This winter’s Kenya tour with David Fisher and Edwin Selempo has an added appeal: an annular solar eclipse.

That event will be visible along a three-hundred-mile-wide band that moves from Africa to China.

So 600-700 bird species, the great African mammal fauna, and a solar eclipse: not bad even by the exalted standards of a WINGS tour!

Scott Schuette photographed a Broad-billed Sandpiper yesterday afternoon on Alaska’s St. Paul Island. Photos of this incredibly charismatic little wader are “up” at Surfbirds.

What is the largest North American passerine thought to have hosted the egg of a brood parasite?

In North America north of Mexico, we immediately think of the cowbirds when we think of brood parasites–birds that lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, of the same or a different species. While the cowbirds are the only North American species that breed only by using this fascinating strategy, many others–”facultative” brood parasites–are known to have given it a whirl.

Both Black-billed and Yellow-billed Cuckoos, for example, occasionally deposit their eggs in alien nests, as do their relatives the roadrunners. The largest passerine to have hosted such an egg is the largest passerine in North America, a Common Raven whose nest held the egg of an ambitious Greater Roadrunner.

Narca Moore-Craig has created a new blog. As you might expect, it’s a beautiful thing, from the painting in the header to the photographs that so richly illustrate each entry.

No surprise that Narca's blog should be one of the most beautiful out there!

The latest entries are a fascinating account of her recent camping tour of Australia. You can bird with Narca on another Pacific adventure this coming spring, when she leads WINGS tours to Hawaii and Midway Atoll.

As electronic technology has grown ever tinier, ornithologists have installed tracking devices on ever smaller bird species in the effort to learn more about their migrations.

This year, for the first time, Bicknell’s Thrushes will leave their New England breeding grounds wearing solar geolocators on their backs. Researchers are hoping to be able to retrace the thrushes’ route from the krummholtz forests they nest in to the Caribbean islands where they winter; very little is known about the rigors of this species’ migration, and the identification of significant “stop-over” sites along the way would be a major contribution to conservation efforts on behalf of this rare bird.

Watch for the new WINGS commercial–our first venture into television–on Birding Adventures tomorrow morning.

Derek Lovitch is featured in an article this week on the front page of the Portland (Maine) Press Herald.

One of Maine’s best and best-known guides, Derek also writes the Maine Outdoor Journal’s “Field Notes,” a regular must-read for anyone interested in natural Maine. Derek’s latest entry is a thoughtful exploration of the care, concern, and ethical behavior required to minimize disturbance to breeding and migratory birds in coastal marshes–an issue near and dear to the heart of everyone here at WINGS.

You can bird with Derek on Monhegan Island next May and in Maine and New Hampshire in June. As the article notes, there are in fact “more and more people who are interested in wildlife observation and engaging in the natural world in general,” and it’s leaders like Derek who provide the inspiration.

WINGS is proud to help support the Puget Sound Bird Observatory’s 2009 Banding Camp for Teens.  We hope that this year’s scholarship recipients have as good a time and learn as much as last year’s, Tayler Brooks.

Pass the word on to the aspiring young ornithologists you know!

The New York Times will be publishing a selection of travel photos submitted by readers–why not send them your best from a recent WINGS tour?

Here’s one I’m thinking about sending in: