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| The famous Amazon kingfisher! |
There's a neat new episode of my "
This Birding Life" podcast available. This one is an interview with Jeff Bouton, the amazing birder who found the Amazon kingfisher during the
Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival last November about an hour east of Harlingen, Texas.
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| Jeff Bouton |
Many of you may know Jeff from his current role as a product specialist in the birder/naturalist markets for Leica Sport Optics. He's been to almost every birding festival in North America serving as a speaker, birding guide, and expert on digiscoping. Before that he was a field researcher doing bird surveys, a professional hawk watcher, and even a purveyor of the indoor sport known as karaoke. ALL of these experiences helped to mold Jeff into the top-notch field birder that he is today. His keen observation skills, honed over years in the field, were the reason he noticed something unusual about a kingfisher he saw perched on a tree as he drove past last November. Most of us might have passed it off as a poor look at a belted kingfisher. Not Jeff. He turned the car around to look again at the odd bird... and the rest is history.
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| Crowds of birders immediately converged on the roadside wetlands where the kingfisher was found. |
Over the next few weeks, the Amazon kingfisher that Jeff found—only the second one ever recorded in the United States—was seen and enjoyed by thousands of people. The bird may have moved on, but Jeff's amazing find will be talked about for decades.
Have a listen to this new episode "Jeff Bouton and the Amazon Kingfisher" which is free to download over at
Podcast Central as well as in the
iTunes podcast library. At either of these links you can also enjoy any of the previous 44 podcast episodes. All for free!
"This Birding Life" is brought to you through the generous sponsorship of
Carl Zeiss Sports Optics.
