On the Road This Spring/Summer

On my birding trips, everybody gets to do the Life Bird Wiggle.

After taking some time off between book projects I'll be back on the road this spring and summer hitting several new birding/nature events as well as some old favorites. I'm really ready to do some field birding. I really, truly enjoy guiding people and showing them birds.

Here's a list of where I'll be and what birds one might see at each event. I hope to see you out there with the birds!

Santee Birding & Nature Festival
Santee, South Carolina.
April 26-29, 2012

This will be my first time at this event deep in the heart of the range of the painted bunting (and Bachman's sparrow, red-cockaded woodpecker, Wilson's plover). Much of this event is held on and around the Santee National Wildlife Refuge. I'm leading a bird walk, giving the Friday keynote, and playing some music during the social hour on Saturday.

Male cerulean warbler at the New River Birding & Nature Festival.

New River Birding & Nature Festival
Fayetteville, West Virginia
April 30-May 5, 2012
This down-home bird fest is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, in the mountains along the New River in south-central West Virginia. It is famous for warblers, including golden-winged, cerulean, and Swainson's warbler, but the spectacular vistas, amazing wildflowers, and Mountaineer hospitality also contribute to bringing back many repeat attendees each year. I'm leading a different field trip each day and The Rain Crows are playing a show on the final night in The Meadows lodge at the charming Opossum Creek Retreat, where the event is centered.

Wine & Warblers
Grange Insurance Audubon Center, Columbus, Ohio
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
I originally thought this was a birding-by-ear event called Whining Warblers, but I was happily wrong. The title says it all: There will be wine. There will be warblers. The setting is the amazing "green" GIAC building in downtown Columbus and, given the early May date, there will be loads of warblers and other migrants streaming through the trees along the Scioto River. Did I mention there will be wine? Julie Zickefoose and I will be leading a bird walk or two, after the wine, which should be interesting.

Kenai Birding Festival
May 17-20, 2012
Kenai, Alaska
We're really looking forward to heading to Alaska in May for this relatively new birding event on the Kenai Peninsula. The bird life there is going to be refreshingly different from what we will have been seeing during spring migration in the Midwest—and I'm hoping for a couple of lifers (Aleutian tern and spruce grouse—a jinx bird for me!) We'll be doing bird walks (including a float trip!), evening talks, and some music. Best of all, this event is totally free and open to the public!

Canton Audubon 50th Anniversary Dinner
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Canton, Ohio
Julie Zickefoose is the keynote speaker for this celebratory event for one of Ohio's oldest Audubon chapters. But after she's done yakkin' we'll be playing some music for everyone.

A prairie pothole near Carrington, ND.

Potholes & Prairie Birding Festival
June 13-17, 2012
Carrington, North Dakota
Sooner or later you've got to go to the northern Great Plains to see some of the specialty sparrows that live there (Baird's, Nelson's, and LeConte's sparrows top the list). Why not do it this year during this charming, intimate event? The birds are enough to draw people to Carrington, ND for this event, but once you get there, the breathtaking prairie landscape and the small town hospitality will enthrall you. Highlights include the Pipits & Pie tours where we head out in the pre-dawn to find Spargue's pipit, then celebrate with lunch in a small-town cafe featuring homemade pie (I recommend the strawberry-rhubarb!). Oh and there will be music, too! Here's a photo gallery from last year's event.

Sunset at Hog Island.

Hog Island Audubon Camp "Joy of Birding"
June 24-29, 2012
Hog Island, Maine
Hog Island is legendary for many reasons: famed naturalists such as Roger Tory Peterson and Allan and Helen Cruickshank taught there for many years; and it's the home of Project Puffin, one of North America's most successful species reintroduction/preservation efforts (restoring the Atlantic puffin to its historic nesting sites off the Maine coast). Julie and I and the kids will be there the last full week of June immersing ourselves in the splendor of the Maine summer.

Pondering My Life List

Masked duck was one of my most recent life list additions.

I need some input from you, the readers of this blog. I just updated my life list and found that I now have 674 species on it, after recently adding masked duck in Florida and several pelagic species off the coast of California. While I've never been much of a lister—I sometimes go years without updating my life list—I DO enjoy the thrill and challenge of adding a new bird to it.

Adding a new species to your life list can be a task of Bunyanlike proportions.

This number, 674, puts me within reasonable striking distance of 700, which is a pretty decent milestone for which to shoot. I have some big holes on my list, too: Bohemian waxwing, gyrfalcon, greater prairie chicken, spruce grouse, short-tailed hawk, yellow-billed magpie, Bicknell's thrush, Smith's longspur, ivory gull, California condor, plus a bunch of pelagics, Hawaii's endemics, some birds in central Alaska, and a mix of semi-regular vagrants. Oh, and ivory-billed woodpecker, Bachman's warbler, Eskimo curlew, passenger pigeon, great auk, Labrador duck, and Carolina parakeet.

My question is this: Should I try to get to 700? Or should I merely wait for life to bring me these life birds? I have made attempts at several of the "hole" birds listed above, but I've rarely chased a vagrant merely to add it to my list. Most of my recent life birds have come as a result of being in the right place at the right time coincidentally in the course of my travels to birding festivals and such.

Celebrating life birds is awesome. In this case, we were celebrating a Swainson's warbler in West Virginia.

So what do you think? I must confess I am on the fence about it. Time and money are limiting factors, obviously. If I DO decide to try to get to 700, I'm going to need some help in finding out where these birds are.

Several years ago I finally added a nemesis bird to my life list when I saw a Connecticut warbler in Minnesota. I'd missed that bird at least a dozen times before. I think my next most annoying miss may be the Bohemian waxwing. So maybe that's where I should start, if this quest is to happen.

Your thoughts, my birding peeps?

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!

Field Trip Action Shots

Here's how things typically go on field trips at birding festivals—at least how I prefer them to go on field trips that I lead...

First we look for birds scanning in all directions.

When we see a good one we celebrate.The Life Bird Wiggle.

These happy birding folk are in Mohican State Forest in northern Ohio. I've got video, too!