On this episode you’ll hear from Matt Goff, a longtime resident, all-around naturalist, and birder from Sitka, Alaska. For those of you who have not been to the Alaska panhandle, Sitka is a small city of about 8400 that is located on two large islands that make up a series of islands extending south and east from the large landmass of most of the rest of Alaska. Matt describes the weather in Sitka as “similar to Seattle but about 10 degrees cooler and with a lot more rain.”
Matt has done a radio show on KCAW of Raven Radio, a public radio show in Sitka for over 10 years. He does shows every 2 weeks, so this is over 270 shows. These shows cover various nature related topics and are enjoyable. You can find them on his web site SitkaNature.org where you can also contact Matt, or you can e-mail him at sitkanature-at-gmail-dot-com
Matt mentions his son in the show. Matt’s son is the #1 eBird lister in Sitka, and Matt is #3. Cool to be the dynamic father-son birding duo for a county.
Matt also talks about a Bioblitz he worked with in Sitka some years ago. Here is a link to the Bioblitz in Whistler he mentions.
For those of you who have not used iNaturalist, it is a phone app and website that allows you to keep records of living things that youfind in nature. I am no expert but it has features to allow other users to help with the ID of things you post with photos. I think of it as a bit like eBird for everything.
I mention an episode with Mike Denny on the episode. You can find that as episode #63 at this link.
Again thanks for listening. Feedback is always appreciated. Leave a comment or reach me on the contact page on this site.
Until next time, good birding.

On this episode I talk with Marcos Trinidad, the Center Director at the Debs Park Audubon Center in Los Angeles, CA. I learnded a lot about being inclusive to persons of color in birding, about helping people incorporate technology into postive experiences in nature, and about Marcos himself.
You can find more about Marcos at his bio on the Debs Park website, and about his podcast, Human/Nature at their website.
You can follow Marcos on Instagram or Twitter also.
I hope you enjoyed the episode. I’d love to hear of guests you’d like to hear from, and you can suggest guests or topics using the Contact Page. Please send any contact information you have on guests you suggest.
Thanks for listening.
Until next time, good birding and good day!

On The Bird Banter Podcast #130 Bill Young and I talk about his life experiences birding, his passion for and inimiate knowledge of his home patch, Moticello Park in Alexandria, Virginia, and the web site he has co-created MPNature.com where you can find incredibly detailed information about the park and its fauna and flora. I especially enjoyed his reasoning and attention to the seasonal occurrence of many of the neotropic migrants found in the park. He is so right about a few days making all the difference in the chances of seeing a particular bird. Here are a couple of the examples from the website:


Note that on these two dates, only a week apart, the list of migrants that have been recorded are very different. On May 12th only Yellow-rumped Warbler has been recorded, but on May 5th 12 different species of warblers have been seen.
Here is an example of one of Bill’s YouTube Videos, the one he mentions about the Mississippi Kites that nested nearby.

Here are the eBird sites for Bombay Hook NWR, Forsythe NWR (formerly Brigantine NWR), Monticello Park, and Los Cusingos in Costa Rica, the place we talk about that Dr. Alexander Skutch lived and worked.
Here is a link to Bill’s book The Fascination of Birds.
I could not find much information on Optical Brighteners and their U.V. spectrum residue that may be easily seen by birds, so if any readers find good information, please use the contact page to let me know. – Thanks to Bill, he sent me this link to information used by the U.S. military on optical brighteners. Bill also copies a short segment from Jon Young’s book where he talks about what birds see. It is worth the read IMO. Funny and informative. Read here.
Thanks for following and listening. Until next time. Good birding.

Raphael Fennimore is my guest on The Bird Banter Podcast #127 and we talk about not just his record breaking King County 2021 Big Year, but also his broad natural sciences background as a marine mammal biologist, scuba diving, as an Antarctic Cruise guide and his experience with a new mirrorless camera. Raphael identified 278 species of birds in King County in 2021, more species than had previously been found in any county in WA in a single calendar year.
I mention on the episode that I think Common Grackle is less common in central Maine than when I was child, and though that may be my impression, per eBird bar charts it is still pretty common, so maybe it’s my faulty memory, or maybe they were more abundant then like many species that have generally declined in numbers over the last half century.
Here is a link to the Birding in King County, WA book that Raphael mentioned by Gene Hunn.
This is the Canon R5 camera Raphael mentions.
Here is Raphael’s Instagram feed
You can also reach Raphael by email Raphael.Fennimore- at – gmail- dot- com
Here is a link to the eBird 2021 top 100 eBird listers page.
Again, thanks for listening and reading here.
Good birding and good day!

