Hello, I am in the brainstorming phase of planning field trips for the coming year and am looking for input from the valued members of the birding community. I posted a poll on the Minnesota Birding Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/groups/mnbirding/posts/24285144014464147/> group and received a lot of great feedback. If you are a Facebook user, I invite you to join in the poll if you have not already done so (link provided above to the post, but in case the formatting does not come through in the listserv: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mnbirding/posts/24285144014464147/ ). However, I also wanted to open up a line of communication to anyone in MOU not on Facebook, so please reach out to me at fieldtr...@moumn.org to give me your thoughts on what birds you may want to see in 2024 which would make you excited to sign up for MOU field trips.
Shortly after the creation of the poll, I saw a majority of the targets were those typically found in the furthest reaches of the state from our major metropolitan area, such as Cerulean Warbler, Louisiana Waterthrush, Greater Prairie Chicken and Nelson's Sparrow, which has me thinking about how I will work out trips to the Northwest and the Southeast corners of the state. There were also a number of folks interested in Arrowhead specialties such as Black-Throated Blue Warbler and Northern Saw-Whet Owl, some demand but less for Southwest specialties such as Blue Grosbeak. This information will be important for me as I plan trips in 2024 and beyond, in addition to leading to fun conversations about birds in Minnesota. This is also a great opportunity to put out an open invitation to potential field trip leaders. I am absolutely delighted to get out there to bird with you all, but having trip leaders in each of these parts of our beautiful state will go a long way in having field trips hosted away from my home in the West metro of the Twin Cities. If you were to reference MOU's membership directory, you can see this disparity for yourself with 76 out of 87 counties in the single digits and 20 of those with zero members. This is not only an opportunity for bringing people from the Twin Cities to these remote parts of the state, but to hopefully get the residents of these areas interested in birds as well. While it is normal for birders to be concentrated in metropolitan areas, a deficit of birders in rural parts of our state is in need of rectification and it is my hope that building an infrastructure for field trips could open up the opportunity for building our birding community, lending more allies for birds and those who value them. Please consider partnering with me to build this infrastructure, by emailing me at fieldtr...@moumn.org Best regards, Trey Weaver MOU Field Trip Committee Chair ---- General information and guidelines for posting: https://moumn.org/listservice.html Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html During the pandemic, the MOU encourages you to stay safe, practice social distancing, and continue to bird responsibly.
