Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes:   It's August 28, 2012.  Roger Tory Peterson would have been 104 years old today.  If he were still alive, I suspect he would have spent at least part of the day painting birds ... as he did on the last day of his life, in July 1996, when he was almost 88.  Recently I've been thinking about Peterson's artwork a lot ... mostly because some of it is going to be auctioned off soon.  On September 8, Guernsey's Auctioneers in New York will be offering 500 lots of material from the Petersons' estates.  Basic information on the auction is available here. Although the writeup says that it's an auction "consisting entirely of the work of Roger Tory Peterson," the online catalog tells a slightly different story.  A number of original Audubon prints are also included, presumably from Roger's private collection.  Quite a few matted photographic prints are being offered, and a few other odd items, including older binocul...

Kirtland's Warbler: the rarest songbird in North America From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: In my previous post on May 30, I mentioned that I'd been making predictions for the migration throughout the Biggest Week In American Birding: checking to see what birds were around, watching the weather reports, trying to predict which days would have the biggest arrivals of migrants. For the first 8 days of the event, this was an exercise in mild frustration, because the weather patterns just weren’t lining up to produce any major migrant wave. We were seeing excellent diversity of migrants -- and the guides from Tropical Birding were making sure that everyone on the scene got to see a lot of different species. But the kind of day that we dream about in northwest Ohio, with migrants everywhere, the trees filled to bursting with warblers and others, just had not happened yet as late as Thursday, May 13. Based on the weather forecasts, I had been predicting for days that Friday, May 1...