Caption Contest #25 Winners!

Hey everybody! We have winners for Caption Contest #25! Yes that's winners—plural, with an s. Our judges were stymied at the prospect of choosing just one winner, so we divided the entries into two categories and we have two winners!

In the Dirty Minds category:
WINNER:

Nilpad said...
Optics for all your middle-aged guy needs!


FINALISTS:
Alyssa said...

Although the invite specifically said "bare-naked birding", Geoff didn't feel comfortable unless he brought along certain..."enhancements."

Erik said...
Looks like Geoff stores his Viagra in his optics case.

In the Funny and Clean category:
WINNER:
Leslie said...
OK, scan north until you hit Michigan, look for third jack pine from the left, halfway up the tree, eight o'clock, sitting on skinny branch against the sky, yellow breast, black streaking, split white eye ring..........

FINALIST:
kevbosnafu said...
Our new 'Pinocchio' binoculars will let your birding friends know when you are....exaggerating... about that ivory-billed in the backyard.

Congratulations to our two winners and all of our finalists! And thanks to all who played!

Leslie and Nilpad, please contact me via e-mail to give me your details and claim your prizes! bt3 AT birdwatchersdigest DOT com. Use the subject line BOTB Caption Contest.

Thank you!

Sweet Birding on Sugar Creek

A vista along Sugar Creek Road, Fayette County, WV.

Among the many trips I've lead over the past ten springs at The New River Birding and Nature Festival, the one we call Sugar Creek is right at the top of the list. There are three warbler species that are the most sought-after birds at this annual West Virginia birding event: cerulean warbler, Swainson's warbler, and golden-winged warbler. Sugar Creek has many breeding pairs of the first two species, which makes it a sell-out trip most every year.

In this post I'm going to take you along on our Sugar Creek field trip from this spring.

 Sugar Creek Road has some big timber. The road itself is about 1.5 car-widths wide and gravel. It is cut into a steep mountainside and at places the road is so narrow that the school bus driver and the folks who drive the vans and buses during the white-water rafting season call out their positions and progress on CB radios to reduce the chance of a head-on collision on a blind curve—of which there are many.

The severity of the landscape is what makes this road special for cerulean warblers. And it's one of the few places where you can see tree-top-loving warblers (like the cerulean) in the tops of the trees BELOW you on the mountain.

Looking down on a flitting warbler.

My strategy for Sugar Creek is to walk the roadway as much as possible. Birds we are seeking are often heard before they are seen, so we ask our bus driver (usually Hank, a veteran driver on this road) to drop us at the top and meet us at various spots as we walk down the mountain toward the bottom where the Gauley River rages.

 

 

This past spring I got to guide the Sugar Creek trip with New River Birding Festival co-founder Geoff Heeter. Guiding with Geoff is always fun and rewarding for a number of reasons:

1. He speaks the native tongue.

2. He knows where the birds are each year.

3. He's mighty handy in a pinch.

4. He cracks a good joke.

5. He always dresses for birding success:

Fresh off the runway from the birding fashion show: Geoff "Hotlegs" Heeter.

This year my Sugar Creek trip also had Katie Fallon along. Katie is the world's most passionate fan of cerulean warblers. In fact, she wrote a really great book about them called Cerulean Blues. You should buy and read this book immediately—especially if you love warblers and appreciate good writing.

Geoff Heeter (in plaid Bermuda shorts) points out a treetop cerulean warbler for Katie Fallon.

Male cerulean warbler.

 

 One of our two primary target birds on the Sugar Creek trip: the singing male cerulean warbler. We found at least a dozen territorial male ceruleans along the route.

Female American redstart nest building.

We also saw lots of nest-building activity during the field trip from a variety of species including American robin, American redstart (above), blue-headed vireo, wood thrush, and worm-eating warbler.

There are other glorious things to see along the way. Hooded warblers are thick in the roadside woods.

We found some morels right along the road as we neared the bottom, but we left them in place for the local folks to harvest if they wanted to...

Ernesto Carman (in the orange hat above) was super fast at finding birds in his scope. He's had years of practice birding in the rainforest of Costa Rica and it shows. He generated a LOT of smiles with his scope-wielding talent.

  Down at the bottom of the mountain, Sugar Creek Road goes through a scattering of small houses and takes a sharp bend to the left when it reaches the Gauley River. This area is owned by one of the rafting companies, so it's not normally open to the public. And this is where we get our very best looks at the Swainson's warbler!

