, we were at …
The highly-anticipated Fraser River Valley Bald Eagle Festival occurs annually over the third weekend of November (21-22) and works with 15 individual sites to offer a wide variety of activities and adventures from Mission to Chilliwack. The area hosts North America’s third-largest population of over-wintering Bald Eagles, arriving to feast …
I admit it – the birding gods have smiled on me when it comes to owl sightings. I grew up in the northern boreal forest, where Great-gray and Great-horned owls were commonplace. In a South Carolina cypress swamp, a Barred owl flew in and landed about 12 ft away. A …
Sometimes the birding urge just overtakes you. Completely ignoring a mountain of work at home, my husband and I decided to spend a sunny November Sunday tooling around the prairie countryside looking for snow geese. When we left at 8:30 am, it was a brisk 2C, and the sun was …
This is the sixth in a series of posts on birds at risk in Canada. The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) lists 73 bird species as endangered, threatened or of special concern. This is a cautionary tale. A tale of how quickly a species numbering …
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSOB) has proclaimed Oct 24 as Feed The Birds Day. It serves as a reminder of all the things we can do to help the birds through the coming winter. We’re pretty good at providing fast food for birds and this is …
Fall migration is such a wonderful time for bird watchers. Not only do we have a variety of adult birds moving through, we have the added challenge of trying to identify juveniles. For the past couple of weeks, I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to identify the …
Today is Blog Action Day, with the focus on climate change and global warming. As I sat down to write this article, I glanced out my window and sighed. A very early snowfall has covered the ground, and record low temperatures have frozen the green leaves on the trees. Hardly …
It’s a miserable, dark, snowy day here in Calgary. I was enjoying my book and a cup of tea when my corvid alarm went off. As any birdwatcher knows, a flock of screaming crows, magpies and jays generally means there’s an owl in the vicinity. I grabbed my binoculars & …
Hearing ranks next to sight in its importance to birds and their survival. The ear openings of birds are hidden under feathers, called auriculars, on the sides of the head. There is no cartilaginous outer ear as found in humans and other mammals. Birds are highly social animals, and depend …