Birds & People

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

In August one year, I looked out the kitchen window to see a small flock of Evening Grosbeaks fly across my yard and land in a tall saskatoon bush.

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

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.

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

Never shall I forget the sheer delight and exhilaration of this one magical moment, even though it happened way back in 1932.

I scanned the cloud with my binoculars thinking that it was some sort of strange, disorganized dust devil.

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.

One day in late summer a Great Blue Heron came stalking along the edge of the Rideau River