Yesterday I was looking for a new spot to go birding for my birthday. Although we’re close to the border with Wisconsin, I’d never really thought about looking into Kenosha Co. parks or preserves before. I did a little Googlin’ and found that the Pringle Nature Center in Bristol was just a half hour drive from our house. So this morning we set off to do a little leisurely Wisconsin birding.

Upon arrival at the Nature Center’s parking lot, we donned our cold weather gear and slung on binoculars and camera. We entered the large facility and the first words I heard were, “Are you here to see the Tufted Titmouse?”

Now, TUTIs range through northern Illinois and Wisconsin and beyond, but they are kind of rare in our county. Looking at eBird, there were a handful of reported Tufted Titmouse sightings in Lake County last year over four different months. There were even fewer sightings in Kenosha County in 2009. Bottom line, we don’t expect to see TUTIs when we go birding locally. So the question from the Nature Center staff member was a welcome one, indeed. Apparently a Tufted Titmouse has been visiting the feeders at Pringle all winter, and it had been seen earlier this morning. We didn’t have to wait long before we saw the little cutie ourselves.

After watching the feeders for a while we headed out on the trails for a slog through the wet, heavy snow. There are over four miles of trails through the Bristol Woods County Park adjacent to the Nature Center.

We saw few birds on our walk but we saw many exposed nests in the bare trees. I bet this is a great place to bird in the spring and I’m sure we’ll be back to check it out. We walked about 1.6 miles before returning to watch the feeders some more. For the visit we saw 12 species, most at the feeders.

What a great birthday treat to find a great new birding spot plus a totally unexpected bird!

Today we spent a few hours at the Illinois Ornithological Society Gull Frolic at the Winthrop Harbor Yacht Club.

Alvaro Jaramillo talked about Slaty-backed Gulls and his own road to becoming a larophile. Alvaro is a great speaker and I really enjoyed his presentation. I still need some work on my gull-love, though.

Well over 200 birders were in attendance and the gulls did not disappoint with at least seven species identified.

It was cold and snow fell for most of the morning and early afternoon. Larophobes like me could ask IOS members for assistance in locating and identifying gulls. They were easy to spot in hot orange hats.

It was warm and cozy inside the yacht club. Birding facilities should be so comfy.

There was a spread of pastries and doughnuts for breakfast, and a nice lunch buffet to warm up cold birders.

It was our first Gull Frolic and we heard it was more crowded than recent years. Kudos to the sponsors for organizing a great gathering!

When Arthur and I first started becoming interested in birds back in Holland, Arthur’s father told us about a site he’d seen called vogelkijkhut.nl, which I kind of like to think was our spark thing (no spark bird). Vogelkijkhut means bird-look-hut or bird hide, and the website is a totally awesome directory of the all the bird hides in the Netherlands. The site is also integrated with waarneming.nl, similar to North America’s eBird. There is basic information for each entry, including type of site (blind or hide, screen, tower, etc), whether there is parking and if it is accessible via public transportation. Further details are provided per site, including user-submitted photos, detailed driving or public transport directions, habitat, and recent bird and wildlife sightings via the waarneming.nl link. The site is naturally in Dutch, but if you look at the page on our favorite local birding spot, Starrevaart, you can get a good idea of the wealth of information on the site. There are 376 locations listed in total.

The entrance to the hide at Starrevaart. Note how the path to the door is also blinded from wildlife.

We would base weekend outings on bird hides we found on this website. Since vogelkijkhut.nl is linked to waarneming.nl, we could look on the site at the hides close to our home or intended day-trip location and see what birds were recently seen from that hide.

Our interest in birding grew as we easily found new birding sites within our reach, with loads of data about each site available at our fingertips. Birding from hides meant that we could sit and enjoy great views of birds that would go about their business – without noticing all the bird groupies that were watching their every move.

Bird hide with low windows at Doñana National Park in Spain

As our interest continued to grow, we would bird farther and farther afield, and during the years we lived in Rotterdam and Leiden we were able to take several trips within Europe where we usually tried to fit in some birding. A lot of this birding was also done from hides.

