The 2013 Midwest Birding Symposium!

From September 19 to 22, many hundreds of bird watchers converged on Lakeside, Ohio for the 2013 Midwest Birding Symposium, hosted by Bird Watcher's Digest, The Ohio Ornithological Society, and The Lakeside Chautauqua. 

The speakers were incredible, the Birder's Marketplace was brimming with vendors, the birding was excellent, and the weather was mostly cooperative.

  

 The MBS started off on Thursday evening with a Lake Erie Sunset Boat Cruise around the region's many beautiful islands. The sunset also made an appearance.

MBS attendees embark on the Goodtime II for the Sunset Boat Cruise.

We had an army of volunteers helping us with MBS, including more than a dozen members of the Ohio Ornithological Society and more than 100 members of the Lakeside Chautauqua community.

The MBS was held just following the summer programming season at Lakeside Chautauqua. If you haven't experienced Lakeside during their summer season, it's quite a wonderful thing. You can learn more here.

 Attendees picked up their goodie bags and name tags at MBS registration in Hoover Auditorium.

 

 

 

During the event, attendees strolled the charming Lakeside Chautuaqua campus from venue to venue.

 Friday and Saturday mornings were reserved for birding at one of our five birding spots staffed with guides. Two species of phalaropes, red knot, golden plover, and golden-winged warbler were among the species of note spotted during the two mornings of birding.

 The MBS is called "the world's friendliest birding event," and judging from the smiling faces of attendees, it lived up to its reputation.

 

Many of our speakers are also authors of important books on birds and nature. On Saturday we held an authors' book signing in South Auditorium. Here, British author Mark Cocker sings a copy of his epic new book Birds and People. 

It's hard to put into words (or electrons in the case of this blog post) just how wonderfully enriching and engaging it is to be a part of The Midwest Birding Symposium. Those of us at BWD have hosted it five (!) times here in Ohio—each time at Lakeside. But this every-other-year event needs to visit other parts of the Midwest, so in 2015 we'll be taking it to Bay City, Michigan. I'll share more details about that in a future post.

The next post here on Bill of the Birds is going to be part two of my MBS 2013 recap.

Twenty Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago today, on September 11 (years before that date became associated with something less happy) I got married to Julie Zickefoose here in Marietta, Ohio at St. Luke's Lutheran Church.

We had a light-hearted wedding with music on guitar and piano and fiddle—and got hitched on the upswing of the clock for good luck. Afterwards we repaired (with 200 of our closest family and friends) to the Whipple, Ohio farm Julie and I already owned and we had more music and a pig roast, or as we called it (to sound "more fancier" a rôti de cochon)

It was an incredible, life-changing day.

We were standing on the precipice of our lives, looking into the future...

 

Here we are (below) two years after the wedding, birding at Ding Darling NWR in Florida. I'll spare you the Then and Now comparison.

(photo by our dear friend, the late Dr. Hugh P. Smith). 

 

It's been a wonderful two decades—not always easy, of course. Then again, what is? One thing that sticks with me is just how fascinating and fascinated Julie really is. I'm fortunate to have shared this journey with her.

And now we are four.

Today I am thinking about happy things and beloved family and friends, and feeling lucky as heck to be right here, right now.

The BWD Optics Annual 2013!

Every bird watcher I know wants to upgrade their optics at some point. Even the best, top-of-the-line binocular or spotting scope can get a bit compromised over time, especially with a lot of usage. Dust, weather, lens scratches, body dings, and just plain old usage take an inevitable toll.

The advances in manufacturing technology for sports optics are incredible, giving us products today that just a decade ago were unimaginable. The $350 binocular that we can buy today is likely to be far superior in optical quality to a bino that cost $1,000 in 2003! While it may be hard to keep up with all the new makes and models, it's certainly a benefit to bird watchers and nature observers to have so many options available to us.

Over the past year or so, Bird Watcher's Digest has published several in-depth articles about birding optics. These articles are so good (in our humble opinion) that we feel they are worth sharing again, which is why we created The BWD Optics Annual.

The content highlights of the BWD Optics Annual include:

•  An optics buying guide based on an interview with birding optics guru Ben Lizdas of Eagle Optics.
• The results of BWD's field test of 8 x 42 birding binoculars.
• "Traveling with Optics" by Alvaro Jaramillo.

It's a whole lot of content on birding optics and it's available as a FREE DOWNLOAD!

Special thanks to the following organizations for their advertising support of the BWD Optics Annual.

Eagle Optics
Carl Zeiss Sports Optics
Swarovski Optik
Vanguard USA
and The Birding Optics Expo

We hope you enjoy the BWD Optics Annual! We welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback. Please use the comments option on this blog to share your thoughts.

I'll see you out there with the birds!

—Bill