Biggest Week in American Birding

Yesterday I wore my green-gray BSBO t-shirt to the gym. Black Swamp Bird Observatory. Today is the last day of "The Biggest Week in American Birding" hosted by BSBO and last weekend we were in Lakeside for an art workshop (observing, not teaching) and some of the activities were there. I picked up a visitor's guide and could spend a month perusing it. https://www.facebook.com/bsbobird/ or BSBO - HOME

Here's just one useful article: How you can help birds. Keep cats indoors. Don't release balloons. Discard used fishing line. Take a beginner birding. Drink Bird-friendly shade-grown coffee. Protect windows from collisions.

Cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds every year. Birders don't like wind turbines or giant glass windows on buildings, but they don't kill as many birds as cats.

I'm not a birder, and I can probably only identify 25 birds, and mostly I learned those names when I was a child. Not sure how, perhaps my mom or my teachers. Here at my living room window at my computer I see herons and mallards, owls and woodpeckers, hawks and crows, cardinals, robins, wrens and doves. Some get on the windowsill and look at me! And of course, when we were up on Lake Erie we saw many species not common around here. More than 3 dozen species of warblers pass through northwest Ohio and the BSBO tracks them.