Photo by Chris Bosak
A young Wood Duck sits on a rock at Woods Pond in Norwalk, Conn., Julyh 2016.

Here’s the latest For the Birds column, which runs weekly in The Hour (Norwalk, Conn.), The Keene (NH) Sentinel and several Connecticut weekly newspapers.

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I’ll kick off this bird column with a baseball reference. Why not?

A Major League manager once said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “These guys aren’t doing what their baseball cards say they can do.” He meant that he had a group of players who had had great seasons in the past, but were underperforming that particular year.

Well, the same can be said for birds in field guides. I have mentioned in previous columns that you can’t always trust field guides, just like you can’t always trust the statistics on the back of a baseball card. Some of the newer guides, such as the ones by Sibley and Crossley, are much more trustworthy. The Peterson Continue reading →