I invite you to read the thoughts below, and further invite you to contact your nearest CBC coordinator to see how you can help this upcoming CBC Season.
Someone named Paul Egeland called me in early December 1995 asking if I wanted to join him and his friends Lee and Joann French to help on something called a Christmas Bird Count. I was new to birding in Minnesota, and did want to meet other birders, so I accepted that invitation... and a whole new world was opened to me. >From accepting that invitation (and each additional invitation over the next nine years) I have learned that winter birding in Minnesota does not have to be reduced to looking out your window at feeders. By observing them in their environment, I've learned some of the tactics birds use to survive the harsh Minnesota winter winds. And I've been richly rewarded (I believe) with spectacular winter sightings of Golden Eagle, Snowy Owl, Pine Grosbeak Hoary Redpoll, 11 Western Meadowlarks, two Spotted Towhee, and Minnesota's first CBC Eurasian Collared-Dove. December 2003 brought an invitation from a man named Martin Kehoe, a retired auto worker from Illinois who coordinates both the Baudette, and Beltrami Island CBCs. His invitation to help on both counts included a free night's lodging in his one-room cabin in the Beltrami Island State Forest. From accepting that invitation I was treated with my most memorable winter experience EVER! Imagine if you will, birding in a place so far removed from man-made sounds that in the windless, quite, stillness you could actually hear the snow fall. December 2004, and another invitation - this time from Mark Alt with news that KARE-11 wanted to do a story on the CBC. He invited me to tag along with the KARE-11 crew, and although the news team was called off to an event more "newsworthy" than invading winter owls, I had the joy of watching my oldest two boys (ages 9 and 7) gaze with awe and wonder at their first ever Northern Hawk-Owl, curiously study wolf tracks in the snow, and listen intently to their grandpa spin wonderful stories of the birds he remembers as a kid. All this from accepting an invitation. Roger Schroeder
