Tag Archives: birding

How ignoring Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) set modern ornithology back a hundred years

Posted on April 24, 2024 by Stephen Carr Hampton

This is a re-post from my other blog, The Cottonwood Post, which is focused on birds, birding, and environmental issues. Here I review a new book about the history of American ornithology — and all the stuff the early colonizers … Continue reading →

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Birders detect dramatic changes as Davis climate warms

Posted on July 26, 2018 by Stephen Carr Hampton

[A version of this was originally published in the Davis Enterprise.] In 2002, the cover of The New York Times Magazine featured a silhouetted man standing on frosty mauve ice and staring through binoculars into a rosy polar sky. The … Continue reading →

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Sitting on 700: The short story of my lifelist

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Stephen Carr Hampton

Sometime long ago when I started birding, when I was seven, I read that the ultimate lifetime goal for birders in the US was to see 700 species in North America. For birders, “North America” was defined by the American … Continue reading →

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Birding in Gambell: Native and White cultures come together at the edge of the world

Posted on June 7, 2017 by Stephen Carr Hampton

In the middle of the Bering Sea, where the only other visible land are the gleaming snow-clad peaks of the Russian Far East, two cultures meet in a strange symbiotic juxtaposition.  Gambell is a Siberian Yupik village, named for the … Continue reading →

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