Birding

We love to travel to find new birds and participate in a lot of bird counts. We also created a Guide to Birding Field Guides and host a collection of over 300 birding links from all over the globe.

Conservation

While our main focus continues to be birds, we promote other areas of conservation as well. Conserving land not only benefits wildlife, but is hugely beneficial to people as well.

Outdoors

We love all sorts of outdoor activities, especially hiking and spend a lot of time outside with dogs and horses. We are working to produce more articles on all sorts of outdoor fun!

Photography

Every week we bring you Bird Photography Weekly. We periodically talk about our adventures in digiscoping. Feel free to browse our photo lifelist.

Article in: Bird Conservation

2009 Rockford Christmas Bird Count Recap

2009 was the fifth consecutive year I’ve counted for the Rockford Christmas Bird Count. Birds were low in numbers but some of the highlights were pretty impressive. We still have two counts left to go this season including the second year of the Rock Cut Christmas Bird Count which we created last year.

Bald Eagle

Bald Eagle

The biggest highlight just because they are always so cool was the five Bald Eagles we spotted. The one pictured was the most impressive as it glided in along the river and posed before taking off again.

Another big highlight was a couple Northern Harriers. The photo didn’t turn out as well but this beauty floated gracefully and low over a field.

Northern Harrier

Walking was fairly slow going with the uneven and icy snow but we managed (like every year) to hike our booties off. There were numerous trees with snow damage, specifically at Sugar River Forest Preserve, a place we enjoy camping. Many of the pine trees had downed limbs from the heavy snow.

Lunch time was spent at a hunting lodge where the wonderfully friendly hunting club is always willing to open up to us birders and let us watch their feeders. These feeders are a constant explosion of Black-capped Chickadees, White and Red-breasted Nuthatches, Downy and Red-bellied Woodpeckers and more. We estimated around 35 chickadees competing for feeder space.

Black-capped Chickadee
Black-capped Chickadee

We will update the count total after we get the numbers but our contribution was certainly adequate on a chilly, windy, low bird day.

1 Comment or Trackback   ↓ Jump to add comment ↓

  1. Eileen says:

    Great birds, love the Eagle, Harrier and the cute lil Chichadee!

    Posted on: December 26, 2009 @ 5:34 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment