A review by Bill Schmoker Mastering Bird Photography: The Art, Craft, and Technique of Photographing Birds and Their Behavior by Marie Read Rocky Nook, 2019 340 pages, softcover ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14938 Given the explosive growth of digital bird photography in the last decade or so, there have been surprisingly few titles devoted to the topic despite the proliferation of birding books in the same time span. In her ambitious new Mastering Bird Photography: The Art, Craft, and Technique of Photographing Birds and Their Behavior, Marie Read has distilled decades of experience into a beautifu ..read more

A review by Mark VanderVen Bringing Back the Birds: Exploring Migration and Preserving Birdscapes throughout the Americas, by Owen Deutsch and the American Bird Conservancy Braided River, 2019 208 pages, hardcover ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14928   “We are a dying symphony. No bird knows this,  But us — we know…”   Margaret Atwood’s poem “Fatal Light Awareness” introduces the remarkable Bringing Back the Birds: Exploring Migration and Preserving Birdscapes throughout the Americas, giving us a haunting reminder of anthropogenically-driven mass declines of many American bird species. Hers is one of ..read more

Continuing rare birds in the ABA Area include the La Sagra’s Flycatcher (ABA Code 4) in Florida and a female Garganey (4) in California. Florida’s 3rd record of Hammond’s Flycatcher had been masquerading as a Least Flycatcher in Collier for several weeks before someone noticed that the wings were a little too long. And that wasn’t the only Hammond’s seen in the eastern part of the US this week, as in Massachusetts a Hammond’s Flycatcher was seen on Martha’s Vineyard. Tis the season for Euro thrushes in the northeast part of the ABA Area and Newfoundland had a Redwing (4) in Lumsden this week ..read more

Continuing rarities in the ABA Area include a Garganey (ABA Code 4) in California, both La Sagra’s Flycatcher (4) and Antillean Palm-Swift (5) in Florida, and a Streak-backed Oriole (4) continuing to visit a feeder in Arizona. Not much in the way of ABA rarities this week, but New Mexico saw the return of a Common Crane (4) in Socorro, traveling amongst the many thousands of Sandhill Cranes at Bosque del Apache NWR. This Old World species is somewhat regular in North America, almost always in flocks of Sandhills. Indeed, most records come from states where Sandhill cranes congregate in winter ..read more

Welcome to 2020! As is typically the case, we ease into the rare bird world  at the top of the year. But there are a couple nice state firsts for those birders looking to get their year lists off right. In Georgia, a young Snail Kite in Charlton is the state’s long-anticipated 1st record. This is a particularly nice find in the light of the spate of vagrant Snail Kite records in the east at the end of last year, including a small handful in the Carolinas to the north. Somewhat surprisingly, Delaware had its 1st living record of Western Tanager at Bombay Hook this week. The species is a fairly ..read more

What: Great Horned Owl, Bubo virginianus When: Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Where: Fountain Creek Regional Park, El Paso County, Colorado Well, another decade is in the record books. Or it will be in a few hours. I hope yours was good. Some personal highlights for me: • My kids are teenagers now, how’d that happen? (Shoutout to Kei on this one.) • I uploaded one or more complete eBird checklists on each and every one of the 3,652 days of the decade. • I baked a frozen pizza upside down, almost set the house on fire, and lived to tell about it. Back to eBird for a moment. I can see how you mi ..read more

For the last Birding photo quiz of the 2010s, we turned the proceedings over to four teen birders who were recent participants in the ABA’s Young Birder of the Year program. Each one of them took a whack at the Nov. 2019 Birding Featured Photo, and each one of them pretty quickly got around to the correct answer. But their approaches were highly varied, and not a one of them was entirely conventional—conventional, that is to say, by the standards of bird identification as many of us learned it in the’ 80s, ’90s, and ’00s. Please consult the Nov. 2019 Birding for the independently derived analy ..read more

As we head into the end of 2019, there are still a handful of rare birds in the ABA Area to note. A Crimson-collared Grosbeak (ABA Code 4) continues in Texas. California has both a Garganey (4) and a Red-footed Booby (4) and Florida birders have kept tabs on the continuing La Sagra’s Flycatcher (4) and Antillean Palm-Swift (5). I thought we were putting 2019 to bed in terms of rare birds, but this week saw the report of a real stunner in the open ocean off of Washington in the form of a Northern Giant Petrel photographed in a scrum of seabirds following a fishing boat. The captain of the boat ..read more

The end of 2019 means that we’re coming to the end of the ABA’s 50th, looking forward to the our next 50. Any big milestone encourages taking stock of where you’ve been, where you’re going. And here at the ABA we’ve been doing a lot of that internally, and in our various publications this year. But to sort of close the book on these 50 years we bring you a conversation about the ABA at 50 and beyond with a couple people listeners to the podcast are no doubt familiar with. ABA President Jeff Gordon and Birding editor Ted Floyd join me to talk about the past, the present, and the future of birdi ..read more

A review by Frank Izaguirre Roads, Peoples, Birds, Mountaintops, & Billabongs by Dean Fisher Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2018 500 pages, hardcover ABA Sales / Buteo Books 14925 In To See Every Bird on Earth, author Dan Koeppel, while chronicling the first globetrotting birders, describes Dean Fisher: “When I first heard about Fisher, I didn’t believe he really existed, mostly because he’s not mentioned in the early accounts of listing that I’d seen.” For historians and enthusiasts of world listing and global Big Years, Fisher may be the most mystery-shrouded figure of the pantheon ..read more