For The Birds

By Brian Kluepfel Birding can take on many aspects: observing birds outdoors, marveling at photographs of birds and reading accounts of avian-obsessed adventurers of days gone by. It all depends upon your fancy. This month, you’ve got a wealth of

By Brian Kluepfel At our recent New York State Birders’ Conference in Tarrytown – many kudos to Saw Mill River Audubon for putting that big show together – one of the more interesting presentations came from Tom Stephenson. It was all

By Brian Kluepfel Paul McCartney is a wonderful musician, but he was likely wrong about blackbirds singing in the dead of night. They’re probably asleep at that juncture, but then again, with all his gold records I’ll allow Sir Paul

By Brian Kluepfel I was excited to paddle in the Bronx River Alliance’s (BRA) annual flotilla down New York City’s only freshwater river. The weather last Saturday was acceptable, although it was 42 degrees when I left Ossining. We’d had

By Brian Kluepfel   April has arrived with a spaghetti splatter of weather patterns befitting climate change, but there is much to feel positive about in the birding world and with Saw Mill River Audubon (SMRA) in general. SMRA held

The Case Against Caged Birds   By Brian Kluepfel   A big celebrity news item in December 2016 was the birth of Mick Jagger’s eighth child, Deveraux Octavian Basil Jagger. Mick will turn 80 this year, and even in his

By Brian Kluepfel   The last Carolina parakeet died 104 years ago. Perhaps fittingly, it died in a zoo. Humans had wiped out all the wild birds of this species several years before. On this cold winter’s day, I pay