Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

There are both Glaucous and Iceland Gulls in this picture, but which is which? Can you tell the difference? After spending my birthday weekend birding with Alison, we decided to to hit up Jodrey Fish Pier in Gloucester in order to locate the Thick-billed Murre ( Uria lomvia ) that had been spotted in recent days. We came up short on that front, but came across a fairly uncommon winter sight. This lead not only to seeing both our first Glaucous Gulls ( Larus hyperboreus ), but also how they differed plumage-wise, from the nearby Iceland Gulls ( L. glaucoides ). After snapping a few pictures, I was initially at a loss to try and identify them. Since I'm newish to gull ID (my favorite plumage is that of a Ring-billed Gull ( L. delawarensis ) in its 1st winter plumage), I looked through my preferred guides and came up with a diagnosis. After browsing through the basic guides provided by Kaufman (least helpful) and National Geographic: Eastern Region (somewhat helpful), I con...

As clownfish ( Amphiprion ocellaris ), I mean snow storm (of course) Nemo bears down on New England, I'm happily sitting inside waiting for the worst to hit later on. As I sit, I'm trying to think of something to write about. I remember that earlier this week, I was at the library to pick up some books on fiction writing for a story/series I'm doing about mythological sea creatures and beings. As I tend to do when I'm in any institution with a huge collection of books, I wandered into the natural history section and poked around the bird section for a bit. It had dwindled from when I was younger, but I distinctly remember certain books that gave me an insight into the bird world as well as the ways they have inspired humans in science, medicine, mythology, and story craft. I looked over the shelves past the ubiquitous Sibley Guides to a volume I hadn't seen since I was 9 or 10. I picked up a book called "The Reader's Digest Birds of North America" wh...

It's time for the next round in the Babe Ruth of Ornithology. For those of you who are wondering, this will carry over into the new year because what use would a tournament be if it stopped at the end of December?! Anyway, this weeks challengers are, the Messiah of birding himself, Roger Tory Peterson and one of the most successful women naturalists in American history, Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey! Let the battle commence! "Feed the birds. Tuppence a bag. Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag..." Roger Tory Peterson (1908-1996) is regarded by many in the American birding community as being the greatest birder that ever lived. People can try to imitate him, but the man staked his claim on the work of other greats in the field of ornithology to provide an easily understood platform with which beginners, experts, and everyone in between could utilize in order to properly identify birds in the field. He got his inspiration to create his own field guide after repeated ...

After experiencing the high of finding so many warblers over the past few days, not finding anything this morning at Heard's Conservation Land was certainly disappointing, but it was made up for it by seeing a family of Northern Flickers ( Colaptes auratus ) I recognized from earlier in the summer. Even though I've only starting concentrating on warblers in the past two weeks or so, I've already run into some problems in regards to correctly identifying species (provided they don't give me "warbler neck" first or in my attempts to follow their flitting and twitching through the understory causes me to fall backwards down a hill I already had trouble climbing to begin with.) This also includes the usual issues with timing, weather, habitat choice, and of course, luck. This past week or so, I've experienced the joy of mistaking Blackpoll Warblers ( Setophaga striata ) with everything else that possesses wingbars (a feature that still annoys me in regards t...

So often it seems in our world today that everything feels more complex than it used to, or that the world is moving much quicker than it ever has before. It's during these times that it helps to withdraw into the beauty of nature and enjoy the quiet that surrounds us in those wild places. We might go fishing at a favorite pond, bicycle along a wooded road, or bird in nearby fields search for species seen and unseen to brighten up our day. I would most likely be conducting the latter and with me would be the standard equipment of all good birders: a pair of binoculars and a field guide. The binoculars go without saying, but it's ultimately the quality of the field guide that determines if a birder or naturalist can quickly and efficiently identify the bird that has been seen. The last "great" field guide to be hailed and celebrated as "revolutionizing" the field of bird identification was David Sibley's "The Sibley Guide to Birds". While I use ...

Ludlow Griscom (1890-1959) while not as famous as Concord's Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, his presence is still appreciated by ornithologists and birders who have graced a local library and perhaps found a curious volume called "Birds of Concord". The book itself isn't a field guide, but instead a reference for any bird lover that wished at the time to better understand the mechanisms behind bird abundance and rarity as well as why migration occurred and what birds were considered common in this small, but rigorously surveyed portion of Massachusetts. Griscom himself was one of the first ornithologists to shift away from "shotgun ornithology" and instead use the field marks present on a bird body to determine its identity. Around the time of Griscom, it was common for those studying birds to have to shoot them in order to tender an identification of the bird in hand. This was certainly true for smaller, harder to see songbirds like sp...