Spring Birding Festivals 2013!

I love traveling, especially if I know where I'm going.

I had a momentary lost of cranial pressure a few minutes ago. I was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting on a plane, and I suddenly realized that I could not recall where I was about to go. I checked the gate screen and saw it was a flight to Detroit. No bells were rung by this. Then I walked my mental fingers through my recent travels. I'd been twice to Florida in the past two weeks, so not likely going there again. And then it came to me. I was not going to a birding festival, but to a business conference for publishers: more work-like and completely indoors. No chance to go birding. No wonder I'd forgotten it.

I can look forward to much great birding travel and adventure this spring and summer, however. Let me share some of the highlights with you.

In just a few weeks I'll be one of the speakers at the San Diego Bird Festival. This event takes place on scenic Mission Bay from February 28 to March 3, 2013. The featured speaker is Dr. John Fitzpatrick from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I am listed as a special guest and I'm leading a birding trip along the border with Mexico as well as giving a couple of presentations and playing some music for one of the evening receptions. 

The San Diego Bird Festival features many activities for young people and families.

The birding at this fest is excellent (including several pelagic trips), as is the vendor hall. There's even a post-festival tour south into the Baja Peninsula of Mexico. Find out more here: www.sandiegoaudubon.org.

Vermilion flycatcher (male). Photo ©Karen Straus

Later in March I'll be representing Bird Watcher's Digest as a host for the first-ever Birding Optics & Gear Expo in Columbus, Ohio March 23-24, 2013. Nearly all the major optics manufacturers will be on hand, showing and sharing their products. Ben Lizdas from Eagle Optics will be there selling optics. And we'll be joined by several other companies, too: Midwest Photo Exchange will be selling cameras and other photo gear, Clintonville Outfitters will bring outdoor gear such as boots, packs, and so on. Manfrotto will be there with their excellent tripods. Optics companies at the Expo include: Swarovski Optik, Leica Sport Optics, Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, Celestron, Kowa Optimed, Minox, Vanguard, and Vortex. Best of all, this event is FREE to attend. All outdoor enthusiasts are welcome, so I hope to see you there.

One spring event that I've been invited to in the past but have never been able to attend is the FeatherFest in Galveston, Texas scheduled for April 11-14, 2013. It might win the contest for longest birding festival name, since it's officially known as: The FeatherFest Birding and Nature Photography Festival. I've been birding along this part of the Texas coast and can attest to its appeal as a place where you get great, close-up looks at wonderful birds. Easy access to diverse habitats means you'll likely run up a huge list of birds. This year's speaker is Mark Obmascik, author of The Big Year. More details are available here: Galveston FeatherFest. One of these years I plan to get back to Galveston (cue the Glenn Campbell soundtrack).

In late April I'll be back down in south-central West Virginia at the New River Birding & Nature Festival, which is held in Fayetteville, WV from April 29 to May 5. This small event specializes in wood warblers, including cerulean, Swainson's, and golden-winged—and about 20 other warbler species, too. Mornings are spent birding the hills and hollers amid breathtaking mountain scenery of the New River Gorge. Late afternoons are a time to rest up for the evening, which might include a cookout, a cafe meal, or a stop at a nearby ramp dinner before the evening program and check list review. 

Life bird wigglers after finding a golden-winged warbler at the New River Birding & Nature Festival in West Virginia.

It's fun, friendly, a little wacky, and a must-add event to your bird-festival bucket list. On the festival's final night, The Rain Crows, the most-famous band ever to emerge from Whipple, Ohio will be playing a show at Opossum Creek Retreat, where the festival is based. Oh yes, and there is local microbrewed beer on hand, too. More info: New River Birding & Nature Festival.

At the end of April I'll be speaking and guiding for the first time at The Acadia Birding Festival on Mount Desert Island in Maine, which runs from May 30 to June 2. I'm giving two talks and guiding on two walks and a pelagic trip for the festival. Marshall Iliff is the other speaker booked this year for Acadia—a festival which is gaining quite a reputation for its combination of great boreal and coastal birding. Who doesn't like a birding event that can give you both warblers and alcids? For more info, head here: www.acadiabirdingfestival.com

Mid-June usually find me and my family out on the Missouri Coteau in North Dakota for the Prairie and Potholes Birding Festival. If you've been a reader of my blog or Julie Zickefoose's blog over the years, or a subscriber to Bird Watcher's Digest you'll know about "Potholes." Our dear friend Ann Hoffert serves as the de facto den mother for this festival which, despite its small size (about 80 people max), offers world-class birding. Highlight species we see most every year include Baird's, LeConte's, and Nelson's sparrows, chestnut-collared longspur, Sprague's pipit, and ferruginous hawk. 

Birders at the Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival looking for a Sprague's pipit.

Add to that alluring list the vision of nearly every breeding species of waterfowl, skeins of American white pelicans, and you get a feel for the wonderful birds we see. But there's more: hot lunches at cafes in tiny prairie towns, a prairie ramble that includes sites where Native American tepee rings are still present, and the biggest sky you've ever seen. There are even rumors that there will be a bit of squatchin' this year with Al Batt and Liam Thompson. We've been out there for 10 years running and we'll be back again: Visit Birding Drives Dakota for details.

Late June will find my family back at the Hog Island Audubon Camp in Bremen, Maine for a course we'll be helping to teach called "The Arts of Birding." Julie and I and our fellow instructors (including...) will lead sessions on nature journaling, field sketching and painting, writing about birds, bird photography, and perhaps even a bit of nature songwriting, too. Hog Island is legendary for its setting along the rocky Maine coast, its proximity to birds such as black guillemot and Atlantic puffin, and its history of teaching people of all ages about nature. We hope you'll join us June 23 to 28, 2013 for The Arts of Birding.

