What's The Best Bird Seed Mix To Buy?

The best bird seed mix out there for you depends on what you want to do.

Want to keep starlings away? Offer only hard-shelled seeds: black-oil sunflower, safflower, striped sunflower, millet. Avoid peanuts, sunflower chips, suet nuggets and cracked corn at all costs.

Want to avoid grackles…have one feeder that only has safflower in it and nothing else.

Want to avoid house sparrows? That’s tough, sunflower isn’t their favorite, but at the end of the day, they’ll eat anything. On the upside, their activity attracts other birds to your feeder.

Want to avoid squirrels? Move to Mars. In all seriousness, half the battle is feeder placement combined with either a squirrel baffle or weight sensitive feeder (that really is its own blog).

This is an example of a good all purpose mix. A handful of cracked corn or millet isn’t bad, but you want your main ingredient to be sunflower seeds.

I feed something a little fancier than the above.

The Falcon Heights squirrels are either too lazy or too chonky from my neighbor’s feeders to get airborne. Most squirrels can jump five feet vertically and ten feet horizontally. My squirrel baffles are about 4 feet off the ground and even on nights when I leave a patio chair near the feeder pole, they never make the jump. This means I can feed all the fancy foods at my feeders with no mammal repercussions. Don’t tell anyone…but I don’t even have starlings so I can even feed seeds out of the shell too.

Golfinches chowing down on my custom mix of seeds.

The birds in my yard have made it clear: they like sunflower seeds. They especially like them out of the shell with side of sunflower seeds out of the shell. If I could throw in some dried mealworms that would be awesome. Oh and for the love of Pete, could I cool it with the safflower, that would be great. And since I try to avoid too many empty seed shells, I try to offer some seeds out of the shell—that makes mixes more expensive but since I’m not going out to restaurants that much or paying for parking, I have some extra cash for birdseed right now.

White-throated sparrow and fox sparrow going for extra fine sunflower chips in a hollow log that I turned into a bird feeder/photography background.

If I have a good number of native sparrows hanging around, I’ll toss some white millet on the ground. I cannot resist that huge variation of tantalizing browns found in native sparrows. I’ll buy extra fine sunflower chips and toss them far and wide. Squirrels can smell it, but the scattered chips are little reward for digging through the grass and they sniff frantically around, whereas dainty sparrow beaks can snatch them up easily.

The seed I like to offer my birds is not cheap, yet I don’t want all of my discretionary income going to bird feed. So I started cruising for for prices online, my intent was to find someone to deliver seed to me, but much like my plain sunflower post, I got caught in the vortex of general bird seed pricing. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been caught dead purchasing Ace Hardware brand seed or Kaytee brand bird seed. I remember at one point some of the seeds in Kaytee mixes had dyed seeds—think of a general bird seed mix with hot pink safflower. However, clearly sometime in the last fifteen years they’ve made better mixes and use nicer seed.

For my home yard, I want a mix of sunflowers in and out of the shell as well as some peanuts out of the shell and dried mealworms. I can’t find anyone who makes this mix. The closest I can find goes by several names: Songbird Mix, Songbird Delight, Fruit and Nut…however all of these have safflower which most of my birds leave behind with the discarded sunflower shells (Please don’t email me about how much your birds love safflower, there’s geographic food tastes and I find in my neck of the woods, safflower on it’s own in a separate feeder works great to deter grackles. Rose-breasted grosbeaks and tufted titmice especially like it but I have neither this time of year where I live in Minnesota).

So here are the wackadoodle prices that I’ve found.

Coming in at .99¢ per pound this bird store had what I could call a reasonable price.

For once, Amazon was the most insane in their pricing coming in at $2.87 per pound. Also…note that you can purchase the seed from other sellers either new or used…ew.

Another bird feeding store and this one was a ZOWIE at $2.33 per pound if I bought 30 pounds. Not only must this seed be this year’s crop but also every kernel was hand polished.

Look at this insanity from Chewy.com! It comes out to $2.23 per pound if you purchase a 20 pound bag.

I found this at Fleet Farm online which was $1.34. When I went into pick it up, it was on sale for $17.99 which came to .89¢ per pound.