As I got off the bus along the river trail, I heard a Swainson's singing and, after getting everyone else off the bus and ready, I slowly walked forward to see if I could spot where the male was perched. It's always best to find birds doing their thing naturally, without having to resort to song playback, pishing, or bushwhacking to find them.

And there he was, left of the trail, about 35 feet up in a tree. Singing. Preening. Oblivious to the 35 gasping bird watchers who were focusing about $20,000 worth of optics on him.

Male Swainson's warbler.

After a session with the Swainson's, we headed to the end of the trail and had a picnic lunch, followed by a stroll back out to a spot in the river where a collection of giant boulders makes a perfect setting for a photo.

 

The Sugar Creek Birders along the Gauley River.

A big thank you to my expert fellow guides! I'm already counting down the days until next year!

L to R: Ernesto Carman, BT3, Katie Fallon, Geoff Heeter.

Bohemian Quest: The Final Day

Dawn breaks over Harbor Springs, Michigan.

After spending the night inside my wrapped Christmas-present box of a motel room, I got up early, put on every piece of clothing from my duffel bag, and loaded up The Back Breaker for another day of looking for our target bird (also known as tilting at windmills). We thought we'd get on the road by 5:45 am, grab an early breakfast at a local diner by 6 am, and probably nail the Bohemian waxwings by 7. At the latest.

Wearing eleventeen layers of clothing for cold-weather waxwing chasing.

Minor detail: there is no diner open at 6 am in Harbor Springs. So we lowered our sights and grabbed a couple of convenience-store belly bombs and two cups of hot battery acid (with hazelnut creamer). NOW we were ready to go birding.

Down to the harbor we went, arriving well before the sunrise. Gazing out over the frozen harbor, I noted the distinct lack of bird life. No crows, no starlings, no Canada geese. It was 2 degrees F. I couldn't blame them.

We drove around the old familiar places, getting excellent looks at bare fruit trees, piles of snow, and some ice-fishermen out on the lake, still frozen in the same positions they'd been in the day before. We even went back out to the land of snow buntings, where some waxies had made sporadic appearances. We scanned the open water on the lake. Nada.

Heeter scans the open water of Lake Michigan.

The day was slipping away.

I'd sent out another plea for help on the MI-birds listserv and got some good leads on BOWAs both farther north and farther south. Since we were running out of time, we needed to make a strategic move, and fast.

By 10 am I was getting both restless and slightly annoyed. So Heets and I decided to head south to a hopeful-sounding sighting in Traverse City. A kind soul named Holly had e-mailed me to share her day-before sighting of a sizable flock of BOWAs in a neighborhood with ornamental fruit trees. It was time to man up or clam up.

Man up it was. I took a nap while Heeter drove us down the lakefront highway to Traverse City.
We stopped at several places where fruit remained on the trees. No dice. We spotted some tundra swans. And a ring-billed gull. And a pile of rock pigeons. Yawn.

And then we pulled into the un-gated gated community where Holly had seen many, many Bohemian waxwings the day before. We began driving the roads, hoping for a miracle. First street: nothing. Second street: nothing. Third street...

"THERE THEY ARE!!!"

Those dots at 1 o'clock in the tree are Bohemians.

They were just seven or so dots in the top of a tree, but I knew, KNEW, that they were Bohemian waxwings. It's possible that I caught a whiff of their diagnostic aura of patchouli. After gawking at them for three seconds in my binocs, I began scrambling for my various cameras. First the Canon 30D. Clickclickclickclick.

Two shots taken with my big rig Canon 30D.

Then the Leica spotting scope for some digiscoping.

Two shots taken with my digiscoping rig.

And then, like leaves blown by the wind, they lifted into the air and disappeared into the distance. Gone! But we'd SEEN them. How sweet! Figuring we'd find another flock or that this one might return, we left the perfectly manicured neighborhood and went looking for a lunch spot. We found a great little deli a half-mile away and settled in for our first real food of the day. Four spoonfuls into my soup I felt the irresistible urge to check Bohemian waxwing off on my checklist. Geoff caught the moment on video.



And so the journey ended successfully. Sigh of relief.

