My husband and I were fortunate enough to spend Valentine weekend at the Sax-Zim Birding Festival again, and had a delightful time. The hospitality of all those who organized and worked on it was fantastic; we had to arrive late for the Friday talk, and our meal was reserved and tended, then brought to us when we arrived, a level of service hard to find! (Thanks, Helen Abramson, and all of you who prepared and served.) Two special requests from last year were honored, too: the bus windows had been washed, and some extra scrapers were provided to help with clearing frost on the inside, both helpful.
The evening speakers were very engaging, and our guides worked hard to ferret out birds that seemed at times to be reclusive. Luckily, there are many supportive local residents, who were willing to maintain feeding stations and hang out deer carcasses that attracted great birds, and allowed biffies to be on their properties. We were very happy to contribute to the cost of bird feed! We had chosen to do the Sax-Zim tour on Saturday and the Aitkin tour on Sunday. Buses were stocked with the lunches we'd ordered in advance, so no birding time was wasted on food stops. We saw many species, including some of the "northern" ones: ravens, magpies, northern hawk owls, ruffed and sharptail grouse, pine grosbeaks, redpolls and hoary redpolls, boreal chickadees, white-winged crossbills, pine siskins, both nuthatches, bald eagles, rough-legged hawks, and gray jays. Other attendees managed to find other subsets of birds, but everyone seemed pleased. Yesterday, I returned to the Bog with a few friends who'd been unable to attend the Festival. Having only about 6 hours of birding time due to family commitments, we proceeded quickly to Derek Morse's feeders, where we had the good fortune to meet Mike Hendrickson, who had both sighting updates and festival sweatshirts still available. The Morses were hosting both redpolls, both nuthatches, siskins, pine grosbeaks, AND the evening grosbeaks that I'd missed last week. With so little time, we were grateful that the folks at Country Store in Meadowlands were on hand to make us some sub sandwiches to go. In our subsequent travels, we found a boreal chickadee, and a three-toed woodpecker that we'd also missed last week. We all agreed we want to return to the bog in warm weather, since some of the species we missed will stay on, and be joined by interesting migrants and breeders! Linda Whyte ---- Join or Leave mou-net:http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives:http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