Since Fleet Farm had Kaytee on sale, I bought three bags. I also saw they had a bag of Nut and Berry on sale for $15.99 (the one Chewy has for more than double so I added one of those too. I mixed them all in my metal can and have this:

It’s sunflower in and out of the shell, it’s got a variety of nuts, it has fruit…and annoyingly it has fruit flavoring mixed in and smells like cough syrup. It’s not like birds are attracted to the smell but boy howdy does it get the squirrels and raccoons’ attention.

So, like sunflower seed by itself (which is often a cheaper way to feed birds and will still get you a great variety) seed mix prices can vary wildly. Take a look around and if you were like me and thought for the last 10 - 15 years that you’ll never purchase seed from a hardware store, take another look. Also keep in mind that the bigger the bag you purchase, generally the price per pound should go down.

As always, a wild bird specialty store will certainly answer all of your questions and give a lot of good, personal customer service, but if you’re strapped for cash and want to attract birds to your yard for your family, you can find good/affordable bird seed at a hardware store these days.

I Guess I Am A Diamond Painting Artist Now?

Seriously. It’s official. I’m an artist. I’m part of an exhibit with MIA (aka Minneapolis Institute of Arts). I entered a Diamond Painting of one of my turkey vulture photos into their Foot In The Door Exhibit and made it in. The Foot in the Door Exhibit is basically a once every ten years event where anyone can enter art in it and MIA will put it on their walls. Normally it would be on their actual museum walls, but because of a the pandemic…it’s online.

I took a few screenshots of the exhibition with my pieces and pieces made by friends.

Yet, It’s one of the few goals I actually got to keep this year and it was good for me to have something long term to work on. It makes it extra special to be in mixed media along with my friend Gayle Deutsch and artist Rob McBroom—the surrealist who always enters the Duck Stamp contest and never wins because…judges are too attached to art ducko: art that looks the same, almost like a photo (I’m not saying it isn’t a difficult or challenging technique, I’m just saying that it’s too wrapped up in only one style of art).

What is Diamond Painting? Well, if you follow me on the various social medias, you would have seen a few time lapses I made. It’s kind of a mix of cross stitch and paint by number with a little bit of a cryptogram thrown in. You get a canvas covered in sticky material. There are tiny little boxes with symbols in them. You have to match the corresponding color to its symbol by using a pen to set down little plastic diamonds. After many hours and tens of thousands of diamonds, you have your image. This image is a favorite of a turkey vulture photo that I took at Everglades National Park in Florida in 2016. It makes me chuckle that this pieces incorporates birds, digiscoping and a weird pop art. I am a little sad that people can’t see it in person, there’s so much texture to it and it’s shiny and sparkly as you move around it. However, I’ll take any win I can get this year and this is definitely a win for me.

Here’s a brief compilation of the time lapses I made this summer while working on the piece:

What the hell did I order? The title was “Jeff Goldblum Sunset.”

How does one get in to Diamond Painting…completely by folly and drunk ordering. When I got the package I had no idea what it was and I was so confused on what it could be. I put it on Facebook, “What the hell did I drunk order?”

My friend Gayle was quick to come out of the woodwork, “Um I linked to this two months ago. Did you click and buy it?

Clearly the answer was yes.

I tucked it away and thought maybe I’d find someone who wanted it since I had knitting and a supply of paint by numbers to work on. And then my mom got ill. Full disclosure: she is well today and just as sassy as ever. But at the time she was not and many things were very uncertain. And it’s very hard when your parents make decisions about their health that you do not agree with. My mom lives in Indiana and I live in Minnesota. I went down for visits, but most of my time was back up north. There was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation.

This is the chart that guides you on who to put down your various colored beads also called “drills.” The beads have a number on their bag. So the light green would be 3047 and it should be placed where you see an “X” on the sticky canvas.

In a fit of cleaning and organizing I came across the mysterious Amazon package and took out the contents. None of it made sense to me so I did what any practical thinking adult would do—watch YouTube how to videos. I thought it looked insane and would take forever. Who has the time to do this? To get a fully informed opinion, I decided to try it. This was slow and painstaking, but oh…it sent me into a mediative state.

When Non Birding Bill came home that night and saw what I was doing, he said, “I’m not sure this is a good sign. This looks really insane.”

I agreed, yet persisted. Over several weeks.

An up close look at the stick canvas with the codes for the colors.