Exiting a bird hide in the Loire Valley, France

When we moved back to Illinois in late 2008, we looked forward to American birding, presumably some of which would be from some good American bird hides (I guess we call them bird blinds, here?) – boy were we wrong!

Why aren’t there bird blinds here? Why are the majority of bird observation areas we come across locally open decks? Why are there so many hides in the Netherlands and Europe? This question has been on my mind a lot lately, and I can’t really come up with one good answer.

Of course, I’ve only got experience birding around our local counties (Lake, McHenry and Cook) and a very little bit of birding in Florida and Ohio (just a few day’s worth), so it could be that there are more wildlife observation blinds in other parts of the country. It’s just the near complete lack of them in our own birding excursions is so disappointing. I mean, birding by butt is so comfy, am I right?

Open “blind” at Merritt Island NWR in Florida

I started a Flickr pool for bird hide images a little while ago. Unsurprisingly, most of the photos are from hides in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe. (If you’ve got photos of bird blinds or other wildlife observation constructions, I would love for you to add them to the pool.)

If birding is such a popular hobby here in the United States, why aren’t there more comfortable hides from which birds and other wildlife can be observed?

America has a lot more conserved land than Europe, so one reason may be that wildlife viewing opportunities are more restricted across the pond, and providing a blind from which to view animals 1) makes the chance of seeing some wildlife more likely and 2) is less likely to disturb the birds and animals that are living in the restricted natural area. In the Netherlands there seems to be a bird hide at every natural park or wildlife area we came across, while here in Lake County I only know of one true blind, a small building on the Tamarack Trail at Volo Bog (also the smallest hide I’ve ever seen).

Observation blind at Volo Bog

There are, however, several sites in the county where bird or wildlife observation areas are set aside. At Rollins Savanna there is an open viewing area with a couple of scopes. A platform was recently built at Prairie Wolf Slough for viewing the wetland.

Viewing platform at Prairie Wolf Slough

Could weather be a factor? It rains a lot in the Netherlands, much more than here in northern Illinois. Are there a lot of covered bird blinds in the Pacific Northwest of the United States?

Are there a lot of bird or wildlife observation blinds at your favorite local birding patches? Do you have any ideas as to why we seem to lack blinds here while Europe uses them extensively? I would really love to hear your theories!

Yesterday we joined another area bird club on a field trip. The Kane County Audubon Roadside Birding outing started at Peck Farm in Geneva. There we picked up a passenger, who just happened to be club president Bob Adrini. Since we hadn’t been birding in Kane County before, it was great to learn about the area specialties and birding spots from Bob. The conversation was engaging even though the birds didn’t cooperate. Our targets for the day were Snow Buntings, Lapland Longspurs and Horned Larks. We only got the larks.

We saw the larks in the parking lot of a grain mill. In the back of the mill’s lot there was a huge pile of corn. A large group of Rock Pigeons and Brown-headed Cowbirds congregated on the ground next to the pile, but these two Mourning Doves went right to the source.

Though we did see quite a few roadside Red-tailed Hawks during the drive, it wasn’t until the end of the day that we saw a pair, perched in a tree close to the parking lot where our journey began. In the same field we saw our first Northern Harrier of the day. Despite the bad luck with the birds, the miserable weather and frigid temperatures, we had a good birding day. Many thanks to Bob for the conversation!

I’ve been looking through my bird photos, trying to come up with my favorite birds of the last decade. I’m saving that list for another post, but I managed to pick out some favorite photos of birds that didn’t make my top ten list.

These twelve photos were taken in four different countries between 2006 and 2009 (since I haven’t been birding all that long and have only had my (super-zoom point-and-shoot) camera since ‘06).

Can you guess what they are? They all link to Flickr where you can find out, or scroll to the end for a list.

Indian Pond Heron: Kota, India;
American Robin: Great Smoky Mountains National Park USA;
Common Coot chick: Starrevaart, Netherlands;
Black-headed Ibis: Ranthambhore, India;
Blue-winged Teal: Viera Wetlands, Florida USA;
Rufous Treepie: Ranthambhore, India;
Chaffinch: Munster, France;
Red-breasted Nuthatch: Illinois USA;
Great Crested Grebe: Voorschoten, Netherlands;
Red-shouldered Hawk: Viera Wetlands, Florida USA;
Red-vented Bulbul: Jaipur, India;
Tufted Duck: Flevoland, Netherlands.

