Bird Counts

This is the part one of six of Birdfreak’s 72-hour birding extravaganza. Our goal was to find as many bird species as possible within Winnebago County, Illinois.
Olive-sided Flycatcher at Rock Cut State Park

We began our 72-hour birding event at 0330 at Pecatonica Wetlands in the hopes of finding bitterns and rails. We struck out [...]

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May is our favorite time of year as thousands of colorful, amazing birds make their way into northern Illinois. Last year we decided to enter the birdiest county contest for our county, Winnebago, which involved doing a 72 hour consecutive block of birding. (Of course, we didn’t bird for all that time, but any birds [...]

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Making our third survey of the week, we did Deer Run Bird Survey #13 on Sunday, May 18th. It was by far our best survey yet in number of species as well as warbler diversity.
Wilson’s Warbler

We spent over six hours hiking and covered more than 7 miles. We were delighted to find four Henslow’s Sparrows [...]

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May 16 was our 12th Deer Run Bird Survey and we got our 100th species (and then some)!
Veery, Dad and Arizona (one of our canine helpers) started out around 8 in the morning and finished up by 11. It was around 60 degrees and sunny.
Arizona Doberman….canine birder

Our 99th species was a beautiful [...]

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The eleventh Deer Run Bird Survey started a bit slow. We were met with a brisk, constant breeze as we crossed the prairie around 6:00 AM on Wednesday. We only had an hour and a half before Birdfreak had to get to work so our numbers were destined to be a bit low.
Despite the low [...]

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