Any free time I had, I worked on this over the next six weeks. I had ten minutes over coffee in the morning before going to work? I did it. NBB watching some weird move, I placed plastic beads on sticky canvas. Phone calls with relatives to catch up on Mom’s health? I put on more beads.

It soon became a challenge to keep the beads/drills corralled, spillage is inevitable. The bags weren’t really resealable. The beads are tiny and managed to find their way everywhere. One night, I took my bra off before bed and my chest was covered in them. I started using an old ice cube tray to keep colors separated. But even that had risks, like the day the tray accidentally flipped from the table on to the carpeting. I spent two hours painstakingly using a flashlight and tweezers to get as many as I could out of the carpet. When that spot was eventually vacuumed you could hear hundreds more get sucked up.

Fail.

Fortunately, these companies give you far more beads than you will ever need. And with many you can reorder them if you have an absolute disaster. I have also seen things online where there are much better bead organizers and even specialized vacuums to help you with just such a tragedy. I haven’t ordered the special vacuum but I have ordered the bead organizer. It comes with its own suitcase…that matches my luggage.

I’m fine, really.

Jeff Goldblum gradually comes to life.

It took six weeks and 19,040 little plastic diamonds to put together Jeff Goldblum Sunset—that doesn’t include the many beads that were lost on my person, the carpet or eaten by my pet rabbit Dougal. But I stuck with it and the sense of accomplishment was well worth it. If I’ve learned anything with this craft it’s that yes, control is an illusion and I certainly can’t control many aspects of my life, but damn it, I can control over 19,000 beads to create an image. I can make them go where they are supposed to and even rearrange a few if the colors don’t look quite right.

The completed Diamond Painting of Jeff Goldblum Sunset

I had no idea the amount of legend this first diamond painting had. When I moved this spring, I framed it and it was the first thing to go up in my home office along with a spotted owl painting that my mother did. Sometimes Jeff even shows up in the background of my live streams. When friends come over for a patio hangout they ask, “Can I see “Jeff?” It truly is a weird and wonderful thing and the texture and shininess always surprises people.

When MIA advertised their Foot in the Door exhibition I knew I wanted to do another one…because a pandemic will certainly fuck with your sense of control. But this time I wanted to do a custom piece of one of my own photos…enter in my favorite vulture photo. I love vultures, I also love the color of this piece and working these colors really help with my meditation. I sent my photo and desired dimensions to a company called Heartful Diamonds and their customer service was great. It takes a few weeks to get the actual kit but they do follow up in case your image doesn’t work in the dimensions you chose and they readily send out extra beads. If you want to attempt this, I’d highly recommend one of their pre made kits or attempting a custom one of your own.

Now…if you’re looking for weird, then check out the diamond painting kits on Etsy…be prepared, not all of them are safe for work and highly erotic.

And as I look down the barrel of a “Covid Winter” in Minnesota where patio hang outs aren’t going to be as readily of an option and the sun will be out for 7 hours a day, I have more on the way.

Skunks and Skulls March 2020

“I’d really love some quality time with a skunk,” I said to a person I’d been dating casually. (And they didn’t flee in horror.)

“Let’s go to my cabin,” he said.

I’m not sure if it was because Julie Zickefoose had shared a skunk on social media about the same time or if it simply dawned on me I hadn’t really watched a skunk the same way I watch other mammals, but I was really in the mood to see and maybe photograph a skunk.

I had just cancelled a flight to see friends who are more like family in Chicago, which was an uncharacteristically rash decision for me. I was worried I was being alarmist, but after reading tweets from an Italian doctor detailing how overwhelmed the hospitals were in Italy and that they were making decisions on who seemed the most likely to survive as opposed to treating everyone, it seemed irresponsible to travel on a plane. It looked like lockdown was a possibility for Minnesota as other cities were suddenly getting Covid cases in the United States.

“Let’s go to my cabin,” he said. “It’s remote, we can avoid people. There should be good birds at the feeders.”

This is what we found when we arrived at the cabin:

Arriving at the cabin, the deer didn’t even leave as we unloaded luggage.

Hey, y’all got any more of that millet?

When you see this it is time to move your bird feeders. A recipe for CWD.

Yep. Those are some amazing “birds” at the feeder. But the cabin isn’t far from Sax Zim Bog and the surrounding county has lots of bog habitat to explore, something I’ve never really had time to visit because I was always traveling. The surrounding fields were chock full of rough-legged hawks and purple finches were well in abundance. I did take a road trip up to the far northern reaches to look for my nemesis bird: the spruce grouse. I was assured by more than one bird guide that this was the spot they took clients to for practically guaranteed grouse.

