Posts by Emily Johnson
Happy Birthday, Ogden!
Happy 40th Birthday Ogden!
Read MoreStaghorn Sumac: A Winter Oasis
Staghorn sumac is an essential support food for winter animals.
Read MoreCenter for Wild Bird Rehab -Looking Back on 2020
VINS Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation has experienced its busiest year yet, receiving a total of 1,025 patients.
Read MoreChanging Bird Names for Inclusivity
The diversity of human languages allows us to communicate with one another easily, across geographic regions and even across time, despite the fact that languages, and our names for things, change.
Read MoreFour Bird Books for Christmas
Written by Gene Walz, friend of VINS What to get a birdwatcher for a Christmas gift? Four new books top the list, three by women. They all show how much birdwatching, birders, and serious bird study have changed over the years. Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir By Julia Zarankin Divorced and at loose…
Read MoreCozy as a Chickadee: How a Half-Ounce Bird Thrives in Winter
As the northern hemisphere dips into its winter angle, we wave many of our small songbird neighbors bon voyage on their migratory journeys. But there is one tiny passerine that stays here waving with us, and chooses not to migrate away from our frigid temperatures: the black-capped chickadee. Chickadees, in fact, hardly shrink from view as the winter encroaches; instead they are bold, brazen, and positively belligerent.
Read MorePassenger Pigeon Apocalypse
Three billion is the number of birds lost to North American populations in the last 50 years. It’s also a low-end estimate of the number of Passenger Pigeons that once lived on the North American continent. These birds were said to number so many that flights of them overhead could darken the sky. The fact that humans alone as a species were responsible for this devastating extinction is terrifying but, viewed from a certain angle, hopeful.
Read MoreIt’s Raining Birds
Summers in the Center for Wild Bird Rehabilitation (CWBR) can best be described as chaotically busy.
CWBR staff receive upwards of 30 phone calls a day regarding injured wildlife across New England, all while caring for countless critical care patients in the ICU, receiving and examining between 5-15 new patients a day, and feeding baby birds every half hour from 6am to 8pm. Summer 2020 could also be described as such, but on a much greater scale.