These are a few of our favorite things...

Many of our recent posts have had a very serious tone, so I thought it might be nice to take a breather and think about something a bit more light and festive. Kenn and I would like to share some cool things that we'll be gifting to the people we love this holiday season. We hope you'll consider some of these wonderful gifts, too!

 

Winged Journey: a 16-month calendar of birds.

With lovely photos from photographer Bryan Holliday (I mean, come on, his name's "Holliday" for goodness sakes!), and beautiful poetry by Sally Deems-Mogyordy, this calendar makes a perfect gift for anyone on your holiday shopping list: birder and nonbirder alike! One calendar fan told us that she bought a calendar for all of her friends and family and wrote in reminders of all the special dates, like birthdays and anniversaries.  Isn't that a great idea?! And, as if you needed any more reasons to order your copies right now,  a portion of the proceeds benefits Black Swamp Bird Observatory, so you get a wonderful calendar AND support a great cause, too!

  Hand-turned wooden writing instruments made by
Galen Frank-Bishop, a young birder from Massachusetts.  

This picture just doesn't do them justice.  These pens are fabulous!

If you're looking for the gift for that person who has everything (or maybe even a treat for yourself), this is it! These are more than simply "writing instruments."  These are fine works of art.  The barrel of each pen is hand-crafted by Galen himself and the "innards" are by the Cross Company - so they're refillable! Choose from Spalted Maple, Mesquite, Bloodwood, Cocobolo, Kingwood, Rosewood, and Zebrawood. Purchase Galen's works of art, HERE!

Buy yourself, and all of the coffee drinkers on your holiday gift list,
some certified shade-grown coffee.

As you might imagine, Kenn gets asked to endorse a lot of bird-related products. He usually politely declines, but when the folks at Birds and Beans came calling, Kenn looked at the company's mission and agreed to become a spokesperson.  If you'd like to introduce someone to a great tasting cup of coffee and support the Birds and Beans mission to make sure that people who enjoy coffee and care about conservation can get great coffee that they know is good for bird conservation, family farmers and the environment. Then visit their website and order some of their wonderful, bird-friendly coffee today:  Birds and Beans: the Good Coffee

Give the Gift of Wildlife Conservation This Holiday Season:
purchase a conservation stamp, like these:

The Ohio Wildlife Legacy Stamp

Impress the wildlife enthusiasts in your life with an Ohio Wildlife Legacy Stamp this holiday season. When you purchase this attractive gift, $14 of each $15 stamp sold supports:

* Habitat restoration, land purchases and conservation easements
* Keeping common species common
* Endangered and threatened native species
* Wildlife and habitat research projects
* Educational products for students and wildlife enthusiasts, such as the Division's popular field guides and CDs.

Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp:

also known as "The Duck Stamp."

But, purchasing this stamp doesn't just help ducks! Ninety-eight cents of every dollar from the sale of this stamp goes directly toward habitat conservation.  Since 1934, the sales of Federal Duck Stamps have generated more than $750 million, which has been used to help purchase or lease over 5.3 million acres of waterfowl habitat in the U.S. These lands are now protected in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wildlife Refuge System. 

The Junior Duck Stamp

The Junior Duck Stamp (JDS) recognizes the conservation efforts of young people and supports environmental and conservation education programs in the United States. The stamp design is selected from a national art contest administered by the Junior Duck Stamp Conservation and Design Program. The first place national winner of the art contest graces that year's JDS and is sold in a variety of places for $5. All proceeds of the stamp are used to fund environmental education programs, award the students for their work, and market the JDS program.

These stamps make GREAT stocking stuffers and you can get them all in one convenient place: RIGHT HERE!

Gift Memberships to Your Favorite Birding and/or

Bird Conservation Organizations.  For instance:

Black Swamp Bird Observatory

Ohio Young Birders Club

American Birding Association

Give a kid (or a beginner of any age!) the gift that will last a lifetime.
Give them the joy of birds and birding this holiday season!

Here's a great way to start!

