Room 101 is not a very auspicious place to be put but actually the Courtyard Marriot in Ithaca is a very friendly place and Room 101 is very comfortable. Ithaca, NY is famous for vegetarian cookbooks, a defunct shotgun company and the truly famous University and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. The bird people are…
Author: Mark
Born Bristol, UK
Educated: Cleeve House School Bristol, Bristol Grammar School and Downing College Cambridge
Ph.D. University of Aberdeen, Winter activity of pipistrelle bats.
NERC post-doctoral Research Fellow, Edward Grey Institute, Oxford University
Former Conservation Director of the RSPB, 1989-2011
Still raining
I thought of detouring to Niagara Falls but that would have been silly – it would have added too many miles and I have seen torrents of rain all day anyway. When it hasn’t been raining hard it has been raining very hard. So not a bird-rich day – even though the Allegheny Mountains, through which…
A hard rain’s gonna fall
It’s raining here near Erie, Pennsylvania and the forecast is for rain for a week. A week! But at least I have lucked out on where I’m staying – it’s ‘only’ a Travelodge but it’s got more facilities than the very cheap places where I have stayed most of the trip so far. It has a gym…
The day after…
Sometimes you have an observation and you don’t make the identification – and it niggles away at you until you solve it. I returned to Crane Creek early this morning. After yesterday I was keen to have some more. I wasn’t alone – the crowds were there too. But the weather was dull and the…
Total birding
Today was a birding day – an excellent birding day. Yesterday evening I drove through the north Ohio landscape looking for a cheap motel. I travelled parallel with Interstate 75 on smaller roads including Route 66 (though not that one) for a while. It was like travelling through The Fens – the roads dead straight…
Homage to the Passenger Pigeon
I did a strange thing in a zoo today. My days are beginning to fall into a certain order. Wake at 5am after a good night’s sleep and without an alarm, check emails (‘cos Europe is already up), shower, move stuff into the car and then hit the road. And so I headed North from…
Bye bye y’all
I’ve not been in the Deep South at all this trip, but I have been in the South until I crossed into Kentucky today. And it really is South too. If you head due East from Washington DC you hit Spain; and Charleston, the furthest South I will go on this trip, is on the…
I got a bear!
And bears trump everything else – except wolves. But it’s been a great day even without the bear (and there was a bear!). I was back on Route 178 heading northwest at 0640 – which made me feel good. 178 and I had spent some good time together yesterday evening and now I left Batesburg/Leesville…
Americans having sex – what a laugh!
2 May It’s late spring here in east Northants. It’s over a month since I saw my first sand martins, chiffchaffs, blackcaps and willow warblers. I’ve seen, locally, a good list of spring-bringers – those mentioned already and garden warbler, sedge warbler, reed warbler, grasshopper warbler, whitethroat, lesser whitethroat, cuckoo, nightingale, yellow wagtail, swallow, house…
Southern belles
The females of the deep South have a reputation for beauty, charm and politeness. I’ve now encountered a few. The waitress at the Dunes restaurant at breakfast today called me ‘Honey’ as I ate my eggs (medium, sunny side up)), grits (my first time – I was until today a grits-virgin) and hot cakes ((just another name…