Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The last few days were like a blur, almost, inspiring me to think of a new title: "Blur-ding with Kenn and Kim!" Friday night our band played at Mango Mama’s in Port Clinton, and it felt like one of our best performances yet, but we didn’t have time to bask in the afterglow of a rocking fine time: I had to hurry home, in most un-rockerly fashion, and sleep for a couple of hours. At 3:45 a.m. I was leaving the house to drive to the Cleveland airport so I could fly to Boise, Idaho, get into a rental car, drive three and a half hours west into Oregon, and arrive in the town of Burns in time to set up and give the Saturday evening keynote talk at the 28th annual John Scharff Migratory Bird Festival. If you’re familiar with the concept of bird festivals, that figure will have caught your eye: 28th annual? Has any bird festival been around that long? There are now hundreds of bird and nature festivals all over North America, but most of them hav...

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: We already wrote about some of the birds we saw on January 9, our first full day in the Falkland Islands (see previous posts on "Punks and Saints" and "Carcass Characters"). But I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite bird of the day. First, some background. The South American geese of the genus Chloephaga make up a very distinctive group, apparently not closely related to the well-known geese of the northern hemisphere. They are fantastically patterned birds, and in some the females and males are strikingly different in appearance. For example, above is the male Upland Goose, from Saunders Island ... And here is the female of the same species. In the afternoon of January 9 on Carcass Island we had our best close studies of another goose in this group, the Kelp Goose. This all-white bird is the male. Sort of blah, right? Just another white bird. Looks kind of like a barnyard duck. Now here are the male and female Kelp Goose toget...