Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 22, we're scheduled to be finishing our exploration of the Antarctic Peninsula and starting to head toward the legendary rough waters of the Drake Passage. Internet access is unlikely, so we pre-set this post to appear in our absence.) If you’re more than about 300 miles away from Phoenix, Arizona, I can pretty much guarantee that you won’t be seeing Abert’s Towhee today. And neither will we. This is a bird with a very limited range, found only in thickets along lowland streams in the American southwest. Some southwestern birds become more common as you head south into Mexico, but not Abert’s Towhee; it barely crosses the border into the northern edge of Mexico. Most of its range is in Arizona and a small area of southeastern California, with tiny toeholds in New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah. In most places this bird lurks inside dense thickets, scratching among the leaf-litter with both feet in the manner of other towhees, and it’s us...

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 7, we're supposed to be boarding ship in Tierra del Fuego to head toward the Antarctic, and we set this post to be published in our absence.) So who would call a bird simply "Blackbird?" The British. Look at bird books from England, especially older ones, and you’ll see bird names like Blackbird, Heron, Wren, Jay, Swallow, etc., as if there were only one bird in each of these groups. Those British sometimes act as if they had invented the English language! Anyway, The Blackbird (which Americans often refer to as "Eurasian Blackbird") is not at all related to the blackbird family (Icteridae), a strictly New World group which includes our familiar Red-winged Blackbird as well as grackles, cowbirds, American orioles, meadowlarks, and others. In fact, the (Eurasian) Blackbird is a very close relative of the American Robin (which is not closely related to the European Robin ... Got that? There will be a quiz in the ...

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 5, we're supposed to be leading a group of birders to the Otamendi Nature Reserve north of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It's unlikely that we'll have a chance to post anything, so this "random bird" is set to post in our absence.) That’s one of the great things about being a bird blogger. Who else gets to title a post "Purple-bibbed Whitetip?" This small hummingbird (technically Urosticte benjamini ) occurs only on the west slope of the Andes in Colombia and Ecuador, mostly in the understory of dense forest in the subtropical zone. It had been considered "rare to uncommon and perhaps local" and "not often seen" as recently as 2001. That was when the outstanding two-volume "The Birds of Ecuador," by Bob Ridgely and Paul Greenfield, was published. But since then, a number of ecotourism lodges in Ecuador have put up hummingbird feeders, and suddenly this rare-and-not-often-seen hu...