Get them a Kaufman Field Guide

The best guide for beginners!

Team the Kaufman Guide with some great optics from our friends at 
Eagle Optics - we recommend these:

 The Eagle Optics Raven is the perfect binocular for young kids. They fit even really small hands, but they also work great for kids of all ages (adults love them, too).

Another great binocular for beginners of all ages is

The Eagle Optics Ranger 

A Kaufman Field Guide paired with quality optics like these makes the perfect combination for beginning birders!

Wishing all of you a holiday season filled with peace and joy,
and of course, lots of birding adventures!   ~ kimm and kenn

Diversity and the Future of Birding, part 2

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: A few days ago (August 24) I wrote about the lack of diversity in the birdwatching community. This issue has bugged me for some time, but on the other hand, I’m encouraged to know some individuals who are actively doing something about it.

John C. Robinson has been a friend for several years. We had corresponded before we met, so I knew he was an expert birder before I knew he was African-American. John has been a writer and consultant on a number of topics, but with his status as a black bird expert, it was perhaps only natural that he would become a spokesperson on the issue of diversity in birding and outdoor recreation. At a conservation summit before the Midwest Birding Symposium in 2003, I heard John speak on this subject, and he was very persuasive and compelling. More recently he has published a book that addresses the same issue, Birding for Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers. It’s a thought-provoking work that offers some real solutions.

More than a decade ago I was already an admirer of Dudley Edmondson’s spectacular nature photography, especially of the birds of prey. Indeed, I arranged to use some of his images in my Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, published nine years ago. Later I found out that this very successful professional nature photographer also was African-American, and had begun to turn his camera toward human subjects as well. He felt that the lack of diversity in the outdoors was partly because people of color didn’t see role models taking part in birdwatching and other outdoor activities, so Dudley has made a point of finding, photographing, and interviewing the exceptions. One result of this work is his fine book, Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places, which is accomplishing great things by highlighting a diverse set of "outdoor role models."

These two guys are both dedicated to this cause of increasing diversity in the field. Here’s just one random piece of evidence: when I was struggling to get my North American bird guide translated into Spanish and then published, John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson were both very encouraging. I hadn’t even met Dudley at that point, but as soon as he heard about the project, he called me up to offer moral support.

Speaking of the Spanish-language bird guide, another person who is doing great things for outdoors diversity is Tamberly Conway, at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. She has been working with the U.S. Forest Service in Texas to promote a program called "Latino Legacy: Amigos del Bosque" (Friends of the Forest). This innovative program has had great success in reaching out to the Hispanic community and getting families to connect with nature on National Forest lands. We haven’t met her yet, but she and her colleague Maricruz Flores, one of the team leaders for Amigos del Bosque, will be coming to Ohio - - along with John Robinson and Dudley Edmondson - - to speak at our conference, Diversity in Outdoor Recreation: The Many Faces of Conservation, September 26 in Toledo. You can read all about that event on the Black Swamp Bird Observatory website here.

ABA: Inclusiveness

Mallard on the park pond, Yellow-bellied Flycatcher at the migrant trap, Wandering Albatross over the Drake Passage: would you enjoy looking at any of these birds? If so, you're a good birder.

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The intense discussions this summer regarding the future of the American Birding Association (ABA) have led some people to question just who the organization should be for. Predictably, a few have suggested that it should be a group designed for "good birders." I have strong opinions about that idea, I’ve expressed them in the past in other settings, and I want to repeat them here.

Forgive me if it seems immodest for me to quote from myself. But I wrote something a long time ago that still seems relevant:

"Birding is something that we do for enjoyment; so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder. If you enjoy it a lot, you’re a great birder."

I wrote that back in the 1980s, and apparently it rang a bell with some people. The editors of British Birds were kind enough to quote it in their fine magazine. Roger Tory Peterson quoted it in the introduction to the 1990 edition of his Field Guide to Western Birds. (Peterson had been my lifelong role model, and you can imagine what a thrill it was to be quoted by my own hero, the man who was the world’s most influential birder at the time.) Later I used this same phrase in the introduction to my own Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America. So the thought has been out there for a while, but I wanted to repeat it.