Alas, my nemesis curse still stands as a northern goshawk was perched at the grouse spot. Don’t get me wrong, I love goshawks, but I’ve seen them, banded them, had one perched on my arm, had a female try to kneecap me…I just want to look at a spruce grouse. Just once.

That was not to be. So I threw out to the universe that I’d like to see a skunk, in daylight and maybe get some photos or videos of one. When we arrived at the cabin, a deer that had been hit by a car was in a ditch on the property. Some canids had already gorged on the carcass. I’m not sure if it had been coyotes or wolves, both are in the area in abundance. As we headed out for some birding one morning, I looked to my left at the carcass and saw a small, black ball on it. “Skunk,” I said, a little surprised that I had sort of willed one out of this air. It trundled away to some melted snow and lapped up water and then headed back to the feast to be found among deer skin and bones.

The skunk has a bit of a rosy glow to the patches on the fur, no doubt from working on the deer carcass.

When I think of a picture that I’ve taken to represent 2020, this one immediately pops up in my mind.

I stayed with the skunk for a long time as the snow gently fell around us. Snow mobiles cruised in the distance, but it was just us. I made sure to give the skunk all the space it needed so it could chow down in peace. And I thought about what was happening. I was supposed to toasting friends in fancy restaurants and instead I was on the side of a county road watching a skunk devour roadkill. And I was enjoying the moment.

I wondered how a lockdown would impair my life going forward. I was actively looking for a new place to live and all the things I’d loved about apartments in the Twin Cities: gyms, saunas, pools, community outdoor space was all being closed off. I was still dealing with divorce forms. Birding events that booked me for my storytelling and workshops were cancelling and that’s a chunk of my income…which I’m now a sole income earner. I was reassessing what I really wanted for my future. When would I be able to travel again? And dating? How the hell do you do that in a pandemic? How do you tell someone nicely, “You’re really a lot of fun, but I can’t see you anymore. It’s not you, it’s the pandemic.”

As I watched the skunk deal with the unanticipated feast of roadkill, I thought about how a pandemic could be a way to do have a sort of “do over.” In some ways, a divorce is a do over, but if a pandemic is going to make life stop, what could I do with that? I love all the travel that I do, but there’s so much in Minnesota that I don’t get to see. Maybe stopping and taking the time to enjoy the skunk and roadkill was what I needed to reassess?

One person I had dated always made plans last minute. 99% of the texts asking, “Want to grab a drink tonight” were answered with, “I’d love to, but I have plans.” They said that I needed to work on my spontaneity. I countered with, “I make plans so I can be spontaneous.” Maybe not knowing what’s going to happen more than two weeks out was a change I need?

Anyway, if you love of a skunk chewing on roadkill being a metaphor for 2020, here’s a video to meditate on.

January 2020...Birding Unfettered

I this meme posted on social media and it took me a full two minutes to realize that people were making a joke that one shouldn’t 30-40 olives directly from a jar for dinner. I’ve done this more than once and have no regrets. It’s kind of the same way I feel about popcorn for dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I love to cook, but I hate doing dishes.

Possible dating profile picture…one should know what they’re getting into with me, deer rib cages and sub-zero temperatures and all.

I make jokes on social media using #DatingInYourForties is weird. Although, I’m sure I’ve probably inspired a few #DatingABirderIsWeird after someone found a frozen blue jay in my freezer when they went to get some ice. It is very hard for my brain to process that birding can now be a potential romantic activity. I have been a great compartmentalizer my whole. You are my birding friends. You are my sci fi friends. You are my friends through Bill. You are my travel birding friends. You are my comedy writing friends. And so on and so forth. After being with a non birder for a couple of decades, birding just never fell into the romantic category of activities. “Life pie” can have a whole new meaning.

Of course, birding in winter in Minnesota is a strange test because your clothes for single digit temperatures aren’t exactly what I would call “sexy time clothes.” But good birds can make even the most awkward date a good time.

I know I’m not the first person to find themselves unexpectedly in a completely new life circumstance where none of the old routines apply and you can make up completely new ones. I decided for one thing to say yes to all the invitations. It’s great to only check with myself before I do something. It’s a liberating feeling to just say yes to a birding trip without checking to see if something non birding had been planned or that I’ve not been spending enough time at home.

