Try being a bird. Want more pain? Try being a migrant bird. On their highly evolved natural calendars, spring, as measured by the First Leaf and First Bloom Indices is leaping forward not by hours but by days or even weeks. Our spring insect emergence, a natural event that migrant birds rely on, started in […]
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Speculation Alert I can not find an authoritative source so I’m speculating that Georgia hosts an unusually large number of avian vagrants – birds outside their ‘normal’ ranges – each year and the number is increasing. Though not fully researched, at least by me, I don’t think this is unfounded speculation. How about y’all? Seeing […]
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Irruption years are a good news, bad news, good news story. The first good news is masting in the northern boreal forests. Masting is when a tree species food source has an abundant+ crop. For example, conifers. This allows the bird species that rely on that food source to have a great breeding season – […]
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We have Eastern Towhees living and nesting in our yard – strikingly marked large sparrows that call on us to “Drink Your Tea!!”. This is not unusual for our part of Georgia. They are considered to be numerous, even though their population numbers declined 49% between 1966 and 2015, according to the North American Breeding […]
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