Join guest leader Heather Cameron and Jack from Wild Birds Unlimited for a summer walk on Mount Burdell. We’ll be listening to birdsong season and looking for young birds from all the summer breeders, including potential Bullock’s orioles, lark and chipping sparrows, lazuli buntings, and various swallows and flycatchers. Click through for details and free registration.
birds
Mount Burdell Bird Walk
Join guest leader Heather Cameron and Jack from Wild Birds Unlimited for a summer walk on Mount Burdell. We’ll be listening to the tail end of the birdsong season and looking for young birds from all the summer breeders, including potential Bullock’s orioles, lark and chipping sparrows, lazuli buntings, and various swallows and flycatchers. Click through for details and free registration.
Mount Burdell Bird Walk
Join Jack and Corrina for a summer walk on Mount Burdell. We’ll be listening to birdsong season and looking for young birds from all the summer breeders, including potential Bullock’s orioles, lark and chipping sparrows, lazuli buntings, and various swallows and flycatchers. Click through for details and free registration.
Seeing Baby Birds
Birds follow a more or less regular schedule: May and June are when baby birds are everywhere you look. Yet except for a few ubiquitous water birds, namely mallards and Canada geese, most birds pass their brief adolescence in near invisibility as far as the human majority is concerned. This article will tell you how to lift that veil – what to look for in order to see more baby birds.
Field Guides to Bay Area Birds
The ideal field guide is one that is perfectly focused on your needs, with species selected exactly for the area where you spend your time and a helpful text that accurately describes those birds’ local range, seasonality, and habitat preferences. If you are in Novato, Marin, or really anywhere in the Bay Area, these are the best available bird guides, ranked from simplest to most comprehensive.
Backyard Birds II: The Rest of the Top 20
In the first part of this two-part tour of 20 of our most common and notable backyard birds, I covered the finches and sparrows, two groups of birds that often dominate feeding stations and our consequent attention. Today, I present another ten birds, sorted into three batches: woodland birds, nectar-feeders, and a smattering of ubiquitous but non-feeder visiting yard birds.
Backyard Birds I: Finches and Sparrows
There is no better place to start learning the birds than in your own yard. It is much easier and more natural to get acquainted with the limited set of birds that you see regularly, rather than diving immediately into the thick of the full 1000+ species of North American birds. Today, I’ll introduce two of the most obvious and important groups of backyard birds: the finches and the sparrows.
Big Year #4: April Update
What are the 26 new species I’ve found recently in my Thoreauvian Big Year? What spring birds can you see now in Novato? What reasonably common birds did I finally nail down after months of unreasonable elusiveness on their parts? And where are the special hotspots of our area that hide the uncommon, range-restricted, habitat-specialist birds that most casual birdwatchers don’t know about? Let me tell you.
Deer Island Bird Walk
Join Jack and Corrina for a gentle walk around this Novato preserve as we say farewell to many of our winter visitors.
Deer Island Bird Walk
Join Jack for this walk at Novato’s Deer Island Open Space Preserve. This wooded hill rising above seasonal wetlands offers a wide variety of spring songbirds. We’ll look and listen for ash-throated flycatchers, purple finches, nuthatches, wrens, and a variety of woodpeckers. Meanwhile, the surrounding open areas attract raptors and our various summer swallow species.