Want to go birding tomorrow morning? I’m not working, yes.

What to go to Texas next month? I have lots of frequent flyer miles, yes.

Want to go to a cabin this weekend and do some birding? Oh, hell yes.

View from a cabin.

In Minnesota, many people have cabins for the weekend. You have to get used to a different schedule when you have a friend with a cabin. They generally are unavailable for city plans on the weekend from spring until autumn and forget holidays. Sometimes you can get invitations to cabins, either staying in them or pitching a tent outside. Cabins run the gamut from very basic with no shower but all the fishing tackle you could ever want and can be grand lodgings with air conditioning and hot tubs. Some are closed down for the winter, but a few have good heating and insulation and can be fun winter getaway.

When I moved to Minnesota I got a real education on cabin culture when I ran a wild bird feeding store. The company even came up with a seed mix just for cabin people called, “Cabin Mix” that people could grab on their way out of town and into northern Minnesota. We also carried rustic looking houses and feeders to match cabin decor, but honestly, the people really need something strong enough to withstand being knocked down by bears.

Friends with cabins have been gracious hosts when I learned that they have a cabin near a public blind with a lek. I’d rather roll out of bed and drive twenty minutes in the dark to get to a sharp-tailed grouse blind than leave the Twin Cities at 2am.

Fresh pileated woodpecker work outside a cabin.

I had an invitation to visit a cabin with some friends in January for snowshoeing on frozen lakes, birding and maybe some fat tire biking. These are fun weekends that generally involve cooking together as well. There was some very visible pileated woodpecker activity around the cabin and the next morning a pair took turns wailing into a tree.

The bird was so close…so photographable…except for the storm windows.

The cabin was fun for me—warm winter foods and nonstop pileated woodpeckers. Even if we never made it outside, I could watch my spark bird all day long. Although, I did feel super taunted by the bird. It was a great digiscoping opportunity, however storm windows keep your place snug and warm, but they can blur the heck out of photos.

However, the next day the cabin owner had removed the storm window and even carefully opened it when the birds returned so I could take all the photos. That is one trusting cabin owner to let out precious heat for a bird photography opportunity.

A clearer view of the pileated. There’s still a bit of heat shimmer from the heat escaping the cabin through an open window, but I still dig this picture.

The next day we headed to Sax Zim Bog for some birding. It was such a great time, not only for the birds but because I ran into so many friends who were birding up there for the day. Some were guides and when I’d pul over to watch birds, I’d find text messages that said, “Hey, did I just pass you over by the goshawk?” Yes, yes they had.

Hoar frost in the bog.

If you’ve never birded the bog and you have lots of lifers to get, especially owls then hiring a guide is a must. But if you have mostly seen the birds or only need one or two lifers, you can get by on your own with a stop at the visitor center and eBird. I knew of a reliable northern hawk owl and that was our first stop. The crowd of birders on the side of the road alerted us that the bird was indeed there.

A lovely way to start the day with a northern hawk owl who gives very little care to the birders below.

A female black-backed woodpecker (was a lifer for one of us) found on the way to the Sax Zim Bog visitor Center.

We were getting all the bog birds fairly easily, except for boreal chickadee, but that’s ok. Canada jays, rough-legs and barred owls are a nice consolation prize. We continued to run into people throughout the day, including one of my fellow park rangers who had just retired last fall. We ran into him at Wilbert’s Cafe and ended up having lunch together.

From there we headed out to a spot to look for three-toed woodpeckers. And I ran into John Jonas, one of my favorite wildlife photographers. He saw me driving my Prius around the bog, pulled over and asked, “You brought a Prius to the bog???” I smiled and said, “That’s how badass I am.”

We had quite a bit of hairy woodpecker activity and Jonas found the three-toed, but it was camera shy for me. I paused to get a slefie of all of us in the bog and it was at that moment a three-toed flew over all of us.

Beardy men at the bog.

What we lacked in three-toeds was made up for with a cool mammal experience. We did find a snowshoe hare hiding near the trail. I’ve seen them here and there, usually hopping away. But this was one of the closest encounters I’ve had with one and what a treat to see its winter camouflage in action!