We headed southward so Geoff could visit his family in Big Rapids and Grand Rapids (lots of rapids in these parts, nearly all frozen solid). We made a stop at Geoff's boyhood home.

Geoff Heeter, 2009 or so model. (photo by Jeffrey A. Gordon)

And I took the opportunity to capture a photo of a photo of good ol' Geoff (I'm OLD GEOFF!!!) from "back in the day." It was on the wall of his parents' house, so I am sure I'm violating some sort of bro-code by sharing it here, but....it's simply too amazing NOT to share.

Geoff Heeter, late-70s model.

So here's to you, Heets! Thanks for making the trek with me, bro. And I've gotta say, dude, if you'd been a singer, with your flowing mullet, you could have given Shaun Cassidy a run for his money.

And that's the story of The New Brohemians and their birding victory over the itinerant Bohemians.

The New Brohemians Head North

The unrelenting winter was slowly turning my mind space to slush and mush when I realized, in a rare moment of clarity, that the perfect curative prescription was adding a life bird to Ye Olde Life List. You may recall, gentle blog readers and lurkers, that I have previously broached the subject of the life list.

I'd recently broken my self-imposed ban on list-serves dealing with bird sightings and the two that I subscribed to represented opposite ends of the spectrum. The Ohio Birds list-serv had reports of great birds from around the Buckeye State, but very, very few species that would require a new check mark on the life list. And NARBA, the North American Rare Bird Alert gave me great birds that were at least 2.5 million miles away in places like Caribou Sac, Yukon and Blown-out Flip-Flop Key, Florida. Most were a bird too far.

What I needed was an attainable goal. And there it was, right there (unchecked) in the middle of my life list and making regular appearances on the Michigan Birds List Serv: The Bohemian waxwing.

I posted on Facebook that I was planning this quest and my friend and fellow birder Geoff Heeter (see photo above) sent me a message asking if I needed a co-pilot. The Heets is a fun dude. So of course I said "Sure." [If you'd like further insight into the humanoid critter we call Geoff Heeter, visit his business website, or his birding festival website, or my earlier post here in BOTB about the trip.

So it was all set: the Brohemians were going after the Bohemians.

Massive amounts of gear.

Geoff arrived late on Sunday afternoon at my mom's house in Marietta. He bolted a plate of food, and we loaded up all of my gear (weighing several tons) into his vehicle. Then I folded myself into the passenger seat like some contortionist getting into a Houdini submersion box. The level of discomfort I was to experience during the next three days nearly wiped out the gratitude I owed Heets for agreeing to drive. We could have taken the Birdmobile, but its track record on snowy, icy roads is scary poor.

So, riding uncomfortably in Geoff Toyota truck, now known forevermore as The Back Breaker, we hit the highway headed north to Bowling Green, Ohio, where my friend Annie had agreed (surprisingly) to let us crash for the night. On the drive we spoke of many things, of cabbages and kings, of bees with no stings, of LeBron with no rings, of caged birds that don't sing, and so on.

Birding junk in the trunk.

We passed through Toledo and then Detroit mumbling our respects, respectively to Jamie Farr and Eminem. The farther north we got, the fewer birds we encountered. In fact our bird list, upon stopping for gas and tire air in the town of Old Gregg, Michigan, was:
European starling
Rock pigeon
Mourning dove
American kestrel
Red-tailed hawk
American crow
Snow bunting
Canada goose
some flying ducks
sky pepper

It was not looking good. Yet we pressed on, blindly optimistic that ours was a quest worth taking.

By late in the day we reached the town of Harbor Springs, MI. This is the home of our my friend Sally, who had responded to my query on the MI-Birds listserv asking about Bohemians. She had seen a huge flock of them in Harbor Springs that very day and we were welcome to come up. She, however, was wisely leaving town with her husband before we arrived.

The Michigan birders from the list-serv were very helpful and generous in sharing their BOWA sightings. Geoff and I mapped all of the sightings and concluded that Harbor Springs gave us the best shot—recent intel, plus it was not as far north as Sault Ste. Marie, where MOST of the sightings were clustered. And, being a Michigan native, Geoff was somewhat familiar with the area. [During the next 36 hours I would hear about every youthful misadventure young Master Heeter was involved in during summers spent in Harbor Springs. We'd go past a house and he'd wax nostalgic about some young lassie and a warm can of Hamm's beer. Lucky for us, the statutes of limitations on most such escapades were expired.]

