There's a Birds and Beers at Merlin’s Rest at 6pm this Thusday. Birds and Beers is a friendly gathering of birders of all ages to get together and talk some birds. YIKES DIGIDUEL IS TODAY! If you saw this post this morning, I said the digiduel was tomorrow--it's today!

Clay Taylor and I are doing another Digiscoping Duel or "Digiduel" on Twitter today. This time I'm going to take my spotting scope and digital camera to the Minnesota National Wildlife Refuge and use local coffee shops to upload images. The competition goes from 8am - 4pm Central Time. Clay will digiscope someplace in Texas. We're going to try for "pretty" images this time and then put up albums on the Swarovski Facebook Page. People can vote on which image we like best. There's no physical reward for getting the most votes, we're testing out the challenge idea. My hope is that we can do the challenge in all sorts of ways and get other digiscopers to participate (if you are interested in being a participant or have an idea for a digiscoping challenge, drop me an email sharon at birdchick dot com).

Also, using Twitter, it's a way for people to follow the progress as we load a few images throughout the day. If you'd like the follow Digiduel 2 then follow both me and Clay at or if you have a program like TweetDeck you can follow us with the #digiduel hash tag or the #birding hash tag.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFpDYR2snvw[/youtube]