Ear Candy Alert: Latest Podcast Episodes!

If you enjoy listening to podcasts about birding, there are new episodes posted in the past few days from two podcasts in which I'm involved.

This Birding Life has been going for more than a decade and just passed the 70 episode count. Episode 73 is a collection of four different birding-related stories I recorded during a recent trip to Taiwan. These first-person tales range from trying to charm you way into an exit-row seat on an international flight to being rescued in dire remote circumstances. Here's a link to listen to episode 73 of "This Birding Life" entitled "More Birding Stories."

That's me in the yellow sleeves with our Taiwan birding group.

"Out There With the Birds" is the second podcast I'm part of, along with my colleague and friend Ben Lizdas. Where TBL is an interview-style podcast with me interviewing an interesting person or people, OTWTB is pretty much just Ben and me talking back and forth about anything that comes to mind. And we usually crack up along the way.

Ben lives and works outside of Madison, Wisconsin, so most of our episodes are recorded via Skype, which makes the audio quality , occasionally challenging. When our paths converge, we record episodes in person and take lots of silly selfies.  Here's a link to a recent episode that included a short discussion about recent research into male duck genitalia.

If you like what you hear, please click on the RSS feed link to be notified when new issues are posted. TBL is once monthly, OTWTB is twice monthly. In between episodes, you should go birding.

Happy listening! We'll see you out there with the birds!

Giant Things of Oaks, PA

I just remembered I still have a blog, such as it is. 

And one of my most favorite-ist blog post categories ever is Giant Things. Go ahead. Search the Bill of the Birds archives and let the wonders fill your eyes. And your nightmares.

This beauty of a Giant Thing is in Oaks, Pennsylvania, standing outside an indoor amusement park and immediately adjacent to the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, where we just held the third-annual American Birding Expo. My guess is Ol' Jughead used to be holding a wrench or some other sort of tool, advertising a car repair center. Now he's standing, empty handed, on the edge of a parking lot, next to his buddy, Life-size Giraffe.

Lifesize Giraffe and extraneous minutiae.

Ben and I spied the Giant Things and had to hold an impromptu photo session. We like to get selfies for use with our "Out There Wth the Birds" podcast. Check out episode 21 in which we walk the aisles of the 2017 Expo, talking to ourselves and others.

No, Ben is not head butting Jughead in the photo above.

Later in the weekend, the Expo staff from Bird Watcher's Digest, along with two of our super volunteers, Ann Hannon and Jessica Melfi, struck a pose with Juggers.

You can find these Giant Things for yourself, when you come to NEXT YEAR'S EXPO, September 21 to 23, 2018, at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center.

If you come, we can take a selfie!

Spring Migration 2017, Part 2

Birders at Magee Marsh.

For those of us who are still scratching our heads about this year's spring bird migration, there seem to be more questions than answers and, of course, theories aplenty. Only yesterday (June 8) there was a female black-throated green warbler in our yard in southeast Ohio—a bird that should be in the northern forests brooding eggs or feeding nestlings by now.

The dedicated news team at our Out There With the Birds podcast sent Ben Lizdas, cub reporter, into the field to speak to two migration experts for a special episode focused on spring migration. Ben spoke with Greg Neise of the American Birding Association and Dr. David LaPuma, director of the  Cape May Bird Observatory.

Greg Neise of the American Birding Association.

Dr. David LaPuma of Cape May Birding Observatory.

Both of these guys are avid birders with loads of spring migration experience—Greg primarily in the upper Midwest in Illinois and David in both Wisconsin and New Jersey. I found what they had to say quite informative and most interesting.

You can hear their take on spring migration 2017 by listening to Episode 13 of Out There With the Birds: Spring Migration Report.

Enjoy and happy (late) spring birding!

Your OTWTB podcast hosts Bill (left) and Ben (cub reporter).