NYNYBIRD Texting

Posted in News

NYNYBIRD is a text alert system for disseminating unusual bird sightings in New York County (Manhattan).

Birds reportable to NYNYBIRD should simply include any wild bird species that are unusual in Manhattan. The purpose of NYNYBIRD is to alert birders so that anyone interested in seeing an unusual bird can get the information as soon as possible. As it is unlikely that most observers have a list of New York County bird records memorized, good judgment is requested.

For more information or to sign-up for the service go to: http://nynybird.wordpress.com/

NYNYBirds runs on TextMark and is paid for by the creator of the service. To donate go to the site and click on the donation button.

Remembering Starr Saphir

Posted in News

Starr Saphir, seen here at an HBO event in 2012, died on Tuesday.

We were saddened to hear of the passing of Starr Saphir on February 5th, at Calvary Hospice in New York, where she had been receiving palliative care after an eleven-year battle with breast cancer.

Our paths crossed many times in the north end of Central Park. She was one of the few people to offer walks in the north end in the early 2000's and she was always quick to pass on sightings and helpful hints.

Starr Saphir says, in the 2012 HBO documentary Birders: The Central Park Effect, that there wasn't much money in offering bird walks Central Park, as she had at that time for nearly 30 years, but she's doing something she loves. "I don't look forward to retiring," she explains. "I am enormously lucky in that I absolutely love what I do every day that I do it. It doesn't mean that it's not tedious for moments, or for hours, or the day when you have to come up with 38 birds and the birds are not cooperating, and you end up with 37. It's work. But I could keep this up for, I think, for hundreds of years. Nobody gets a chance to find that out."

She will be missed.

Read the article about Starr on the NPR Web site.

A Place for Healing Broken Wings

Posted in News

Animals and Wildlife November 20, 2012

New York Times

By EVE M. KAHN

Fred Cohen/FredCohenPhotography

A patient at the Wild Bird Fund Center, this wild turkey from Staten Island has a splint on his broken leg. He will spend Thanksgiving eating, not being eaten.

“He didn’t mean to hurt it; he just didn’t see it sitting there,” a little girl said. It was late September on a ball field in Riverdale in the Bronx at my daughter’s lacrosse practice. I winced, picturing the bug or frog that the girl’s brother had squished.

Instead, the girl’s father walked up carrying something in his outstretched brown baseball cap: a stunned ruby-throated hummingbird, a long-beaked iridescent thing of unbearable beauty.

We ended up wrapping the creature in a towel and driving it to the Wild Bird Fund Center on the Upper West Side, the city’s only licensed wildlife rehabilitation center.

Read the rest of the article on the New York Times Web site.