Birding at Fort Snelling

It's been awhile. I intended to finish up the Ramsey/Hill house post but my personal life took a rather unseen turn and I never got back to edit that entry. Looking at it now, I've decided to leave it as is. There's much left unsaid and undone but I can't always edit the past, so it's time to move on and get back to living.

Today I went to Fort Snelling for a beginner's introduction to birding. I used to think of birds as being basically all alike - sure, they come in different sizes and colors, but basically a bird is a bird. The more time I've spent in the outdoors the more I realize how silly that sounds. I've decided to put a little more effort into watching them and learning about them so I have more of a clue.

It was a beautiful spring day - the trees are starting to leaf out, the grass is finally green, the sun is out and the birds are back for the summer. In other words, winter is just around the corner.

The park naturalist sat us down and explained some things (how to use binoculars and a field guide, how to spot birds and explain where they are to everyone else, what to listen and look for), and then we got outside. We stopped several times as she pointed out various birds before getting even 100 feet from the visitor center, which was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I've always seen birds, but this was the really the first time I deliberately saw birds, and there was quite the variety. Turkey vultures, mourning doves, cardinals, robins, great blue herons, mallards, wood ducks, chickadees ..... clearly a bird is not just a bird.

The highlight was finding a barred owl. The naturalist had seen this bird perched on a tree on the edge of a small clearing in mid-day for a couple days, so we set out to find it again. Alas, it was not where she had last seen it, but after giving herself 5-10 minutes to scan the immediate vicinity, she found it about 50 feet from it's last position. Owls are generally not seen in broad daylight so it was pretty cool, not to mention it was the first owl I've seen in the wild ever. I'm going to go back with my camera a time or two and see if it's still hanging out in that area - if I get a photo I'll come back and post it.

That's about it. An hour or so of meandering around, looking at the trees and sky on a perfect spring day - I could get used to this.