A sunset view of Hog Island Audubon Camp in Maine.

It's time to board my plane to....ummm.....uhhhh......HOME! Yay! What a long strange trip it's been! Hey, I hope to see you out there with the birds one of these days at one of the events I've listed above. Until then, stay birdy, people!

Ready for Grosbeaks

"Band of Gold: Evening Grosbeaks" by Julie Zickefoose

 I've heard their calls once or twice this season, flying overhead, unseen. I've also heard the voices of bird watchers, breathless with excitement, after capturing a glimpse of these dynamic birds with the massive bills and mustard-colored plumage. Evening grosbeaks!

Yes it seems that this is an invasion year for grosbeaks and other members of the finch family, too, including pine siskins (currently EVERYwhere), purple finches, a few redpolls, and both flavors of crossbill (we still have just two crossbill species in North America as I write this, though the "splitters" are hard at work).

It's been years since we had a serious influx of evening grosbeaks here in southeastern Ohio. I remember a couple of visits to our bird feeders in the early 1990s, but that's about it. Of course many local birders—in fact many bird watchers in the Midwest recall the huge northern finch incursions during the late 1970s. The winters of 1977-78 and 1978-79 were among the coldest and snowiest in modern times. And we had colorful, feisty flocks of finches covering our feeders. I remember filling the feeders almost daily and watching hundreds of evening grosbeaks and common redpolls descending to gorge themselves. We'd started Bird Watcher's Digest in the fall of 1978 in our house, and all the bird watchers' chatter and newspaper articles about the winter finch invasion gave us great encouragement to keep the magazine going.

The male evening grosbeak from Willard Bay State Park in Utah.

The last evening grosbeak I set eyes on was a male lagging behind a small flock of his species in a riverside forest just north of Salt Lake City, Utah. I was birding there with two friends on a morning off during the Great Salt Lake Birding Festival. Seeing a gorgeous male grosbeak, singing and foraging, in green leaves was a bit of a context shift for me. You can read the full story of that birding adventure in this earlier post from this very blog.

Julie's quick snapshot of one of this year's grosbeaks in our gray birch tree.

Julie called me last Tuesday with the happy news that a small flock of grosbeaks dropped into our yard, foraged below the hopper feeder, then vanished. Even my mom reported a flyover evening grosbeak back in October. Now that people all over the region have seen evening grosbeaks, I am getting fully prepared. I know that evening grosbeaks prefer sunflower seed offered on a platform, so I built what may be the world's largest platform feeder by placing an old, weathered piece of siding across the corner of our deck railing. Crafty of me, huh? I poured a large bucket of black-oil sunflower seed onto it and stepped back. Ten seconds later a tufted titmouse dropped in for a seed.

Here's my gargantuan feeder, with my hat and a tiny tufted titmouse for size perspective. Now how could any passing evening grosbeak not notice this? I'm thinking about making some grosbeak decoys (out of French's mustard bottles) and using my iPod to play grosbeak flock calls out the window. But I'm NOT desperate. Not at all.

BWD Digital: NOT Scary!

It's Halloween season right now, which means there are scary things all over the place: Jack-o-lanterns, haunted houses, headless horsepeople, robo-calls about the presidential election, Old Man Jenkins from Scooby Doo...

One thing that is NOT scary, however, are the really wonderful digital options available for enjoying Bird Watcher's Digest.  

 

BWD is the magazine that I edit (and which my parents started in our living room in 1978). We're a magazine for folks who love reading about birds and birding. If you download the BWD App or use your e-mail address to log-in to eBWD our fabulous digital edition, flesh-eating zombies will NOT immediately surround you. I give you my word on this.

 

If you like reading about birds on your computer, give eBWD a try. In addition to all the great articles and columns in every issue, you'll get bird videos, sounds, audio files of authors reading their articles, and links to birdy websites all over the Internet. Just a few issues after we launched eBWD, it won a digital magazine award for being awesome. You can poke around the current issue of eBWD by visiting this link: http://www.birdwatchersdigest-digital.com.

eBWD: The digital edition of Bird Watcher's Digest

 Here is a video that we made to help our readers get maximum enjoyment out of eBWD.

 

Or, if you prefer reading on your iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook, or other digital tablet/reader, then the BWD App is a better option because it's designed to take advantage of the tablet format and interface.

You can download the BWD App here in Apple's iTunes. And if you're unsure about whether or not you'll enjoy the app, please browse the many positive comments it has received since it launched in January of 2012.

Here's the current issue of BWD as it appears on an iPad (our digest size is perfect for tablet reading!). Now if YOU get (or GIVE!) an iPad or some other whiz-bang digital gizmo for the holidays, wouldn't it just be wonderful to have some engaging, entertaining content inside it? We certainly think so.

Subscribers to the printed edition of BWD get access to the digital options for FREE! All we need is your e-mail address to verify your subscription.

If you're not a current subscriber to Bird Watcher's Digest it's just $19.99 for one year/six issues. Of course you can also subscribe to just eBWD (six issues is currently $9.99) or just via the BWD App (six issues is currently $4.99). But folks these low-low prices won't last forever...

It's a well-know fact, in these scary times, that one of the ONLY ways to keep flesh-eating zombies away from yourself and your loved ones is to subscribe to Bird Watcher's Digest.

Happy Halloween, happy holidays, happy birding, and happy reading!