Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

A picture worth a 1000 words. Personal photo. As Forrest Gump once professed, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." Birding is a lot like that as well. I remember going on a birding trip when I was about ten with a teen birder at Wayland Community Gardens in eastern Massachusetts expecting that his advanced years would clearly be an asset to finding a multitude of rare and unusual species. The birds it seemed, had other ideas. The only bird we saw that day was a lone black-capped chickadee investigating the twigs of a bare oak. I was extremely disappointed to say the least, not only because of the poor turnout, but I was annoyed at myself for not speaking up more. I guess, I was just a shy kid. Fast forward to about two weekends ago, I spent birding the Trinity Center property looking for birds for: 1. relaxation purposes, and 2. providing a checklist to submit to eBird the next evening in front of an audience of Road Schola...

There is a small pond on the Trinity Center property I walk past everyday and is exceptionally buggy. Even when you are covered head to toe with 25% DEET bug spray, it seems to have no effect. The other day, as I rounded a bend, something lifted off from the top of a gnarled cedar. A tall bird croaked with agitation, flying away on long wings and extending a snaking neck. The bird in question was a great blue heron ( Ardea herodias ), a charismatic and recognizable marsh bird that is familiar to most people. Despite their common presence around wetlands, ponds, and rivers, I have heard them mistaken for another tall marsh bird, and are sometimes called "blue cranes". Immature great blue seen near Bogue Sound in Pine Knoll Shores, NC. Photo by me. Bird misidentification isn't a new issue. Even as naturalists and budding ornithologists like John James Audubon and Alexander Wilson were traveling the country identifying the birds they could; even they used colloquial n...

It's amazing how spending a little time outside can revitalize your sense of well being. For me, nothing makes me happier than when I'm birding. Being able to spend time with birds is necessary for my well being as a human being, they speak to my very soul. That said, after spending a week on the Bogue Banks, I knew I needed to start finding hotspots to check out. While the Outer Banks is a prime migratory stopover for shorebirds, getting there can be difficult especially if you haven't gotten a handle on the ferry schedule yet. For my purposes starting out, the closest and easiest to reach was the public beach access at Bogue Inlet in Emerald Isle, NC. Finding the beach access was easy enough, but finding adequate parking was trickier. Like many towns with beachfront property, parking on the sides of roads is prohibited with limited opportunities to find free parking unless you are within proximity of a business district or public beach lot. Initially, the only lot I c...

Snow, thick and sticky, like icing sugar is tumbling from the sky, while reports of thundersnow and blizzard conditions blast through the airwaves and cover the internet in posts about snarled travel and snow days. As I watch the "snowscreen" (it's like a smokescreen, but whiter) outside, my mind imagines what the next few months will bring in terms of adventure and excitement. Soon I won't simply be a northeastern naturalist. In a few more days, I will journey south of the Mason-Dixon to work in North Carolina for the coming spring. On Sunday, I'll be among the longleafs and dogwoods, looking for new places to explore while happily avoiding the snow and ice up north. North Carolina is home to five species that I've wanted to see for a while now, but never had the opportunity up north. Some of these species can be found in the northeast, but are localized and rare and sometimes are in restricted areas that make it difficult to engage with them properly. Othe...

In three days, it will be the final week of 2016. While many will see it as the end of a trying and packed year, I see this final week as an opportunity. As of tonight, I am 11 species away from my goal of seeing 200 species of birds for the year. Since graduating from college in 2012, I have always tried to observe (both visually and audibly) over 200 species of birds per year. That year, I reached 228 species. In 2013 and 2014, I managed to skip over the line with 225 and 221 species respectfully, but started the decline into the high hundreds last year with 171 total species. In those three previous years, my career has taken me from Connecticut to Massachusetts, back to Connecticut, down to New Jersey, over to Pennsylvania, back to Massachusetts, briefly up to Maine, and finally to Central New York where I currently reside. From a resume building standpoint, this is pretty impressive, but as a birder with a achievable goal, this was extremely disappointing. My uprooting from Ma...

This week, Cornell's birding website eBird launched a new feature on their bird identification app, Merlin Bird ID . While the app has been around for a while, this is the first time that one can take a picture of a bird and use it to identify what you've seen in the wild! To most people, this is another sign of technology integrating with the modern field guides to provide more accurate ways of identifying birds. In my opinion, this has given rise to another comparison. Personally speaking, I think that the time of the Pokédex has come! The original PokéDex from the Pokémon anime. How retro. For those of you not familiar with the Pokémon franchise and its overall goal, you might have heard a little about it this July when Niantic released Pokémon Go! for Android and iPhone. The premise of the game is to capture all 151 original Pokémon that appear randomly across the country in different habitats. Some Pokémon only appear in towns and cities, while others might only ...

Well, that went well! With the election season over in a big way, I can say with certainty that no one truly expected the orange man with wispy hair to win the highest office in the land. Those of us with blue hearts and political leanings sighed despondently at such news, so naturally, we all needed to escape after the election results of this past Tuesday. I did so by heading to Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge. I had a quest for myself and the goal was to find a rare visitor that had appeared on the main pond for several weeks this year. In fact, not only did I find one far flung traveler on this day, but two more graced my presence in and around Montezuma. The first target I sought was a duck. While that may not seem that exciting, the duck in question was a Eurasian wigeon ( Anas penelope ), a duck more at home in the marshes of Slimbridge than the backwoods of central New York. Despite living and visiting the UK frequently in my life, I had never gotten the opportunity to see...

The sound of the ocean slapping the rocks of the causeway heralded the arrival of another car to the rutted parking lot. Over the sea wall, Horseneck Beach with its daredevil para-sailers danced over the distant swells while gulls dark and light swirled over the mile long spit jutting into Buzzard's Bay. Alison and I stepped out of the car and looked around. It was good to be home.* As we stood on the rocky shores of Gooseberry Neck in Westport, Massachusetts, we watched as sanderlings, scampered back and forth along the sands while being chaperoned by herring gulls. We sat on a few boulders that lead down the eastern side of the neck and watched the relay. The sanderlings would run towards the retreating surf to pick at the minute crustaceans and periwinkles that were caught in the pull of water and sand. After busily picking at the sands for only a few moments, they were chased back by the rushing waves to begin their relay again.  The gulls, being far less particula...