This week, Mark takes up Flight Lines: Tracking the Wonders of Bird Migration, “a joint initiative between the BTO and the Society of Wildlife Artists which celebrates and documents the wonders of bird migration, the birds that do the migration, the places they visit through the year and the scientists who unravel its details” by Mark Toms of the British Trust for Ornithology.
Names are powerful things. In many human cultures, the selection of a name for a new baby is a matter of the utmost seriousness, reflective of a family’s, society’s, or religious group’s past as well as perhaps portentous of that child’s own future. So it is also that what particular groups of people, entire races […]
Even those bird watchers who might not be quite up-to-speed in their history of natural history likely know Alexander Wilson – or at least his last name. After all, a warbler, a storm-petrel, a snipe, a phalarope, and a plover all carry it in his honor.
In 1921, the journal Pacific Coast Avifauna published “A Distributional List of the Birds of Montana with Notes on the Migration and Nesting of the Better Known Species” by Aretas A. Saunders. Since that time it has remained the only comprehensive reference book to the bird species of that state – until now.