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Today’s Google Doodle honors Phoebe Snetsinger!

Since being spotted in Prospect Park over the weekend, a male painted bunting has drawn crowds of bird-watchers eager to glimpse a multihued creature that does not often stray much north of Arkansas.

And I saw it! What a privilege to witness its beauty.

Carolyn Kormann tries out BirdGenie, a new app that works like Shazam for birders.

And listen to Tom Stephenson talk about his new app amidst a variety of birdsongs.

A new smartphone app learns to tell a hawk from a house wren.

Read more about Tom Stephenson and his amazing app here! And last year I had the pleasure of interviewing him about the Brooklyn Bird Club for this article.

#tom stephenson

Years ago, Helen Macdonald dared to adopt a goshawk—the most bloodthirsty of birds—to cope with grief after the sudden loss of her father. After making the life-altering decision to train the wild ...

Feather Fact #8

A bird’s eye takes up about 50% of its head; our eyes take up about 5% of our head. To be comparable to a bird’s eyes, our eyes would have to be the size of baseballs.

#feather fact

barefootmarley

bird watcher’s society

My whole conception of what is beautiful has changed because I've come to love birds so much. I respond to landscapes that have birds in them, that are friendly to birds. A dismal swamp behind a rail yard now has a kind of beauty for me that a bird-free beach in the Mediterranean doesn't. Love changes your idea of beauty inevitably. When you love a person, you are not thinking in terms of magazine beauty or newscaster good looks. A deeper kind of beauty comes into play. That is very much what happens when you begin to pay attention to birds and you begin to love them.

Jonathan Franzen

#jonathan franzen #birding #beauty #love

aliensrobotsoctopodes

birdscout-blog

oldsampeabody:

For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. One day I went out to investigate the racket; I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. They simply materialized out of the tree. I saw a tree, then a whisk of color, then a tree again. I walked closer and another hundred blackbirds took flight. Not a branch, not a twig budged: the birds were apparently weightless as well as invisible. Or, it was as if the leaves of the Osage orange had been freed from a spell in the form of redwinged blackbirds; they flew from the tree, caught my eye in the sky, and vanished. When I looked again at the tree the leaves had reassembled as if nothing had happened. Finally I walked directly to the trunk of the tree and a finally hundred, the real diehards, appeared, spread, and vanished. How could so many hide in the tree without my seeing them? The Osage orange, unruffled, looked just as it had looked from the house, when three hundred red-winged blackbirds cried from its crown. I looked downstream where they flew, and they were gone. Searching, I couldn’t spot one. I wandered downstream to force them to play their hand, but they’d crossed the creek and scattered. One show to a customer. These appearances catch at my throat; they are the free gifts, the bright coppers at the roots of trees.

Annie Dillard

#Annie Dillard #pilgrim at tinker creek #red-winged blackbird

The weight of a wingbeat.

sweetboyceo-deactivated20180113

How Birds Count

A 105-year-old group of binocular-toting Brooklynites is fighting to keep the borough’s avian habitats safe.

"The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. He says that leaves are old and that for flowers Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten. He says the early petal-fall is past When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers On sunny days a moment overcast; And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.

#birds #poetry #literary #Robert Frost

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