Association of Field Ornithologists

There is a stereotype of a certain type of birder, sometimes called a lister, ticker, or twitcher, who is only concerned with identification, chasing rarities, and adding new species to a life list, while the behavior and the lives of the birds are unimportant. I don’t know how many birders actually fit that stereotype, but it is certainly true that many birders know little about the behavior of the birds they chase. Even backyard birders might initially know little about the chickadees that are coming to their feeders.

The COVID19 pandemic presented an enormous scientific challenge almost unparalleled in its urgency. Among the myriad of questions laid at the feet of virologists and epidemiologists by the emergence of SARS-CoV2 was the question of transmission. We all recall the first months of the pandemic in early 2020 and the guidelines calling for frequent handwashing and distancing of two meters...

When Europe’s Birds: An Identification Guide arrived, my initial thought was ‘Do we really need another guide to Europe’s birds?’ The first thing I noted was that the book is a photographic guide and the second that its subtitle is ‘An identification guide’ rather than a ‘field guide,’ – a difference which is significant and one we will get back to later.

As any field guide aficionado will recognize, field guides focused on habitats are uncommon. But this rarity does prompt the questions: Just who needs a field guide to habitats? and how are we defining “habitat”? Fortunately, the introductory material of this book does a nice job of explaining that (a) the intended audience is anyone traveling with the express interest of viewing birds and other charismatic wildlife...

Before there was John James Audubon, there was Alexander Wilson, but before both there was Mark Catesby—the first artist-naturalist to engage in the ambitious project of depicting the flora and fauna of North America, most notably (and for readers of this journal, most agreeably) birds. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Audubon (1785-1851) became America’s most adulated avian artist, even as he worried about Wilson (1766-1813) as an ornithological rival, but Catesby (1683-1749) provided...

This is a true story as told by Jonathan Slaght, a young graduate student, about his graduate study on Blakiston’s Fish Owl (hereafter Fish Owl) in the Primorye Province of eastern Russia. Slaght was originally in this region working for the Peace Corps. He later completed a Master of Science (MS) degree on song birds and forest management in the Primorye region. He learned to speak Russian fluently...