I haven’t been out birding much lately, but I hope that will change in the coming weeks. In the meantime I’ve been reflecting on the past year’s birding. I thought about the Loggerhead Shrikes we saw when we first arrived at Viera Wetlands on a visit in November. A pair was hanging out at the entrance and seemed to welcome us. Later, during the same visit, this shrike gave me a giggle when I watched it chattering from its treetop perch.

When we visited Lake Geneva back in October I saw these interesting Purple Martin condos by the water. I wonder if they attract any summer breeders?

Driving home from Florida last month, we took a detour through Great Smoky Mountains NP to avoid a 150-mile detour caused by a rock slide blocking the highway. We might have been faster than the detour if we hadn’t stopped a couple of times to watch bears foraging close to the road. At a scenic outlook I took this photo of an American Robin. I was trying to take a picture of a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker in this same tree, but it flew off before I could catch it. I didn’t notice the robin right away but he was so kind to patiently pose for me. Our robins are mostly gone for the winter, and I miss them.

After watching the launch of STS-129, we left KSC and followed traffic back towards Titusville. Instead of going to our hotel, we headed to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge to have a quick spin around Black Point Wildlife Drive. It was getting close to sunset so we mostly kept moving, knowing we would be back the next day for a longer, slower visit.

We spent the entire next day at Merritt Island. Again we started on with Black Point Wildlife Drive, this time taking it easy.

After this Killdeer took a bath, it ran to the shore for some serious preening action.

I was cracking up watching these busybody American Avocets foraging in the shallow water.

We visited Canaveral National Seashore too. On the way in, an Osprey ambassador reminded us to park in designated areas only.

From one of the viewing turnouts we could see launchpads 39A and 39B. 39B is closer to us, on the left side of the photo, surrounded by three towers. It is now undergoing modifications to accommodate launching the new Ares 1 rockets. STS-129 launched from 39A (right side of photo) as will all of the remaining five Space Shuttle missions.

We had a nice long walk on the beach, enjoying the lovely late afternoon weather and the birds foraging and posing in the surf.

An informational sign told us: “Often mistakenly referred to in general as “sandpipers,” shorebirds include many species that delightfully challenge birdwatchers.” (emphasis mine, ha ha ha)

It was getting late but we couldn’t resist another go around Black Point Wildlife Drive. On our way there, we were treated to a great sighting of a pair of River Otters crossing the road. We were very excited to see this life mammal but unfortunately did not get a photo. Our second Black Point sunset was predictably beautiful.

We finished the day with 55 (bird) species and three lifers including Florida Scrub-Jay which we were thrilled to finally see.

Here’s another Viera bird. During our first visit we heard a juvenile Red-shouldered Hawk calling, over and over. The next day I watched an adult polishing off a meal on a post at the back of the wetlands.

More photos of this bird at my Flickr stream here.

When the meal was done, the bird joined another RSHA in a tree further from the road.

Later we saw this RSHA perched over the wetlands.

More photos of this bird at my Flickr stream here.

Red-shouldered Hawks range where we live but I have never seen one around here before. With so many of the birds at Viera and in Florida in general, you can get such good looks. The birds seem so much more relaxed and approachable. It was great to see these hawks at the wetlands. This was not a lifer but among our best looks at this bird (besides a couple of other times – in FL of course!).

This post has been submitted to Bird Photography Weekly, hosted by Birdfreak. I love BPW because not only can I see great bird photos, but I can read the cool reactions people have to them. There might be a bird I would consider common that is a lifer for the poster. Yet other posts will be of birds that would be a lifer for me, taken in someone’s back yard. Then there are the familiar but far-away European birds that make me feel homesick for Holland. It’s always a great mix. Check out this week’s submissions. While you’re at it, why don’t you submit your own BPW post?