Brendan McGarry: I’m guessing that you were working hard for a short period of time and that was about it – did you have any time for recreating or was it just eat, sleep, work? Ben Freeman: We were pretty regimented due to the amount… Read More
Just in case you didn’t snicker enough in the last interview that my initials are BM, here’s another, equally fascinating and envy inspiring conversation. A benefit of starting out young as a birder is that it’s a small world. You inevitably meet some people who are headed… Read More
I interviewed Ben, a fellow bird nerd and real deal Ornithologist, this fall about exciting expeditions he’s taken in the name of science. Enjoy! Ben Winger is a graduate student in the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and the Division of… Read More
An ornithological collection is not a bunch of stuffed birds. Devoid of 15-some data points, dutifully transcribed on individualized tags, they would be merely wonders of preservation. Every bird has a unique number, date of collection, a preparer, a locale, standard name (Latin name), and… Read More
I decided to write a review of the movie instead of listening to someone “uh-huh” me while they played video games. After watching a documentary about an extinct bird, the last thing I wanted was to have the message fall on deaf ears and I… Read More
The landscape of presentation, the selective facts that drive inquisition, and the visual stimulus, combine in the best cases for endless learning. It can be overwhelming, for it’s easy to walk away with the impression of comprehending little and feeling exhausted for it. People blame… Read More
Migration happens once every year. And then again maybe 6 months later. Really it depends on an number of factors, but around here, starting in late July and extending through late September many birds are on the move away from their breeding grounds. Some are… Read More
The Cactus Wren is the state bird of Arizona, but that is probably the least interesting of designations. More importantly it is also a member of one of the largest genera of wrens Campylorhynchus, dominating both in size and number of species (the largest, Giant… Read More
“Holy Shit, there’s a fucking Lewis’s Woodpecker in the backyard. I gotta call you back.” I was talking with my friend Ryan on the phone about birding, standing in my parents’ jungle of a suburban backyard. A few less usual birds, including a Yellow Warbler… Read More
I tend to subscribe to the notion that modern Western society likes to ignore our necessity for the natural world. Frontier living especially, put our predecessors literally at odds with, striving against an ecosystem that hadn’t developed to support them. So there is certainly no… Read More
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