We followed Sally's directions to the letter and found the fruiting trees the waxwings had been, apparently, occupying non-stop for the past month. Most of these trees were along the lakefront streets and nearly all were stripped almost bare of fruit. Not a good sign.
But we could see ample evidence of the carnage—of the raw masticating power of the roving Bohemians.
The snow was stained from the juice of thousands of crushed berries.


We loafed around the harbor and its springs enjoying the quiet of a waxwing-free winter's afternoon. Common goldeneye and common mergansers edged their way onto the trip list. The temperature began to drop from a balmy 12 degrees F so we changed strategies.

We went to the pet store.

I figured it might sell bird seed and therefore the owner might know another local bird watcher and that local bird watcher would know where else we could go looking for the waxies.

Bingo! Within 30 minutes I was talking to a nice woman who was, indeed, a local bird enthusiast. She'd had the waxwings in her yard that morning. We got directions and headed out to her rural home, racing the daylight, which was doing its best to disappear into Lake Michigan.

Then we got lost. Found a general store. Got directions. Found the woman's house and yard, now 100-percent devoid of Bohemian waxwings.

The Waxwing/Bunting Lady's house. She was both nice and helpful.

"They come every morning to eat the fruit on that tree right in front of my living-room window!"

I muttered to myself, feeling slightly wounded.

"Ya can't hardly shoo 'em away once they start eatin'!"

Wound now gushing blood.

"Yeah, I didn't even know what they were 'til I talked to my daughter on the phone and we figgered it out!"

Wound: meet salt. Salt: wound.

Geoff pulled me away, toward Back Breaker. We needed to go elsewhere so I could have my missed-life-bird conniption fit in peace.

And here is where our luck changed ever so slightly. We ran into a big flock of snow buntings. you can read the tale of this in my recent post over at the 10,000 Birds blog.

Snow buntings. In a tree, of all things.

After enjoying the buntings and their weird, tree-perching behavior, we rolled back past the Waxwing Lady's house, just in case we were on an actual roll.

She came out again to chat with us. We told her about the snow buntings.

"Oh yeah, those things come to our feeders round the back of the house every day, all winter!"

I felt my knees begin to buckle.

Back to town we went, but it was to late to see any more birds. Instead we added planked white fish to our gastronomic life lists, got some affordable hotel rooms and crashed out, with visions of Waxwing/Bunting Lady's birds dancing in our heads.

My room had plaid wall paper which made me think I might be sleeping inside a giant Christmas present.

Ahh. Sleep. Let me drift until tomorrow, when I will take on the Zenlike aura needed to ADD THIS #$&(%(+@ BIRD to my life list. But, really, I'm not like that.

I'll continue the saga in my next post.

Briefly Waxing Rhapsodic About Bohemians

They were even more beautifully Bohemian than I thought they'd be. We found a small flock of seven Bohemian waxwings in a retirement community cul-de-sac in Traverse City, Michigan. This was yesterday, February 15, 2011, just after noon. That's life bird number 600-something...

The telling of the complete saga will have to wait for another day because I am now having to re-enter reality and there's simply no time for storytelling. But when I DO tell the tale, you should know that it will include: extremes of cold, a stretching of the time-space continuum, a pet store, frantic phone calls placed to unknown persons who MIGHT have seen a flock, many helpful messages from Michigan birders, a stern scolding for my list-serv faux pas, bad food, good beer, the first robin of spring, bear tracks, snow buntings, Geoff's questionable choice of chapeau, late nights, early mornings, doldrum afternoons, and planked whitefish.


But like I said, there's not enough time to get into all of that now.
Thanks for following along, my friends.
I'll see you out there with the birds.

The Swainson's Warbler Trip!

It's always a bit dodgy when you're asked to lead a birding festival field trip that is dedicated to finding one particular bird species. This is exacerbated by the following additional factors:

1. It's a rare bird, known for skulking in rhododendron thickets.
2. Lots of people sign up (and pay money for the privilege).
3. It's pouring rain.
4. It's the last day of the festival and everyone is COUNTING on seeing this bird.

And so it was last Saturday morning when my friend (and festival founder/raconteur) Geoff Heeter and I loaded 12 or so brave and eager souls onto a Ford Econoline van somewhere near the New River Gorge in West Virginia. This was the Swainson's Warbler Trip and it had but one target bird.