Birding is something that we do for enjoyment, so if you enjoy it, you’re a good birder. If you enjoy it a lot, you’re a great birder. I think the American Birding Association will need to adopt that attitude as they go forward. Become a group for all those good birders -- for everyone who enjoys it -- and try to make them into great birders by helping them to enjoy it even more. In fact, the ABA could claim to have some initial ownership of the idea, because I first thought of it after taking part in a panel discussion at an ABA convention. I wrote it in a letter to Jim Tucker, who was then still the executive director of ABA, and he liked it enough that he printed it in Birding magazine as a letter to the editor. So it first saw the light of day in ABA’s magazine.

Do you enjoy birding? If your answer is "yes," it doesn’t matter whether you’re watching the finches in the back yard or trekking off to Borneo to look for Bristleheads, you’re one of us. You’re a good birder. I hope the American Birding Association will make a strong comeback and offer an enhanced experience to all of us.

Thanks For The Mammal Reads

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: Way back last year -- on December 25th -- I wrote a post about a wild animal that we observed at our bird feeder. In case you don’t remember or didn’t see the post, here’s another picture of this wily creature:

Actually, if you didn’t read it, I’d like you to scroll back to Dec. 25 and read that post and tell me: could you tell that I was trying to be humorous, or was it just too subtle?

The reason I ask is that, in that post, I didn’t mention what kind of squirrel it was. I was trying to strike a familiar chord with all those people who have had their bird feeders emptied by voracious squirrels. This has happened to a lot of people, but it isn’t always the same kind of squirrel. In the U.S. and Canada there are at least eight species of tree squirrels, plus various ground squirrels and chipmunks, that will come to bird feeders at least occasionally. If I had started to get technical about the particular type of squirrel that was chowing down at our feeder, the post would have bogged down in detail.

It was sort of like saying: "Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s dog barks all night?" instead of saying, "Don’t you hate it when your neighbor’s three-year-old female beagle-spaniel mix with three white paws and one brown paw barks all night?" If your statement is more general, it’s easier for people to relate.

Anyway, after that blog post was published, I got three anonymous comments -- one mild, two (not published) pointedly snarky -- taking me to task for not identifying the species of squirrel. "Do you think all squirrels are the same kind?" "Are you so narrow-minded that you can’t even identify the squirrels in your own yard?"

So -- okay, the animal at our feeder was an Eastern Fox Squirrel. Our area of northwest Ohio also hosts Eastern Gray Squirrel and Red Squirrel, as well as Southern Flying Squirrel, but the Eastern Fox Squirrel is more common out in the farm country with scattered towns and scattered groves of trees.

To quote from published information: "Very common in many areas east of the Rockies, in open woods and parklike areas with large scattered trees and an open understory. It is often found in the same forests as the Eastern Gray Squirrel, but because it favors more open habitats, it is more numerous in the midwest ... Less arboreal than some of its relatives, this squirrel spends a lot of time foraging on the ground ... Like most tree squirrels, Eastern Fox Squirrels have a varied diet. Acorns and other nuts are staple items, but they also eat flowers, buds, seeds, bark, fungi, birds’ eggs, insects, and sometimes carrion. They also raid bird feeders, but because they are not as agile as Eastern Gray Squirrels, they are more easily foiled by strategic placement of feeders in places they can’t reach."

I’m happy to say that the source of that information is the Kaufman Field Guide to Mammals of North America, written by Nora Bowers, Rick Bowers, and myself, published in 2004 with a slight update in 2007. So, um, to answer the question from one person who commented on the Dec. 25 post: Yes, I do know what kind of squirrel it was.

