Peter Alden Wild Life

A hundred brave souls in 20 parties endured a morning snowstorm and afternoon frosty winds on the 50th Concord Christmas Bird Count.
Rosita Corey participated in her 50th straight count! Smaller birds and some hawks congregated at feeders, waterfowl huddled in open stretches of the Assabet, and snow attacked our binoculars.Sixty species were noted despite the [...]

My final summary report on the groupings of organisms and the people who found them during Walden Biodiversity Days in 2009 and 1998 is finished and can be downloaded here (5.7 MB).
These events wouldn’t have been possible without hundreds of experts and helpers of all sorts deserve our gratitude for their time in the field [...]

In the run-up to Thanksgiving this week Shannon Mullen of National Public Radio interviewed me and Martha Stewart about Oriental Bittersweet, one of the most aggressively destructive invasive plants in the North East US and a staple of holiday decorations. Not surprisingly we come to different conclusions about it’s place at the table.

Here’s a clip of my recent appearance on WCVB-TV’s Chronicle, once again trying to spread the word about the problem of invasive alien species.
When I say that, I know most people think of UFOs and little green men. Producer Ernie Sarro even leavened this story with some great stock footage of those kinds of aliens. [...]

On July 3rd and 4th I’ll be leading the second Walden Biodiversity Day, a gathering of top naturalists and field biologists — many of whom participated in the first Biodiversity Day in 1998 — who will fan out to find, identify and photograph over a thousand species of mushrooms, plants and animals in a day. [...]

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: a tiny blackbird has been tormenting pedestrians in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district, guarding his nest in a behavior called “mobbing.” But has this bird gone bad or is he just getting back at the bankers for fine the economic mess they’ve gotten us in? I’ll [...]

Interest in penguins, their lives and their homes (in this era of climate change) is at an all time high. Having lectured on the sex lives of penguins and all sorts of Antarctic topics since 1986, I will be returning again this February 22 - March 16 for the final cruise of the 2007 southern [...]

From July 17 to September 10, 2006 I was bird lecturer and part-time charismatic megafauna spotter on Quark Expedition’s Kapitan Klebnikov from the Chukotka Peninsula to the Thule area of NW Greenland. We traversed the NW Passage south of Victoria Island, then counter-clockwise around Baffin Island, around Devon Island, west side of Ellesmere, then east [...]