As we drove across WV 19 onto a country road that would take us to a spot that had at times hosted a Swainson's warbler, I was already drafting my apology for the trip participants in case we totally dipped out. The rain pounded on the van roof, pouring down like silver over the windshield, visibility nil.

"Well everyone, we tried our best. Some days you get the bird. Some days the bird gets you. Some days you feel like you've been flipped the bird. Sorry we missed it, but that's a great reason to come back next year!"

or this:

"Those Swainson's warblers are harder to find than a working microphone at a Milli Vanilli concert!"

or this:

"If I had a nickel for every time I've missed this bird, we'd be birding from a stretch limo instead of this rattletrap and eating caviar for lunch instead of flat meat."

Little did I know, I was wasting my time thinking up disappointment-softening excuses.

At our first stop Geoff and I heard two distant Swainson's singing along the creek in separate directions. Neither one was close enough to see or to lure in with a taped call. I decided to walk the group down to a nearby bridge while Geoff and Ned Keller got the vehicles.

From the bridge, one singing male sounded lots closer. Then he moved even closer, but was still out of sight in the thick rhodies, 30 yards upstream. I filled Geoff in about this new development and we motioned to the group to stay put while we carefully moved up the road for a better vantage point. Barely 150 feet farther along, I spotted the bird, teed up and singing against the trunk of a giant hemlock. Within seconds I had him in the spotting scope. Geoff beckoned our group forward and we all took turns drinking in this very rare sight. And the male Swainson's warbler sang and sang and preened and sang....

It felt SO great to show more than a dozen birders this cool and hard-to-find bird. It felt even better to locate a bird that was relaxed and singing from a favorite perch on its territory. No audio luring necessary! No trying to get bird watchers onto a het-up, moving bird. Just us, this beautiful male Swainson's warbler, some nice optics, and the rain, still falling down, but completely unnoticed.

Doing the Swainson's Warbler Life Bird Wiggle.

After we all got great looks I realized, in one of those I-could-kick-myself moments that I had ABSOLUTELY NO CAMERA WITH ME to take this bird's photo. No digiscoping rig. No 30D with a 300mm lens. Nope that stuff was warm and dry in the van. Hearing my remorseful cries, Geoff handed me his camera phone. I held it up to my Swarovski spotting scope and here's what I got!

Zipline Birding in West Virginia

Our group was put through our paces in ground school before we took the first zipline.

What IS a zipline? A zipline, typically, is a set of metal cables stretched between two platforms, one higher, one lower along which a person rolls on pulleys, suspended from a set of safety harnesses. Many bird watchers have encountered ziplines in the tropics, where canopy walkways and towers often have this extra feature for those inclined to thrill seeking.

There's a new zipline near Fayetteville, West Virginia, on property owned by Class VI, a New River rafting and adventure company. A handful of the trip leaders from the New River Birding & Nature Festival were invited to sample the new zipline one afternoon during the festival. Called TreeTops Canopy Tours, the zipline operated by Class VI is an amazing experience. Our primary guide was none other than Tiny Elliott, former rafting guide and regular birding guide for the New River Birding & Nature Festival for many years.

We arrived at the patio of Smokey's on the Gorge, the main restaurant of Class VI, and were geared up in our harnesses by Tiny and Shaun, another TreeTops guide. From there we vanned over to the start of the canopy tour course for ground school. In ground school the guides instructed us in everything we'd need to know and do to have an enjoyable and safe zipline experience. Our harness pulleys were hooked up to the twin zipline cables and we took a short run between two tree stumps, just a few feet off the ground. We learned how to speed up and slow down while moving along the cables. We learned how to stop ourselves. And we learned how to self-rescue in case we got stranded in the middle of a zipline run. Self-rescuing was reasonably easy—you just lean back and pull yourself, hand over hand to the nearest zipline platform. We were required to demonstrate all of these capabilities and skills before we were allowed onto the main part of the course.

Perhaps most importantly, we were instructed how to minimize discomfort in our harnesses, which, when holding up our bodies, put large amounts of pressure in certain unusual places. The guides told everyone—males and females—to try to "keep all of your furniture in the same room" for reasons of comfort and health. Believe me, if some of your furniture sneaked into another room before you "zipped" you knew it and wanted to get it moved back right away.

