Daily Bird: Hiatus

Two Snowy Egrets, left, and a Great Egret.

June 23, 2020 — Fans of the Daily Bird, you may remember that we started this five-time-a-week feature in March, when it became clear that the pandemic was serious.

The hope was that it would provide a few moments of enjoyable distraction during a difficult time. If you’re going to be distracted by something, it might as well be by birds.

The source material was an archive of scores of Bird Finder features, which we published weekly starting in late 2013.  I tried to chose birds that were appropriate to the season, species you could find in Connecticut around the time each was published if you wanted — no Snowy Owls or Evening Grosbeaks, for example, in late spring and summer.

We lucked out with the occasional rarity — Townsend’s Warbler in April, Western Sandpiper in June.

Google Analytics tell me people love the Daily Bird. Unfortunately, one bird every weekday since March 24 is a lot of birds — approximately 60, given the occasional day off — and we’ve run out of seasonally-appropriate species.

So the Daily Bird will take an enforced hiatus. It will return in late July, when shorebirds are populating the beaches on the southward migration, and it might be several times a week instead of daily.

To all those who subscribed via text or found it on our blog, thank you! I’ll start the text notifications again when things resume. If you’re not a subscriber, click here and sign up.

Thank you as well to the authors: Miley Bull, Andy Griswold, Andy Rzeznikiewicz, Stefan Martin, Kathy Van Der Aue, Greg Hanisek, Corrie Folsom-O’Keefe, Nick Bonomo, Genevieve Nuttall, Helena Ives, C.S. Wood, Ben Skaught, Paul Cianfaglione, and probably one or two others whose names I’m forgetting.

They all did their work years ago for Bird Finder. What made the Daily Bird special was the fresh art, photos, and videos we were lucky to get.

So thank you to Gilles Carter for amazing bird photos and videos, some of which he essentially shot on assignment for me; and to Patrick Lynch, for bird illustrations and photos. Both are members of Connecticut Audubon’s Board of Directors.

Thank you to Tomas Koeck and Mark Szantyr for offering new photos, as well to Connecticut Audubon land steward Stefan Martin and Executive Director Patrick Comins.

Just as a heads up, I’ll be asking again in July. — Tom Andersen