Savvy birders are meteorologically astute. They keep an eye out for what may be arriving with the next airmass, wrung out of the skies by an approaching front, or even just a pop-up thunderstorm on an otherwise migration-friendly day. In the age of smartphones and apps, it’s now more convenient than ever to stay abreast of changing weather conditions. Anyone … Read More
The evolution of county listing
I came to county listing quite innocently, at least in my mind. After college, I spent my summers doing surveys for the now published 2nd Breeding Bird Atlas in Pennsylvania, honing my earbirding skills so I could identify any breeding species by hearing just a snippet of their song. (Hint: If you really want to learn your bird songs, spend … Read More
2012 PAMC eBird results
[dc]E[/dc]ncouraging Pennsylvania birders to enter their PAMC data into eBird was a definite success. After two weeks, over 800 checklists were submitted, for a total of 220 species. We don’t yet know the official total number of species reported from the PAMC this year because reports are still being compiled, however, last year there were a total of 238 species reported. … Read More
Winter Raptor Survey Results for PA – 2012
Greg Grove sent out the following message concerning the results of this past winter’s PA winter raptor surveys (WRS). Greg has allowed me to post this on his behalf – Record coverage and mild weather led to several record high counts this year. Given that hourly rates were not notably (or at all) higher than usual (with one exception) – most … Read More
Birds to Look For – Centre Co, PA (Last week of March)
This coming weekend marks the beginning of the last week of March. April is so close and beginning in just the first week of April, we will see huge pushes of newly-arriving spring migrants into our area. This last week of March is very important too, however, and I have tried to go through eBird bar charts for Centre County … Read More
2012 Yard Contest – February results
For February we are now up to 37 entries in the yard contest. People are doing pretty good in all the categories, especially those with some attached property which is probably helping them with sparrows and other passerines. Two yards are tied at 43 species, with quite a few not far behind. It will be interesting to see how many … Read More
Centre County Waterfowl Report 2/29/12
Many of us here in Centre County have brought up the idea of trying to coordinate efforts on rainy days when waterfowl could get forced down, by checking every single body of water in the county during the same block of hours, and trying to get a full picture of how the storm affected waterfowl migration. Today everything fell into … Read More
The American Kestrel story
American Kestrels have experienced some pretty severe declines in parts of their range. This was most recently brought to my attention while reading Clay Sutton’s article ‘Killy Killy No More’ in the November 2011 edition of Birding. This article was perhaps inspired by the fact that American Kestrel was the 2011 ABA Bird of the Year. More locally, there was … Read More
Jo Hays Vista – October 2011 Report
On the first day of October, we had counted 2048 migrate past Jo Hays Vista, the best fall flight at this site ever recorded. I was really excited to see what would happen in October, after all last year we really didn’t even start hawk watching seriously up at JHV until October and we were rewarded with a wonderful flight … Read More
Blue-headed Vireos on the decline?
There has been a lot of talk on the PABirds listserv regarding a possible decline of Blue-headed Vireos based on the scarcity of individual sightings this fall. I decided to look into some eBird graphs to see if our collective eBirding can shed some light on the discussion. The graphs do have to be taken with a grain of salt … Read More