Jim McCormac in safety gear.

The first zip was a short one and not very fast—down the hill into the river valley. When my turn came, I stepped onto the stump next to the lines to be hooked up. My heart was pounding and I admit to having some butterflies. After the initial moment of adrenaline, I was quickly overtaken by the feeling of how incredibly cool it was to be "flying" through the forest. I'd seen three of my large fellow "zippers" go down the line ahead of me, so I knew the lines would not break. Still, it's a bit disconcerting to have nothing below your feet but blurry hemlocks and oaks.

That's me, Bill of the Birds, in my Devo-approved safety helmet.

Tiny Elliott, our lead guide, was our ground school drillmaster. Hey Tiny: "Ta-Daaa!"

Geoff Heeter, not Bob the Builder. Leather gloves are needed for speed management while zipping. And for coolness.

After the second and third zips, we all got much more comfortable and started video-taping the runs of others from the platforms. We also noticed that we were high in the hemlocks, getting a true bird's-eye view of the landscape. I was amazed at the diversity of plantlife living on the top sides of the hemlock branches. No wonder these woods were so full of birds! This was not something I had ever noticed from the ground, looking up at warblers in these mountain forests.

Trusting my safety gear, high above the forest floor.

The course had been designed very sensitively to minimize impact on the forest, especially the native eastern hemlocks, which are being decimated by a non-native pest, the hemlock woolly adelgid. One of the goals of the owners and designers of this canopy tour zipline course is to keep the surrounding forest healthy. Thus, ziplines were plotted so as to minimize the removal of trees and branches. Platforms are built with minimum bolts or screws drilled into trees. Cables around trees are supported by block-stabilizers to protect the bark and trunk. An arborist will make regular inspections of the entire course to monitor the health of the trees being used. I was impressed at how much of the forest seemed untouched considering that the course was only just nearing completion.

The foliage was still thin enough on the trees that we could see several platforms on the course at once.

People on the ziplines are encouraged to have fun but discouraged from making lots of noise. Nothing will clear out the forest creatures faster, or diminish the natural beauty faster than a bunch of screaming thrill-seekers. Time will tell if this course will settle in as a feature of the landscape, or will become more like a ski-lift, with an alley of nature-free clearance for its riders.

Bird's-eye view of Mill Creek far below us. A Swainson's warbler was singing as I took this photo.

I felt a few screams of joy well up in my chest as I rode the zips. And on the platforms we encountered close-up songbirds, poking their ways through the tree tops. A female Blackburnian warbler passed within eight feet of us at one point, gathering nesting material. I was sorry that I was not allowed to bring binoculars along on this initial run. I missed easy looks at Swainson's warbler and northern parula from two different platforms. Tiny thinks compact binocs may be OK if they can be secured by a harness strap. Before we started this adventure we were encouraged to leave ALL valuables behind. Finding anything that fell off the zipline would be impossible.

Sky bridge across Mill Creek.

In the middle of the zipline course there are several rope and board bridges that we walked across to get to the next zip. They were surprisingly stable and gave us a chance to soak in the beauty of the forest and the plants and birds around us. We smelled the sweet flowers of a Fraser magnolia and heard the flat chip notes of a Swainson's warbler. It was a literal and spiritual high to be moving, as we were, through the top of the forest, looking down instead of up.

Prepping for the next-to-last zip.

Standing on the tree platform frame with Mill Creek 85 feet below.

As we neared the end of the tour, several of us got more daring, letting our harnesses and safety lines do their work as we leaned out over the edge of the wall-less tree platforms. I should stress again, that at no point during the tour were we not hooked by our safety lines to a secure anchor. It's nearly physically impossible to fall and our guides were particularly focused on keeping our group both safe and relaxed.

At each platform the guides kept us hooked up to the safety lines while we waited our turn to zip.

I could write about this zipline adventure for hours more, but think I'll share a couple of videos instead. These are two of my fellow "zippers", Geoff Heeter (one of the New River Birding & Nature Festival founders and owner of Opossum Creek Retreat where many of the festival events are held) and Jim McCormac of the Ohio Ornithological Society, whom some of you may know as the good-natured target of many of my online and offline jokes.

I understand there are plans to try to incorporate a TreeTops Canopy Birding Tour into next year's New River Birding & Nature Festival. If that happens, I'll be the first in line to gear up and zip it!