We tried to finish the day with a great gray owl, but no one was having any luck. At sunset we drove the usual hangouts and it seemed that every ten minutes we’d pass one of the Sax Zim guides in their vehicle with clients trying to find a bird. We’d already seen many great grays and headed back to the cabin at dusk for some celebratory beer and whiskey. I have never seen so many ruffed grouse in the trees and bushes. It was clearly a bumper crop year and it explained why goshawks were easy to find in the bog this winter.

Craptastic owl photo!

We did manage one more species of owl that day. We drove past a snowy owl as we headed back towards Aitkin County. Not a lifer, but a cool bird.

Sunrise at the cabin.

On one page, a cabin just seem like a second home that you have to take care of: extra cleaning, yard work and other maintenance. On the other page, cabin life is seductive when you watch the sunrise over coffee while bacon sizzles on the stove a fox darts through the yard. You feel like you could give up work and just live hand to mouth up there forever.

But work calls. And friends in the city call insisting on lunch plans.

January 2020 My First Birding Event of the Year

That awkward feeling when you write about your relationship a lot on the Internet and incorporate them into storytelling shows and then that relationship ends and you really don’t want to talk about why, but feel you kind owe people an explanation and well, you get booked for storytelling shows…and one of the first for the year is where that relationship started.

I knew this year was going to be weird. I knew writing was going to be hard. I never anticipated having an ex husband and having to navigate that phrase. But here I am.

The one thing that I know how to do really well is to move forward. Just keep moving forward.

I generally get booked for speaking engagements a year to two in advance. When an opportunity to speak and lead trips at the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival came along in late 2018, I was all for it. They contacted me over a year out and at the time I thought I’d get Non Birding Bill to come with me because we used to go there with his family for summer vacations when we first together. And because Virginia Beach was where he proposed. We had lots of great memories there. I got many a life bird at Sandbridge Beach and Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

And then life happened. And I found myself heading to a very public event loaded with emotional land mines alone. But, you have to move forward.

I’ve traveled enough that I know my limits on a good weekend and how to pace my flights. I purposely booked myself in early to give myself some time alone in the spaces that would be hard. Places that I wouldn’t want to show people shorebirds and gulls while reliving parts of a marriage this is no longer viable. I mean, c’mon, shorebirds are hard enough to identify as it is with out hardcore break up emotions exploding all around you. No one wants to get a lifer while their field trip leader is a bawling mess.

I went to the mostly deserted beach as cold winter winds accompanied the waves rushing to shore. It was the perfect weather for me in that the moment. I didn’t come to the beach to take in warm rays, I came to scour out emotions. I relived all the wonderful memories. I dusted them off, shined them up and put them on their proper place on the shelves in my mind. I examined the painful recent ones and tucked them away in a box and placed them in a drawer where they don’t need to be seen every day. I cried and was grateful that winter made people avoid the beach and if people saw me, they’d assume my eyes were watering with the cold wind. No one walks the beach to look at other people, the walk to look at the ocean and the crashing waves, perhaps even a gorgeous sunset.

I found someone’s secret in a mason jar on the beach.

As I walked, I came across a mason jar in the sand with a note that had washed ashore. I opened it and read it. It was someone’s secret. I’m a huge fan of PostSecret and read it religiously every Sunday morning over coffee when I wake up, no matter where I am. The secret in the jar was hard and painful and the writer was letting it go on the beach. I took in their secret, I understood it. If PostSecret teaches you anything, it’s that secrets are universal and letting them go or sharing them with the right person is liberating. And in a long exhale I let go of what I was holding on to and hoped that I was helping them let go at the same time. I put the secret back in the mason jar and left it exactly as a found it. Maybe someone else would be walking the beach that night and need to read it?

I continued down the dark beach, met the organizers for dinner and had a lovely time meeting new people and learning about their jobs and what brought them to birding.

My hotel was right on the beach and I was lucky enough to get a room facing the beach. I took a time lapse of the sunrise as I got ready for my day.

A nice big, fat sassy greater black-backed gull in front and a snoozing lesser black-backed gull in the back, surrounded by ring-billed and laughing gulls.

A willet working the shore. I got my first ever willet here over twenty years ago.

I looked out onto the beach and could see gulls and shorebirds. I took some time to enjoy them in the morning sun. I enjoy spending time with birds that I don’t normally see where I live. It’s nice to get a chance to soak up the differences in various gulls when it isn’t -20 degrees Fahrenheit and I take the time to nice not only color differences, but shape and flight patter.

