Tag: Birding

I did not set out to become a bird feeder/watcher. I heard someone say that as you get older you just one day realize that you enjoy watching birds. The one day for me was my cats. Dabo and Max enjoy watching birds at the window. Thinking I could enhance their life, I bought a small window bird f...

The air is autumn apple crisp and the sun is glowing softly through a blanket of downy clouds. I was the first car in the parking lot. I guess not many others shared the same thought that I had for starting a Tuesday morning. In fairness, most days I wouldn’t have had the thought either....

My world is small, mostly due to my husband’s health, but also because we’re still very cautious about Covid. Besides Ben’s twice-weekly dialysis sessions, our grocery and pharmacy runs, and my short drives to client offices, my time is spent at home or walking through our neigh...

My wife came to me the other day with an interesting challenge. “Honey, I cannot see far enough to identify the sea birds!”. All images in the this article are available full resolution at: https://allangraves.myportfolio.com/bird-scoping. I encourage you to look at the larg...

The African Fish Eagles on a Birding Safari in Uganda: Eagles are huge predatory birds that are members of the accipitrine family and many genus groupings that are not closely related. There are approximately sixty different eagle species in the world, with the majority of these found in Africa...

Birding, according to Oxford Languages, is “the hobby or activity of watching birds in their natural environment and identifying different species”. My first birding outing was a happenstance romp through a local suburban park four years ago. I was with a friend of mine, a season...

While currently an environmentalist by trade, it was not until adulthood that I discovered environmentalism as a practice, and later still, that I discovered the joy of birding. It’s a hobby that has enriched my life in so many ways, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to shar...

The low Mojave Desert is a brutal place in summer. I should know because I lived in it during adolescence and a few hours away from it in earliest adulthood. And then I didn’t return for just shy of 10 years, for reasons that included fear of flying, lack of travel funds, being in a rela...

Hyderabad Birding Pals always searches for new locations in Telangana so as to organize bird walks there in future. For this purpose a visit was planned to Gubbala Mangamma Talli Temple and Parnasala. The temple is located in a dense forest about 350 km from Hyderabad in Khammam district, Telangana....

It was a year that rarely provided enough time for proper reflection and appreciation of the places I experienced and the birds I followed. It was equally true that having grossly underestimated what it would take to win the thing, I was not able to work as closely with the Global Wildlife Conservat...

Guinness, my 5-month-old lab/boxer mix wakes me up at 5:30 to go outside. After we both eat, she settles down and I decide to go to one of my favorite birding places, Apex’s Lake Pine Park. The trail is popular with birders, walkers, runners, and anyone who wants to be outside. The paved lo...

“Are you sure?” asked my husband, and he came to see for himself. He could not be certain either, and that was the problem. The bird was a beautiful buff-pink with white flashes on the wings and a few blue feathers. It was merrily eating all of the peanuts, so quite clearly it was a jay&...