A nice piece about nighttime bird recording at my favorite spot in the world, Merrill Lake Sanctuary. www.easthamptonstar.com/villages-nat...

Got a chance to do some seawatching this morning. The Camp Hero bluffs are a nice spot to see a bit of everything. Still learning the scoping tricks of the trade...today's lesson was not to try to ID the many, very distant shearwaters and just wait for closer individuals to pop up.

Yesterday I asked AI to generate images of a bird dropping musical notes into a bucket, from the perspective of the bucket, in different styles: “cutesy”, a death metal concert poster, a drawing that gets the response “We should get that kid some psychiatric help”, and Dali…

Requests?

An example of a good eBird rare bird comment, with the birder describing the details they saw/heard and how they might be different from similar species. It helps reviewers confirm the sighting, helps other birders know what to look for, and helps ensure they’re not overlooking a different rarity.

What fancy equipment does it take to get into nocturnal flight call recording? For me it was a $100 AudioMoth, a bucket, a roll of painter’s tape maybe from the 1990s, a bucket I used a screwdriver to crack open a drainage hole, some stakes, and a bungee.

Check your basement for ingredients.

The essential research breakthroughs for studying overnight movements of birds are 1) weather satellites and 2) the realization all you need to capture good audio is a mic in a bucket.

I got hooked on nocturnal flight call recording for a bunch of reasons. One is when two different recordists in different states get the same species and see identical spectrograms. These are two mourning warblers from this week, one recorded by me and one by another recordist elsewhere.

Planning on complete overkill for my first Christmas Bird Count later this month. Start at dawn. 11 miles of route options, half benefiting from lugging a scope. Fellow birder and I will be keeping an eye out for a seemingly annual Barrow's goldeneye.

Great blue heron and a friend at Horn Pond last November.

This week last year was when Cambridge's Danehy Park had a western celebrity. This ash-throated flycatcher, usually in coastal Mexico by now, hung around for about 3 weeks.

It may have been the same one at Sunny Meadow Farm earlier in the fall, but otherwise first in the county I think since 2017.

Common eider, February 2023, in the foam made by waves rolling into the Head Island causeway surrounding Pleasure Bay in South Boston.

Just an appreciation post for the northern pintail that, for the past two winters, lives its life with the mallards at the cistern at the south end of Lower Mystic Lake.

A scoped image last week of KZ, the male of a pair of bald eagles that live and nest by lower Mystic Lake.

Visitors often find him perched on a large tree above the boathouse, easily viewed from the dam.