Birds

I recently had the opportunity to go out in the field with Kerry Brust, a red-cockaded woodpecker biologist in the North Carolina Sandhills. I went with Brust to put brightly colored and aluminum bands on nestling red-cockaded woodpeckers. It’s part of a research project begun in 1978, initiated by Dr. Phil Doerr and Dr. Jay […]

The northern flicker (Colaptes auratus) is native to most of North America, parts of Central America, Cuba and the Cayman islands. It is one of a few species of woodpeckers that migrate. Flickers in the northern part of their range move south for the winter. It is a medium-sized woodpecker, brown with black spots and […]

A few years ago at the Pee Dee National Wildlife Refuge in Anson County, we spotted an interesting species, thought to be out of its natural range – the wood stork (Mycteria americana). This was during a meeting of the Greater Uwharrie Conservation Partnership, and we saw four wood storks, all juvenile, perched on dead […]

[highlightrule] Learn more about KEEPING WATCH on HABITAT for 2017[/highlightrule] Walk into Ernie McLaney’s backyard in southeast Charlotte and for a moment, you may forget you are in a neighborhood of more than 6,000 residents. It’s a serene and private place, enclosed by trees, shrubs and a fence and lined with a curlicue paver path. […]

If you’re much of a birder and you ever use playbacks to attract a bird, you know there’s one sure way to get a variety of birds to come out. Play the song of an eastern screech owl. Songbirds are one of their favorite prey species, yet those little guys don’t give up without a […]

Over the years, some interesting birds have turned up at our farm in the Uwharries. Mama keeps her feeders stocked all winter, and she’s been rewarded with species that will set a Piedmont birder’s heart aflutter: an evening grosbeak, a black-headed grosbeak, and the extremely rare yellow-headed blackbird. This summer, she had another unusual visitor: […]

A stop by the Eldorado Outpost one recent morning included a sighting of a barn swallow that had built a nest on a ledge of the building under the eave. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are fairly common, and you’ve probably seen them on your own property. A couple of years ago, kayaking on Mountain Creek, […]

From mid-December through early-January, tens of thousands of citizen scientists across the Americas will participate in an Audubon Christmas Bird Count. This wildlife census effort began in 1900 as an alternative to the traditional Christmas “Side Hunt,” a competition that entailed killing as many birds and mammals as possible. The only formal count in the […]

The song sparrow was tangled in a mist net stretched between a stand of big bluestem and a blackberry thicket. It flapped and flailed, but settled a bit as Alicia Bachman’s nimble fingers worked to extract it – first the tiny claws and legs, then the wings and finally the head. A volunteer and experienced […]

We feed them in our backyards, thrill to their springtime calls and watch with wonder as they flock in the fall. But for scientists, the birds of the Piedmont Carolinas also serve as messengers of the health of the region and as evidence of changes in the landscape. Now, for the first time, a mostly […]