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.

Birding Ohio – A Tale of Two Mimics

June 15, 2010
Article in: Birding

While Eddie’s been horsing around back in Illinois (kidding!), I’ve found a hotspot of birds right outside my window in Ohio. Work’s been keeping me from any major birding lately, so it is nice to do a little birding from home.

This past May, I was delighted to see both Gray Catbird and Brown Thrasher hanging out in the yard. But by early June it seemed the thrashers had moved on. Every time I thought I heard the thrasher again, eventually I would hear the distinct “mew” of the catbird. Hmm…

The yard show has recently been “Catbirds Gone Wild”: mating, calling and chasing. The catbirds are great at convincing new birders that birding is really fun! They even call in total darkness (very late at night). Sun, rain, or thunderstorm – it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

Gray CatbirdGrey Catbird

Enjoying the varied mimicry, I whistled a note to copy one of (the catbird’s?) songs and there he was – popping up a few feet from the window. Brown Thrasher! Simutaneously, I heard a Gray Catbird out further in the yard. Ha! I knew it!

Brown ThrasherBrown Thrasher

There are at least three Gray Catbirds and two Brown Thrashers living (nesting?) nearby. I am not sure how the competition is with each other, but they seem to coexist in relative closeness.

Now to see some babies. Good June birding everyone!!!

More nesting yard birds:

  1. Killdeer (broken wing display near road)
  2. House Sparrow (nest seen)
  3. Chipping Sparrow (nest seen)
  4. Yellow Warbler (carrying food)
  5. American Robin (carrying food)
  6. Common Grackle (carrying food)
  7. European Starling (carrying food)
  8. Brown-headed Cowbird (lurking)

Yellow WarblerYellow Warbler

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Deer Run Bird Survey #8

April 22, 2008
Article in: Bird Conservation

Our eighth Deer Run Bird Survey of our year long survey was the best we’ve had yet. The weather was wonderful and we had our highest count of species thus far. This should be topped as migration really hits, but we’re happy with what we saw Sunday. Technically, DRBS #7.5 happened on the 6th of April but was done by local birder (and great friend) Tim Young. He added three new species for the count: American Coot, Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, & Golden-crowned Kinglet.

D.R.B.S. #8 started off with a bang as we netted Brown Thrasher and Eastern Towhee (new for the count).

Brown Thrasher
Brown Thrasher

We counted 330 individual birds of 39 species and added five new ones for the survey:

  1. Rusty Blackbird
  2. House Wren
  3. Ruby-crowned Kinglet
  4. Eastern Towhee
  5. Brown Thrasher

Our total for the survey now stands at 2,948 individuals of 62 species.

Wood Duck
Wood Duck
Hermit Thrush – never get tired of these!
Hermit Thrush

Read more about what we are doing with our Deer Run Bird Survey.

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