Birds I Have Known

After my second expedition to Texas in 2021, I began updating the species gallery descriptions. I have sifted Wikipedia and Cornell’s Birds of the World websites for most of my information. When I’ve found interesting (to me) information, I’ve woven it into the narrative. I hope these galleries will provide educational content useful for beginning and intermediate birding enthusiasts. This exercise elevated my understanding of the avian world, and hopefully that information will help other curious souls. The format I tried to follow for the species descriptions should conform to the following outline:

• Range description (gleaned from multiple sources)
• Range map (captured mostly from, and credited to Birds of the World as per their FAQ)
• Contextual descriptions of my meetings with the species
• Interesting (at least to me) trivia about behaviour
• Subspecies information

I have organized these collections into pseudo families. The reader can use the menus to drill down to find a species of interest. Alternately, the Search feature (far right on the menu bar with the magnifying glass icon) is a method that can deliver a specific subject. Be sure to surround a multi-word search with quotes, or the search engine will deliver results for all the words in the search string. For example (quotes included), “Boat-Tailed Grackle”, or “Quiscalus major” should deliver a single result for the Boat-Tailed Grackle gallery.

I’ve tried to present images of as many variations in behavior as possible; birds in flight, bird eggs, birds foraging, and bird portraits.

Below are links to albums and galleries that will display birds that have met my camera. Before my Revillagigedos voyage in February 2017, there were 412 species. After my second expedition to Texas in 2021, and a 16,000-mile expedition through western North America in 2022, I recalculated the totals and learned there were more than 500 species in the Birds I Have Known collection. These totals don’t include exotics and species in zoos.