Hello: The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival is now accepting regist
Hello: The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival is now accepting registrations. This will be our 6th year of hosting this very popular festival. It will be held on February 15-16-17, 2013 at the Meadowlands Community Center in Meadowlands, Minnesota. On Friday night Steve Wilson will give a presentation on Spruce Grouse and on Saturday night the folks from Raptor Education Group from Antigo, Wisconsin will bring some live birds of prey. There will be local vendors and craftsmen selling their products. Our new Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival long sleeve T Shirts will be for sale. That way you can advertise Sax-Zim Bog!! Please stop by and visit our website and sign up for the 2013 festival. http://sax-zimbog.com/ We have added two pre-festival trips for Friday. The two destinations are the Duluth-Superior Area and Lake County. Larry Weber will lead a Saturday morning nature walk in the Bog. We have placed the Aitkin County trips on hiatus this year and have replaced them with trips to Lake County, which will give birders the opportunity to look for Spruce Grouse and Three-toed Woodpecker. On Friday evening we 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/). Website manager Ken Zackovich has given our website a new look and logo. We are adding two new features that will be a great interest to birders. One is that our website will allow birders to instantly post bird sightings to the website on “Bird Sightings.” 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 or spring months. Birders will be able to read up-to-date bird sightings of what birders are seeing all year 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 to write a blog post and come up with something different to chat about on a weekly basis. Making this blog public is sort of like the 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 once these additions have been put in place. I have created more maps for downloading. I did 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 Bald Eagles and Black-billed Magpies all year. The lot to the west of their homestead is an upland coniferous stand, where they have created a wide path off the Kelsey Whiteface Road and made a small clearing to put the feeders. They will add some benches and chairs so birders can sit and enjoy the birds coming to their feeders. I have also added winter and spring locations for Sharp-tailed Grouse. My plans are to place some feeders in the same general location along the Admiral Road where in the past various birders including myself have maintained these feeders which attract Boreal Chickadees and assortment of winter finches. We also have a Sax-Zim Bog page on Facebook. (https://www.facebook.com/SaxZimBog) This should be a very exciting winter birding season for many reasons. First, Boreal Owls will be headliner for this winter season. So far Hawk Ridge has banded 8 Boreal Owls and that number may have changed since I was told about it. 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 that history has shown that these owls are 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 experienced birders and leaders. They know the area and the birds that can be found. The pre-festival field trips will give birders a jump start on birding before Friday evening dinner and program. This pre-fesitval trip offers participants a choice of trip around the Duluth area or up to Lake County. Please check out our website often. If there was one year to attend the Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival this is the YEAR -- 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
