New Podcast Episode: Sketches of Homer, Alaska

Last May, I was the keynote speaker at the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival in Homer, Alaska. The festival was really rich in terms of field trips and speakers, the birding was excellent, the people were super friendly, and the weather perfect. My friend Marianne Aplin, a longtime U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service person working in the refuge system, had been inviting me to the festival for a number of years, but, because it usually coincides with International Migratory Bird Day, I could never go. In the spring of 2014 I decided to make getting to Homer a priority and I'm sure glad I did.

Homer is a wonderful small town on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska, surrounded by Kachemak Bay. It's about a five-hour drive southeast from Anchorage. While the festival attracts mostly Alaskan birders, the town of Homer supports the festival fully and a lot of Homerites—even non-birders—participate.

Huge turnout for the Beginners' Bird Walk in Homer.

I got a life bird (spruce grouse!), got to see some other really special birds (Aleutian tern, tufted puffin, varied thrush, harlequin duck, and Northwestern crow), met a lot of new friends, judged a bird-calling contest, helped out a couple dozen young birders in a competition, experienced an earthquake, witnessed a birds and beers bash, participated in a beginning birders walk, gave my keynote talk, and played a lot of music.

BT3 with two of the members of the Fledgling Birders group in Homer.

I created a podcast episode for "This Birding Life" about my experience in Homer. If you give it a listen, I'll bet it'll make you want to head north to Homer. As I found out during my visit, Homer is the center of the universe—we're just not sure which universe.

"This Birding Life" is sponsored by Carl Zeiss Sports Optics and hosted by Bird Watcher's Digest.

For more information about the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival, visit the Homer Chamber of Commerce website at www.homeralaska.org.

Out There With the Birds!

 

Longtime readers of this blog may recognize the phrase "out there with the birds." It's been a kind of catch phrase of mine for a long time, used to sign-off from my presentations, my blog posts, and my podcast: "I'll see you out there with the birds!"

Now the content team at Bird Watcher's Digest has borrowed the phrase as the title of our new multi-author blog, Out There with the Birds. Why create a multi-author blog? That's a good question. Multi-author blogs are very popular these days. Two of the more successful ones focused on birding are 10,000 Birds and the American Birding Association blog—both are worth checking out.

Since BWD is a magazine for readers, we tried to emulate that for the blog. If you like reading good writing from new voices in the bird and nature realm, please give OTWTB a try. The topics and subject matter are all over the map. In fact, you never know what you're going to be reading, but we guarantee you that it's going to be interesting, well-written, and worth your time. Dawn Hewitt, BWD's managing editor, is the content wrangler for the blog. Her job is to keep the posts rolling in and to make sure that the blog and its contents help us reach our two goals: to provide engaging, entertaining, thought-provoking content for the blog's readers, and to expose the blog's authors to a new, wider audience.

Among the many authors are some well-known names in the birding realm, such as Bo Beolens (a.k.a. The Fatbirder), artist, author, and marine-life expert Sophie Webb, poet and editor of Bird Watching Magazine (UK) Matt Merritt, as well as newer voices such as naturalist, photographer Erin Gettler, and ace bird photographer Tom Dunkerton. We've had individual posts by a number of other authors, including Jason Kessler, the filmmaker responsible for the Opposable Chums documentary about the World Series of Birding.

The latest post is a guest contribution from Clay Taylor of Swarovski Optik NA recounting his recent Costa Rica birding trip with Birder of the Year contest winner Lyn Stallings. Swarovski and BWD partnered to sponsor the 2013 Birder of the Year (BOTY) contest with the grand prize of an all-expenses-paid, week-long birding trip to Costa Rica, plus a pair of new Swarovski SLC binoculars. Here's a hot tip: the 2014 BOTY contest will be announced soon, so watch for it in the pages of BWD.
 

BWD's content and events team, from L to R: BOTB, Wendy Clark, Kyle Carlsen, and Dawn Hewitt.

We also include some work from two of our BWD content team—Dawn Hewitt and Kyle Carlsen. Both of these folks are talented writers and avid birders, which is incredibly useful if you're producing a constant flow of bird-related material for a variety of delivery channels. I feel very lucky to have these two on our team.

So please check out the content on OTWTB and let us know what you think of it. Better yet, if you have something you'd like to contribute to be considered for the blog, please contact us via e-mail: bwd AT birdwatchersdigest DOT com. Use the subject line OTWTB.

Thanks, and I'll see you....well, you know the rest!