Tundra swans at Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

Apart from my fond memories from over 20 years ago at Virginia Beach, one thing I was particularly excited to revisit was Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge. When I would go on those early vacations we would drive down the road or even bike there. I got so many new birds Back Bay as a young birder: blue grosbeak, sanderling and king rail just to name a few. No jokes about sanderlings, I was a land lubber from Indiana at the time. I also remember the insane amount of cottonmouths. Usually, when you go to a refuge and there’s a sign warning of a potential danger (or a particular bird) it means that someone in the last 10 years. The cottonmouth signs were no joke. They were everywhere in the evening. I remember my ex husband was no fan of them and that if he saw one he would immediately make us leave. There was more than one cottonmouth that I falsely identified as “just a water snake, but don’t touch it.”

When we visited in July all those years ago in a time share, I read the signs at Back Bay that explained that tundra swans spent the winter there. When I moved to Minnesota and saw them by the thousands stopping in Minnesota to carbo load before reaching Back Bay, I always wanted to go back in winter to see them. This trip would be my chance and they did not disappoint. It was nice to finally realize that dream of so long ago.

White ibises were found among the swans.

I never get tired of large flocks of snow geese.

The rest of the festival was wonderful. We birding along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel—both on it and along side in a boat. I remember years ago after 9-11 having to get a permit to bird along there so I could get an American oystercatcher. My father-in-law went along as something to do, but also I think he was baffled by a new daughter-in-law who said that if they went to a particular island, they would see a very particular bird. Birds fly, why would one be so reliable. We got to the oystercatcher spot, pulled into a parking lot and as soon as we stepped out I said, “There it is.” He was shocked that the bird was so “easy.” Ahhhh, if only they all were so easy. 

Long-tailed ducks and a couple of red-breasted mergansers.

The winter offered many delights and I loved looking out at a huge flock of gorgeous long-tailed ducks. Their elegant plumage reminded me of the move The Last Unicorn when King Haggard described watching them on the crests of the waves outside his castle, which stayed on an extended loop in my head the rest of my time at the festival when I saw the long-tailed ducks. 

On top of those elegant beauties were scoters, loons and gannets. It was a tremendous day with lots of birders to share it with. 

Surf scoters.

Brown pelican and black-backed gulls from the boat.

Chumming.

One of MANY rainbows I’ve seen this year. Nice to get one in January right over the ocean.

The boat ride made an attempt at chumming and though we didn’t get rarities, I never get tired of seabirds chasing a boat going for raw fish scraps, I especially love watching the giant brown pelicans thrown into the mix. Who knew how much I would rely on these images for backgrounds in Zooms and Teams meetings? 

I did give my keynote, something that I generally love to do, these are tried and tested stories. I’ve tested many out on the road and these are the ones that always bring the audience along and even play well with non birders. But I was nervous because phrasing had to be changed with some of them. Would I trip up? 

It was a wonderful way to get my toes back in the water. 

Bobby Dyer the Mayor of Virginia Beach was my opening act.

I love that the Virginia Beach Mayor gave the opening remarks and a proclamation, it’s important to see local political officials taking birding seriously as an economic force. I apparently did fine, the audience was full and wonderful and afterwards the theater tech running the show said, “Hey, we had a guy here a couple of weeks ago from America’s Got Talent and you got way more laughs than him! I had no idea birds could be funny.”

I think I had a primed audience, but it’s good to know my stories still work, even if I had to make some relationship adjustments.

Bob, the Bobwhite.

Speaking of relationships, I flirted heavily with an education bobwhite quail while at Virginia Beach. I try really hard not to be the “ahem, I’m the keynote, can I have this special favor” at birding events, everyone is busy keeping an event running smoothly. However, when the caretaker for an education bird ask, “Hey, you want to feed my boy some wax worms,” and it turns out to be a bobwhite…I’m gonna play that card. How can I resist a cute chonky boi who makes all sorts of squeaky sounds? I’d like to think he was flirting back at me, but his interest went only so far as the few wax worms I had to give him. Listen to those little squeaks, how could anyone deny him anything:

Why can’t someone as cute as that ever show up on Tinder?

A good start to a strange year. That just keeps getting stranger. But we move forward.