Must Pack

Mental Note:

Careful eating an apple around Cinnamon. She's sneaky and will stop at nothing to get her fair share.

"Good grief, that rabbit is a pig!"

Last night Non Birding Bill mentioned that Mr. Neil was doing a reading and signing and asked if we should go. I gave my standard answer: "Is it bird related?" We both knew the answer, but I went anyway. He was reading from his new collection of short stories called Fragile Things, which has a cute little story about teen dating gone weird.

Boy, that man can put some asses in seats, can't he? After the reading and during the signing and we found Maddy and hung out with her. NBB asked us what our thoughts were on her dad's reading:

And here's our response. We then located Lorraine, our friend Jody the librarian (and I found one heck of a Halloween costume for her) and a few other friends and grabbed some hot chocolate, wine and dessert across the street.

Today is an action packed day. Banding, packing, getting to Duluth, book travel to Cape May, sign a couple of contracts and put them in the mail, do at least one more blog entry and at some point I need to try and squeeze in a weights workout--all of this before 5:30pm. Hmmm, I wonder which thing on that list is going to fall to the wayside?

Whooping Crane Lecture at The Raptor Center--It's Free!

Reintroducing Whooping Cranes, Presented by Dr. George Archibald
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006 from 7:00-8:30 p.m.
The Raptor Center

The inaugural winner of the Indianapolis Prize, Dr. George Archibald, will present a lecture on Thursday, October 19, at 7:00pm at The Raptor Center on the University of Minnesota St. Paul campus. Archibald co-founded the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and has devoted 30 years of his life to saving endangered cranes throughout the world. The lecture is free and open to the general public!

The event is free but registration is required as seating is limited. Call 612-624-9753 for reservations

Birdchick Note: The above photo would make one heck of a Halloween costume!

Rant: Bringing Birding Back!

There's an opinion piece being ciruclated about by Pepper Trail on why he thinks birding is viewed as uncool as opposed to fly fishing which is viewed as very cool. The writer feels that there a lack of literary examples of making birding cool like there is with fly fishing.

Okay, first let's not kid ourselves about the coolness of fly fishing. Why is fly fishing so cool and so up front in the minds of Americans? Because of a little movie called a River Runs Through It. You have a hot, wet Brad Pitt swirling around in a river going for the perfect fly fishing experience--that's what made fly fishing so cool. Just typing that last sentence makes me want to go get completely outfitted for some fly fishing. If you have a hot, wet Brad Pitt traipsing around in the woods, pishing and sportin' some optics America would take interest.

The person who sent the email with the article was asking that editors and writers help the birding community "establish a higer opinion (read more cool) of the actvivity". The sender even wrote, "I know that some writers have attempted to make birding really cool too..."

Wait, attmepted?? Attempted! The sender of the email obviously doens't read this blog! There is no attempting--birding is cool and is well established as such here.

Birding is cool and it's not about how many books are written about it. Cool is a state of mind. It's time to take birding back. No more of this, "Yeah I'm nerdy 'cause I like to look at birds." It shoud be, "Of course, I look at birds, and why aren't you doing the same?"

Glorious October

October is the pretties month in Minnesota, everything is incredibly colorful and the weather is perfect. Even the sky seems its brightest blue. This is one of the views from the Summit Overlook at Hawk Ridge. I'll be there Friday night. They’ve added a new public program this year—“Strangers of the Night” is an owl program held on Friday nights now through the end of October. It starts at 9:30pm at the main overlook, and they’ll be bringing up banded owls for adoption—very similar to the hawk adoptions during the daytime. The program is free and registration is not necessary; adoption amounts vary from $30 to $100.

This tree was practically glowing as I walked down my street. Maybe the colors are just more vibrant because I'm happy to be up and moving in a healthy way.

Yellow-rumped warblers are still in big numbers around my apartment building. I keep getting endless joy of pishing them from out my bathroom window. I'm amazed at how close they come. This morning they were in my window boxes and clinging to the screen.

The warblers appear to be after these tiny little flying bugs. There are literally millions of them. They are all over our screens and are so small they can squeeze right in. They don't appear to be interested in what's in our home, just hanging on the screen. Whatever they are, the warblers sure are savoring them.

Here's a third yellow-rump that fell for the bathroom pish, they just kept coming and I just kept pishing.

And then I took my pishing too far and pished in a squirrel. The warblers took off and I gave it up for the afternoon.

Cute Commercial

I may have to get a Jeep Wrangler if for no other reason than because they used a red-tailed hawk call with an actual red-tailed hawk!

Check Out BirderBlog

BirderBlog has posted about the ivory-billed woodpecker in Florida paper given at the AOU Conference. Check it out.

I'm not saying people should not search, I want them too. I need them to search. But I can't get excited anymore without photographic evidence of a bird. Do I think ivory-bills are out there--yes, but I'm tired of reading about maybes and articles full of photos of leafless trees in swamps and uknown scaling and strange cavities. It was a fun article the first few months but I really, really need to see the bird now in order to pay attention.

This doesn't mean that I'm not going to support searches, listen to a friend's search story, glance at blogs, blog about it myself, go on another search but I really need a photo.

Big Sit Sunday

The Bird Watcher's Digest Big Sit is this Sunday. I had big plans earlier this year to make this a huge blog event and then my family decided to visit this weekend. I will be doing a big sit, but it will be in a blind out in the middle of nowhere (and it is out there, I don't even get cell reception). Next year, and I will have to make a note to have my mom not visit on the Big Sit Sunday.

Bill of the Birds and I made a video of how to do a big sit that's still on the Eagle Optics site. Remember that you need to download the movie to watch it. The first half is an interview, but the last half is the best where demonstrate how to do it. the video is roughly eight minutes long.