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: Birding

The Wren Formerly Known as the Short-billed Marsh Wren

The Sedge Wren, whose name was changed to differentiate it from the Marsh Wren, is a tiny, rambunctious, energetic bird. Their call sounds like an insect, which is hard to identify unless familiar with their song. This cute wren, (as if any wren species were not cute), is one bird we believe does not get enough publicity.

In our midwest birding travels, we have come across the Sedge Wren in various prairie habitats. They like not-too-wet praires, bog habitats, and marshy areas. Though secretive, they can be found in many different places across North America and beyond.

Many unconnected Sedge Wren populations occur throughout the Americas, from Canada to Terra del Fuego.

The Sedge Wren is one of the most nomadic territorial birds in North America. On a given area, it may be present in numbers in one year, and be completely absent the next. –Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Two great places in our area to find them is at Horicon Marsh’s Bud Cook Trail located in Horicon, Wisconsin, and Deer Run Forest Preserve in Rockford, Illinois.

ChivirÃn sabanero is their name in Spanish, mentioned just because we think it sounds cool.

Sedge habitats are one of the most hard to define yet important areas to study, along with prairies and savannas. Much more conservation work is needed to save some of these precarious areas.