Glasgow FeatherFest 09

Saturday morning was calm and sunny. A perfect day for FeatherFest this year. Instead of leading a field trip like I have done all the previous years, I elected to join Woody Baxter on his Missouri River canoe field trip.



Fourteen other folks joined Woody and me as we headed down the Missouri River just below Fort Peck Dam. We enjoyed a full suite of local riparian birds including the resident pair of Bald Eagles ( you can just see both members of the pair in the leaning cottonwood over the canoes in the photo above.)



We stopped a few times along the way but I was not on top of taking photos when we were walking around looking for birds. We managed to spot some Piping Plovers along with a few Franklin's Gulls, a Baird's Sandpiper, California Gulls, American White Pelicans, and American Avocets on a small island though and I did get one bird photo then.



In my book, the best find of the morning was a pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers flycatching from the tops of the cottonwoods, then copulating above the apparent nest hole. They are uncommon but regular birds around here and it is always a treat to see them.
The other field trips - a tour of South Valley County, the Fort Peck Area, and a bird banding demonstration in Glagsow - apparently went quite well, including 10 Mountain Plovers and a plover nest on the South Valley tour. Stay tuned for information about next year - we hope to be bigger and better again.

Birding in Northeastern Montana

If you are interested in birding in one of the best places to see large numbers of grassland birds in North America here are a couple of things you might be interested in. One of my goals when I moved back to Northeastern Montana was to promote the birding opportunities in the area and hopefully bring additional "value" to the prairie beyond the traditional grazing, hunting, and oil and gas production and these are two efforts I helped initiate to help meet that goal.

The first is a new addition to the Montana Nature and Birding Trail, an online resource for birding sites in MT. The Northeastern Plains Birding Trail, which up until now has existed pretty much as a hard copy product, is now online. See it here. Let me know if you have any feedback on the site. We are still working out some things we noticed that need to be fixed but hopefully this site will be helpful for those of you interested in birding here. If you would like a hard copy of the trail see this website (then scroll down).

I also wanted to let everyone know about the Glasgow Feather Fest. This is an annual event we put on in Glasgow to highlight the prairie birds of the surrounding landscape. It is a small festival with lots of great birds.

Click on the image above to see a larger version and all the info on the poster.

Here is a copy of the brochure (hopefully I will have that posted tomorrow - I can't find the whole brochure right now) with a registration for the event. We currently don't have much of a web presence for the festival but that is something we will be working on. If you have any questions can contact me for more information.

Montana Bird Festival Season

Fort Peck, MT - Field season is upon me and so the blog posts are probably going to be farther apart, at least until the beginning of July. It is also bird festival season and two that I am particularly fond of are the Glasgow FeatherFest, our small, local festival with great birds, and the Montana Audubon annual festival, an event that annually moves around Montana, providing local communities across Montana with an economic boost from birds and also provides participants with the opportunity to observe a wide variety of bird species across Montana.

The Glasgow FeatherFest has been going on for 3 years now (last year it was held in conjunction with the Montana Audubon annual bird festival). We have a small group of people working to put this on so we have decided to alternate our efforts each year. This year we are focusing on getting local individuals who may be interested in birds, but may feel overwhelmed to attend a larger function, to attend. We are having an orientation talk and field trips this year, including a Missouri River canoe float, but no lectures or keynote addresses. Next year we will again be looking for lecturers and a keynote speaker that we hope will help draw in more people from around the country. I am hoping that our bird list will help draw in those speakers too! (more on birding in Northeastern Montana later). I would provide a link for more information about the FeatherFest but that is something we currently lack and I am hoping to correct soon.

I will also be attending the Montana Audubon Festival in Ennis, MT next weekend. I am giving a talk on grassland birds and also providing the keynote address where I will talk about Antarctica and Antarctic birds. I am looking forward to seeing a number of friends I haven't visited with in a long time as well as hopefully observing a few species I haven't seen in Montana before. More information on this festival can be found here.

Black-headed Grosbeak