The book’s treatment of Eastern Fox Squirrel includes a full page of text, a range map, a diagram of the tracks, and six color illustrations. That’s more detail than some species receive, but every North American mammal is treated in the book. I hope I don’t sound too horribly conceited in mentioning this book, but I'm proud of the way it turned out. It’s an excellent guide -- not because of me, but because of hard work by Nora and Rick Bowers as writers and photographers, by Stacy Fobar as managing editor for the project, by Eric Powell on digital graphics, by expert consultants Christine Hass, Nancy Mann, and Ronnie Sidner, by my editor Lisa White at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and by more than 50 photographers who contributed to the book. If you’re interested in wildlife, I would encourage you to consider picking up a copy.

Okay, enough of this. Who cares about mammals, anyway? Let’s get back to birds!

Never again would birds' song be the same

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: It isn’t often that ornithologists get to document an abrupt change in the song of an entire species of bird, but this is exactly what happened less than four years ago.
Moreover, it happened with a very common bird, the White-throated Sparrow. This beautifully marked native sparrow nests across the eastern two-thirds of Canada and parts of the northeastern United States, winters commonly in most eastern states, with small numbers throughout the west. It’s a backyard bird for literally millions of bird watchers. You would expect that a sudden change in its song would command the attention of legions of birders. But as far as I know, only one reference book has documented this change in vocal pattern.

That reference (I must admit) was my own field guide. It was published in 2000 as the Kaufman Focus Guide to Birds of North America, with a brightly colored cover featuring a Scarlet Tanager. In 2004, however, the marketing department at the publishing company decided that they should change the name of the series from Kaufman Focus Guides to Kaufman Field Guides. So they designed a new cover, the current one that features a bright Yellow Warbler on a white background, and it was issued in early 2005.

I insisted that if we were going to change the cover design, I had to make some improvements to the interior of the book as well. They didn’t want me to do a complete revised edition (and besides, we were busy with the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects), but they said I could make essential changes: adding 8 pages to the introduction, improving a few illustrations, updating some maps, changing some scientific names to conform to the latest pronouncements of the American Ornithologists’ Union. And making an important change to the description of one bird’s voice.

If you find yourself in a position to compare the editions of the focus / field guide, look up the White-throated Sparrow. In the older edition it’s on p. 350, and its song is described as Oh, sweet, Canada-Canada-Canada. In the newer edition, White-throated Sparrow is on p. 358, and its song has changed to Oh, sweet, Kimberly-Kimberly-Kimberly.

Sorry, Canada, but those are the facts.

This morning Kim called me to the window. In the garden was a White-throated Sparrow, foraging on the ground, crisp and bright among the new frost. It had not been there the eve before, and this seemed a gift of this special day, as if song or laughter had carried it aloft and placed it here. The bird wasn’t singing but in my heart I could hear it anyway.

Invasion of the Thistle Snatchers

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: The title from this post came from an e-mail we got yesterday, passed along from a naturalist at a nature center farther east in Ohio. Thistle snatchers -- yeah, they're talking about Pine Siskins. These sturdy little nomads have been showing up all over the place, little flocks bouncing around the fields and woodland edges all over the Midwest. I wrote about these birds back on October 14th -- see that post for more info.

It doesn't look like it at first glance, but the Pine Siskin is closely related to the American Goldfinch. In my Kaufman Field Guide to Birds of North America, I described it as looking "like a goldfinch in camouflage." And like the goldfinch, it's a major seed-eater. It likes the seeds of wild thistles, but it will come to bird feeders (often in the company of goldfinches) to eat Nyjer seed, which is often marketed as "thistle seed." One thing you'll notice, if you get siskins at your feeder, is that they're fearless. Goldfinches may get nervous and fly away if you approach within 20 feet, but the Pine Siskins will just glance at you with a bored expression -- "hunhh, who are you ..." -- and then go back to eating. Often you can walk right up and admire them up close. The streaky look, thin spiky bill, and flashes of yellow in the wings and tail will tell you for sure that you've got Pine Siskins. And this is the year to see them; they're still moving south in massive numbers. I expect we'll probably see some when we go to Cape May, New Jersey, later this week.