BirdingGirl

I squeezed in some birding while I was in New York last weekend. I was there for a "Girls Weekend" with two of my best friends from college- Kristin and Lori. Lori just moved there in January, which is very exciting. I forgot my binoculars, and we were on a tight schedule, but I still made a few interesting sightings. Female Common Yellowthroat Mystery Thrush (it's Friday and I don't have the energy to try and ID it from this poor picture): We stuck to Strawberry Fields, but it was really cool being there on a nice Saturday with lots of other birders. We encountered: - A dad and his 4 year-old son who each had their own binoculars. The dad told us about the ruby-throated hummingbirds and then the little boy piped in and told us exactly where to go and added "I hope they're still there for you. I hope you get to see them." SO cute. - A scary homeless man over by the ruby-throated hummingbird site (looked like a patch of honeysuckle surrounded by a fence,...

Here is some interesting news I just came across—the first traces of color in a bird feather were discovered in a 47 million year-old fossil. Image Source: ScientificComputing.com Here is an excerpt from the New York Times article: To find well-preserved feathers, the scientists traveled this May to a famed fossil site in Germany near the village of Messel, where exquisitely preserved 47-million-year-old bird fossils are regularly dug up in an old quarry pit. The scientists inspected several fossils and removed small pieces from 12 fossilized feathers. They returned home to put the material under a scanning electron microscope. “You can see a surface of beautifully packed together melanosomes,” said Richard Prum, a Yale expert on feather colors. “This looks exactly like a grackle or a starling, where you have a dark glossy bird with a metallic sheen.” To read the entire New York Times article visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01feath.html I personally think Grackle fea...