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 are working to promote other areas of conservation. 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.

Finch Invasion Year?

February 4, 2009
Article in: Photography

Whether or not Winter 2008-2009 is “officially” an invasion year for winter finches can be left to the experts. But northern Illinois has been inundated with beautiful birds from the far north.

Pine Siskins have been so numerous the resident House Sparrows have been delegated to the front bushes, forbidden from the backyard.

Here we have one Pine Siskin and one Common Redpoll sharing a thistle sock {digiscoped}
Common Redpoll & Pine Siskin

Common Redpolls are outnumbering Dark-eyed Juncos nearly 3:1 and there have been reports of Hoary Redpolls throughout the Chicagoland area. (We have yet to find any).

Common Redpoll {digiscoped}
Common Redpoll

With so many redpolls, there’s bound to be a squabble over seed {digiscoped}
Common Redpolls & Pine Siskin

Crossbills seem to be everywhere, the Reds being much more camera shy than the White-wingeds.

White-winged Crossbill
White-winged Crossbill

Thus far, this has been an excellent winter for birding. Now if we can just get an Evening Grosbeak…

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