Hey, remember in May when I went to Horicon Marsh? It’s funny, I’ve always been the sort of blogger who puts stuff up as she goes, never one with a backlog of material but as the Internet has changed to interacting with people via Facebook and Twitter, I don’t blog as much and now I [ Read More ]
If you ever have a chance to visit the great state of Utah, I highly recommend checking out Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. This place is awesome, there’s an easy birding drive to take and you can use your car as a blind to get great looks at western birds. You can also use the [ Read More ]
I did a bunch of traveling in May and haven’t really had a chance to sit and breathe and really focus on the wonderful birding to be had. It started with the Horicon Marsh Bird Festival in Wisconsin. This is a smaller festival and forgoes some of the traditional things like name badges and packets [ Read More ]
This is a pair of redheads (a type of duck) seen during last weekend’s Horicon Marsh Bird Festival. Horicon Marsh is over 33,000 acres in size and at first glance it may appear to be managed for Canada geese and muskrats, but redheads are one of the main targets for optimizing habitat. If you are [ Read More ]
I love this little male kestrel snacking on a small rodent it plucked from a field in Utah. I got its photo at the same place I had my unexpected weasel encounter called Farmington Bay WMA. One of the coolest features about this wildlife management area is the homemade great blue heron rookery that is [ Read More ]
If you live in the eastern portion of the US and have never seen a magpie–Salt Lake City is the place for you. Those birds are all over the place–they’re like crows (not just in family but in commonality). We have a remnant population up in northern Minnesota but not the sort of numbers you [ Read More ]
One of the reasons I was at the Great Salt Lake Bird Festival in Utah was to conduct a digiscoping workshop for Swarovski Optik. I really enjoy doing these types of workshops, we start with a basic how to and then we go out someplace birdy and take photos. They are not trips about getting [ Read More ]
Yesterday I had some time to kill before my flight back to Minneapolis from Utah. I stopped for a wee bit at the Great Salt Lake Nature Center in Farmington to enjoy a final few moments of yellow-headed blackbirds. As I walked down the gravel road, I noticed a mammal hopping across the path. I [ Read More ]
I’m just back from the 2009 Midwest Birding Symposium and this was the most insanely busy birding event I have ever been to. There was so much going on and so many people, my only complaint was that I didn’t have the time to have an actual conversation with many people from people I want [ Read More ]
I found some phalarope photos that I had forgotten about. These are some red-necked phalaropes that we saw on the Steppes in Kazakhstan. When you are learning shorebirds, phalaropes are ones that can be easy to distinguish from the others, they have a unique shape, can be quite colorful and they are just plain fun [ Read More ]