There are birding big years, where the stated object is to find the highest possible number of species in a given area in a calendar year. These are relatively common and there have been lots of birders who have done these and written books about their year. Some of my prior guests have done variations on this theme. Dorian Anderson on Episode #5 did his Biking for the Birds big year. Lynn Barber in Episode #79 did big years in Texas and Alaska as well as an ABA big year, and wrote two books about these endeavors.
My guest this episode is R. Bruce Richardson. He and his wife took on birding during a year of travel around Australia. Bruce is also a songwriter, entertainer, comedian, and all-around funny guy. I bought the book right after we recorded the episode, and am loving it so far. Buy it here on his website.


I knew that Australia is a big land mass, and in the front of his book he shows how the size of the lower 48 U.S. states approximates the size of Australia with map overlays. It is a cool visual. I also didn’t think of Australia as a place with lots of Parrots. I cannot find an easy answer to how many extant species of parrots are wild in Australia vs the Americas, but certainly both areas have a lot.
I thought that this would be a great place to embed a few of R Bruce’s You Tube funny songs.

Also of course a link to his book on Amazon: An Australian Birding Year

I hope you enjoyed the episode. Please leave comments or suggestions.
Thanks for listening.
Good birding and good day!

Neil Paprocki is a raptor researcher studying for his PhD at the University of Idaho. You can follow him on both Twitter and Instagram. He is studying the movements of Rough-legged Hawks primarily in his PhD work, using geolocators on the hawks to track their annual journeys from breeding in the Arctic to wintering in mostly the lower 48.

I always love getting my fix of RLHA both at the Skagit and Sammish Flats and on Eastern Washington trips in winter. Rarely we get them in the south Puget Sound area. When one is sighted in Pierce County it is much chased by we county listers.
On the episode Neil talks about the two primary types of geolocators used on these hawks, the type that gives near real-time location using satelite communication, and the type that uses cell tower communication for uploads of data, meaning the researchers only get data when the birds are in cell range, i.e. for RLHAs not really on their breeding grounds.
Neil has also worked with the California Condor reintroduction and monitoring project with the Peregrine Fund. These are spectacular birds. I first saw them soon after their reintroduction from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but got my first listable condor at Pinnacles National Park in California. These are spectacular birds, gigantic, and unmistakable. I cannot find my photos of these birds quickly now, but here is a link to my eBird list with photos.
Neil has also worked with Hawk Watch International, as a biologist. Hawk Watch International has a wonderful network of sites staffed by professional hawk watchers and counters placed along the flyways of raptors where at many of these birders can visit and watch the migratory spectacle for ourselves. I have limited experience at hawk watch sites, really just at Cape May and at the Butler Mountain site in New York. I hope to spend more time at these wonderful sites in years to come.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Good birding. Good day!

Jon Anderson is a hard guy to miss on a birding trip.  He is a big guy with a big moustache who is not shy about joining in any conversation, enjoys both birding and birders. Jon has been a birder for decades, but has been more active since his retirement a few years ago. We talk a bit about what he calls his Perigrination, defined as, “a journey, especially a long or meandering one.” This nicely and humourously describes Jon’s year, which he journals on his blog, “Peregrination.” In addition to his biggish year of birding after retirement we talk about his birding story and his career with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Here is an article on the Caspian Tern Relocation Project we talked about.

Here is the Westport Seabirds website.

Jon helps with field trips for WOS, and here is the WOS field trips page.

You can contact

Jon by email festuca-at-comcast-dot-net If you have ideas for guests you’d like to hear from please leave a comment or use the contact page above to reach me.

Until next time. Good birding and good day!

Have you ever found yourself off to a great start birding in a certain area and decided maybe you should see how many species you can find in that area for the year, sort of a kinda-big-year? That describes many of the recent years of my guest this episode, Alex Patia. The ABA, New Mexico, Washington and Clallam County big years have come about this way for Alex since he became an avid birder and lister in about 2014.
We talk about his career as an environmental educator. He has worked for Nature Bridge, as well as at a camp in Maine, Camp Chiwonki
While at Camp Chiwonki he led several trips to Eastern Egg Rock. You can learn lots more about this area as well as Atlantic Puffin Reintroduction programs on The Bird Banter Podcast #57 with “Puffin” Pete Salmonsohn. The boat ride out to Eastern Egg Rock is one of my favorite easy short boat rides ever. I got my life Atlantic Puffin and Northern Gannet on this ride years ago.
I was fascinated to learn about the great birding in New Mexico too. I have birded just a little in NM, on a soccer trip with my daughter Jean when she was 13 and playing a regional tournament in Albuquerque, and on a vacation in Santa Fe with friends when we made it up to the Sandia Crest Lodge in Cibola to see Black Rosy-Finches at a feeder there.
I would love to get to Guadalupe Canyon there if that is still within my physical capability. This is a link to the eBird Bar Chart of species that can be found there.

Here is a link to Birds of the World that I talk about in the introduction. I love this website.
Last, here is a link to the Bird Banter Podcast #55 with Suzie Gilbert to hear and learn more about bird rehab centers and Suzie’s novel Unflappable.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks for listening. Until next time. Good birding and Good Day!