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Birds & People

The Owl and the Tanager

Despite all we know about birds, there remains as much yet to be understood. Both amateur and professional ornithologists can help add to the collective knowledge about birds

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A Pelican in the Backseat

The call came as my son Travis and I were halfway around our trap line. We often care for injured owls from the Strathcona Raptor Shelter, and to feed the owls as natural a food as possible, we have set up a mouse trap line to collect mice for the owls. Milo S. was on...

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A Memorable Visit

One year the students in our school had developed a great interest in birds. All through the winter we worked at a mural depicting a winter scene in which were shown all the birds any of us had actually seen. And if you think the winter bird population is made up of...

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A Bush of Woodpeckers

In September of one year, while looking out the window of our house, which is located on an acreage near Armstrong, British Columbia, I noted a Pileated Woodpecker eating chokecherries. We see Pileated Woodpeckers frequently, and are close enough to observe them from...

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The Hawk and The Train

You've heard of racing pigeons; how about racing hawks? While the Goderich-Exeter Railway Company's freight train was passing through a valley near Mitchell, a hawk decided to follow along. The train was traveling at 25 mph and for some time, the hawk was flying right...

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Me and the Ovenbird

A few years ago my wife and I visited Florida for a couple of weeks during the winter and spent a wonderful day birding at the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island. My wife is not a birder but is generally pretty patient about birding with me.

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Dead Mice and Other Light Snacks

You shouldn’t go into our freezer without explicit instructions as to which containers are safe to open and which are not. That’s because there are dead bodies in our freezer.

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Drama on Ice

Loons return to the lake where we live in eastern Ontario soon after the ice goes out in April, yet they do not always nest nearby.

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White Birds

Long ago when we first came to this farm, I remember the flocks of birds all about the place.

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The Hawk and the Crow

I was walking across our 20 acre property near Armstrong, British Columbia, in September a few years ago when I heard, then saw, a typical confrontation between a Crow and a Red-tailed Hawk.

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Listening for Owls

One spring a few years back, we were out looking for owls in the Columbia Valley, in southeast British Columbia.

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A Long Way to Not See a Warbler

The moment I signed on as a participant in the Alberta Bird Atlas Project, I was no longer just a birdwatcher, content to wait for new species to appear on our acreage. I had become a bird hunter.

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The Names of Bird Groups

Have you ever tried to describe a group of birds but couldn’t find a more original term that simply “a flock”? Yup, it’s the same tired, old vocabulary used by everyone else. Well, there’s hope for those of you who want to stand out from the crowd; here’s a list of specific names (known as nouns of assemblage) for groups of different birds.

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Hollywood Goes to the Birds

Hollywood is the place where accuracy goes to die. And this is certainly evident with anything related to science or bird biology; neither field gets much respect from the movie-making bigwigs in Tinseltown.

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