there used to be a most marvelous hummingbird migration map, but they stopped updating it because of some Google problem or something...One year I got a dot for my location (earliest noted h-bird near me) which was a major high in my otherwise boring life. :http://www.hummingbirds.net/map.html
looks like it may not be secure anymore, so i wouldn't click on stuff, but you can see the format...
I was standing at my kitchen sink Sunday, looking out the window at my backyard. All of a sudden, a hawk came swooping down from the very back of my yard STRAIGHT AT ME. I think it realized there was a window at the last minute b/c it stopped and flapped at me a second or two, not two feet from my face, then flew off to a distant tree. I don't know if it actually came in contact with the window or not b/c I screamed and couldn't have heard it if it did. SCARED THE CRAP OUT OF ME! I have never had one do that and hope it doesn't happen again. My neighbors' chickens were running around their yard, so I warned them there was a hawk nearby. We have lots of them, and I have had one swoop in front of me in the driveway, but never had one dive bomb my window like that.
Oh, sure. I have had the heartbreak of finding a dead cardinal outside my storm door and a smear of red feathers on the glass. But for this hawk to pick out my relatively small kitchen window to dive bomb from hundreds of feet away was just unexpected. I have no idea what it saw/thought to make it do that. I don't think it saw me until it was right there, which is why it pulled up at the last second.
The Canada Geese have started scratching that Zugunruhe itch. I’ve notice migrations the past week or so. Must be cold up north!
On this morning's walk I saw the first migrating geese of the season.
Yes, if the geese have a nice golf course or office park to hang in, why go South?
I probably mentioned it before, but at an ACC tournament some years ago, we were at an office park to buy some sandwiches...office parks have nice paths and nice ponds, then wonder why the geese crap all over them...so I met a woman who had a border collie and an radio controlled little boat, she called her business Goose Busters, and she drove around all day having the dog swim at the geese and chase them away....but every once in a while there's an alpha goose who won't leave, then she brings out the radio boat to scare them off.
http://www.goosebusters2.com/about_us.html
there ya go...they don't seem to mention the radio controlled boat, but I know they have it...
Birds declared extinct. My mom still swears she saw an ivory-billed a few years ago in her back yard.
https://www.wral.com/us-says-ivory-b...inct/19900409/
I remember the Ivory-billed woodpecker "bubble" in 2005 and 2006. Oh, man! Birds were reported from Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia -- after a fairly credible video by an outdoorsman in Arkansas was revealed and confirmed by Cornell Ornithology. But no one ever found a nest hole, which would have allowed definitive observation, photos, etc. Hmmmm... Then, because of concern about the quantity of reports of a bird that had not had a confirmed sighting since 1944, organizers began sending observers out in teams of two people instead of just individuals. Spottings fell off dramatically. Then the guys at the Cape May Bird Observatory re-analyzed the initial video and concluded that the white patches on the wings were really from the underwing of the bird, which is consistent with the almost-as-large Pileated Woodpecker, an impressive sight in MidAtlandtic and Southern forests.
Boom and then bust in Ivory-billed Woodpecker searches.
There is a larger lesson to be learned from the Ivory-billed Woodpecker outcry -- because most of the reports came from very good birders with many hundreds if not thousands of birds on their lifelists.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013