Turns out, poetry isn’t my only thing. My bird obsession has increased exponentially since the COVID quarantines. While birding was always a category in my blog, it really wasn’t written about very often. But now, I’ve gotten my very first nature column published and I thought you might enjoy taking a look.
Since moving back to central Pennsylvania, I’ve been birding a great deal with my friends Jessie and Bryce. Jessie signed up to be a county coordinator for the third edition of the Pennsylvania Bird Atlas, but she didn’t want to go it alone, so she asked me if I would co-coordinate with her, maybe handle some of the written and email side of it. Not knowing what I might be in for, I said, “Sure!”
Honestly, it’s been a lot of fun, though, I admit, the benefit of being chiefly a hawk watcher, like I was back in the day, was that often the hawks don’t migrate past the lookouts until 9 or 10 am. Plenty of time to sleep in! Now, I’m frequently up before dawn waiting to see a county rarity like a Tri-colored Heron or a juvenile Little Blue, or a young Yellow-crowned Night Heron. All of which I’ve seen in the last week. Two of them were lifers for me.
If you’re not into the whole birding culture, lifer means it’s the first time I’ve seen it in my life. Many birds that are new on my eBird life list, though, are new because, though I may have seen the Snowy Egret before, I wasn’t keeping a list in those days, so it’s “new” for the sake of my eBird statistics.
If you are already here for the bird stuff, I’m working on setting these posts up so that you can subscribe just to that topic if you’d like. If you are here for the poetry, you’ll be able to sign up just for poetry stuff to land in your inbox. But if you like both, we should go birding and talk about poetry!
Here’s the recent article, of special interest to Pennsylvanian’s, but it’s really a broader appeal to get people involved in observing and recording what they see. The title of it was “You Can Help Birds, Just by Looking Around,” and the photos are by my county partner in crime, Jessie Sauder.
If you want more about birds in the Keystone State, you can check out more articles from Bird Lore, at pabirds.org. The monthly column is brought to you by the Lycoming, Seven Mountains, and Tiadaghton Audubon societies.
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