The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival is now accepting registrat
The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival is now accepting registrations. This will be our 6th year of hosting this very popular festival. The festival will be held on February 15-16-17, 2013 at the Meadowlands Community Center in Meadowlands, Minnesota. On Friday night Steve Wilson will be giving a presentation on Spruce Grouse and on Saturday night the folks from Raptor Education Group from Antigo, Wisconsin will be bringing up some live birds of prey. There will be lots of local vendors and craftsmen selling their products. This year we will be selling our new Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival long sleeve T Shirts to all participants of the festival. That way you can advertise Sax-Zim Bog!! So please stop by and visit our website and sign up for the 2013 festival. http://sax-zimbog.com/ We added two pre-festival trips that will be offered on Friday. The two destinations are the Duluth-Superior Area and Lake County. Larry Weber will be giving a Saturday morning nature walk in Sax-Zim Bog and I cancelled the Aitkin County trips and replaced them with trips to Lake County, which will offer birders to look for Spruce Grouse and Three-toed Woodpecker. On Friday evening we will offer a Great Gray Owl Dusk trip to locate some Great Gray Owls before evening meal/presentation. Last year we found a very cooperative Great Gray Owl! Some other changes include our website (http://sax-zimbog.com/) our website manager Ken Zackovich gave our website an new look and logo. We are going to add two new features that will be a great interest to birders. One of items that will be on our website will allow birders to instantly post bird sightings to the website on our “Bird Sightings” and if you have photos you will be able to post your sighting along with a photo. This addition will greatly help birders who are planning a trip to Sax-Zim Bog during the winter months or spring months. Birders will be able to read up to date bird sightings of what birders are seeing all year round in Sax-Zim Bog! The other addition will be a public blog. This item will be called “Bog Stories”. Here birders who visit the “bog” will be able to post their bog experience. This item will also allow birders to post photos along with text. We added the public blog because it is really time consuming for me to write a blog post and come up with something different to chat about on a weekly basis. So making this blog public is sort of like those journals you find in rental cabins or bed & breakfast places. I guess you can call it a online journal for the Sax-Zim Bog. The festival staff will also use this public blog to announce any news that involves the Sax-Zim Bog and the festival. I will announce to you all once these additions have been put in place. I also created more maps for downloading. I created a map of all the public viewing bird feeders located around Meadowlands. A NEW public viewing feeder located on the Kelsey – Whiteface Road will be accepting birders this coming winter season. These folks contacted me last winter and began a trial run to see what birds they could attract. It was very successful and they attracted a lot of winter finches. On their hobby farm they have year round Bald Eagles and Black-billed Magpies. The lot to the west of their homestead is an upland coniferous stand, where they created a wide path off the Kelsey White Face Road and made a small clearing to put the feeders. This year they will add some benches and chairs so birders can sit down and enjoy the birds coming to their feeders. I also added winter and spring locations for Sharp-tailed Grouse. I have plans on placing some feeders in the same general location along the Admiral Road where in past various birders including myself have maintain these feeders which attract Boreal Chickadees and assortment of winter finches. Some other news is for those that have a Facebook account is that we have a Sax-Zim Bog page. (https://www.facebook.com/SaxZimBog) This should a very exciting winter season for many reasons. First of all Boreal Owls will be headliner for this coming winter season. So far Hawk Ridge, from what I was told, banded 8 Boreal Owls and that number may have changed since then but anyway the outlook for viewing this hard to find owl is very good! Other owls like Great Gray Owls and Northern Hawk Owls might be affected by this Boreal Owl irruption. I was informed by a local raptor bander who told me that history has shown that these owls do get affected by a Boreal Owl irruption. So this winter, owls will be the headliner. The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival offers field trips to give participants the best chances to view all the winter bird specialties and more! Each field trip will have 2-3 leaders on board. Our field trip leaders are experience birders and field trip leaders. They know the area and the birds that can be found in the area. The pre-festival field trips will give birders a jump start on birding before the start of the festival on Friday evening. We will offer participants to choose either a pre-festival trip around the Duluth area or up to Lake County. So please stop by our website often and also if there is one year to join the Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival this is the year to sign up and be part of it! Thanks so much Mike Hendrickson Mike Hendrickson Duluth, Minnesota MikeHendricksonGuiding.com Sax-ZimBog.com ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
