Boat-tailed Grackle are rare in Alabama away from salt marsh habitat in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, but they now appear to be established at Damon Pond in Geneva County.  I photographed this bird on my day out, with not human contact, during the virus pandemic of 2020...

 A Clay-colored Sparrow, like this bird that I photographed in Minnesota, was Adam Byrne's record-setting 306th species for the year in Alabama in 1996.

Below is an account of a 1996 Alabama Big Year that I did with my master's student at the time Adam Byrne.  Adam ende...

 We had a choppy ocean for our 2019  Alabama pelagic trip.

I find Alabama to be a fine state for birding.  The dullest portion of the year is mid-summer, but that is brief and the state is still full of breeding birds.  For about 10 months of the year, birds a...

The map in my eBird profile reveals not only where I need to do more birding—it shows me what states, provinces, and countries I have yet to visit. As of the end of July 2019, my eBird profile map traced a lifetime of birding across the United States with most states v...

Snow Bunting were in view almost constantly both in the town of Barrow and in the surrounding tundra.

With my wife and fellow Auburn professor, Wendy Hood, I traveled to Anchorage, Alaska to attend the American Ornithology Society meeting.  The first four days of the tr...

 The second day of Victoria birding with Simon Starr focused on the dry woodland habitat NW of Melbourne.

On day two of our Victoria bird blitz, we awoke at dawn to heavy overcast with some spits of rain, but birds were up and active.  We had two Brown Falcons perched o...

A 3-day blitz with Simon Starr leading

We starting our bird tour of beautiful Victoria Australia in the spectacular primeval woodlands in Toolangi State Forest.

I landed in Melbourne, Australia mid-morning on January 1 having lost a New Years.  The date flipped from 2017...

Birding and fishing Andros Island, Bahamas

 Bahamas Oriole were right at the end of the drive at Swain’s Cay Lodge on Andros Island, Bahamas.

           After 25 years as a professor at Auburn University, I’m taking my first sabbatical semester in the spring of 2018 and...

I’ve been birding for about 40 years, and there is very little chance that I will see a new life bird anywhere within at least two days drive of where I live.  (Actually, if I drove for a day and went out on a boat for a day, it could pretty easily happen, but I hate b...

In early March, The Auk: Ornithological Advances, published a paper in which I presented a new species concept based on a new model for the process of speciation. This new speciation model focuses on the interactions of coadapted sets of mitochondrial and nuclear genes...