When I posted this last night message last night I originally t Hello: When I posted this last night message last night I originally typed it out on Microsoft Word and copy/paste it to the body section and sent it to the MOU listserv. I viewed it this evening and saw a bunch of babble and my post looked distorted and confusing to the reader. So I typed it out again on my email provider instead of copying and pasting. So hopefully this time it looks neat and readable.
Thanks The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival is now accepting registrations. This will be our 6th year organizing the winter bird festival. The festival will be held on February 15-16-17, 2013 at the Meadowlands Community Center in Meadowlands, Minnesota. On Friday night our speaker will be Steve Wilson who will give a presentation on Spruce Grouse and on Saturday night our speakers will be the folks from Raptor Education Group from Antigo, Wisconsin. Raptor Educational Group are planning on bringing several raptors to the festival as part of their presentation. There will be also local vendors and craftsmen selling their art and crafts. This year we will be displaying and selling our Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival long sleeve T Shirts to all our participants. That way you can advertise Sax-Zim Bog!! So please stop by and visit our website and also sign up for the 2013 festival. http://sax-zimbog.com/ We added two pre-festival trips for Friday February 15, 2013. The participants can choose to go on the Duluth Area trip or head up to Lake County. On Saturday & Sunday participants can choose Sax-Zim Bog, Duluth Area and Lake County field trips. Author and local naturalist, Larry Weber will be leading a Saturday only Nature Hike in Sax-Zim Bog. Larry will teach and identify mammal tracks, learn about plants, lichens, moss and insects and how they survive the winter months. On Friday we will once again offer Great Gray Owl Dusk Trip. This trip in the last two years produce sightings of Great Gray Owls! Some other changes include our Sax-Zim Bog website (http://sax-zimbog.com/). Our website manager, Ken Zackovich gave our website a whole new look and logo. We are going to add two new features to the website. One of the features will allow birders to instantly post bird sightings to the website under a page called "Bird Sightings" and if you have photos of birds you would like to share you can also download your photos to this page as well. That way when birders are planning a trip to Sax-Zim Bog they can see all the recent sightings and photos of what birders are seeing. This will be a handy item for birders who own smart phones with internet connection who are in the bog. Instead of relying on bumping into other birders to swap sightings they can just check the Bird Sighting section of the website and read about all the recent sightings in the bog. The other feature will be a public blog where birders can create a blog post and share their experience with others and if you want you can download your photos you taken in the bog as part of of your blog post. This feature is basically like one of those journals you find in a cabin rental or at a bed and breakfast, where people write down their experience but instead this is a online version of that concept. These two new website features will be announce as soon as Ken programs them into the website. The website also has new maps for downloading. I created a map of all the public feeding stations located around Meadowlands. A new feeding station will be located on the east side of the bog located off the Kelsey-Whiteface Road. These folks contacted me about erecting a feeding station large enough to serve visiting birders. They have a coniferous stands of woods just west of the property and they did a trial run last winter to see what birds will be attracted to their feeders and they were rewarded with high numbers of redpolls and other winter finches. So this year they added seating in the small clearing to allow birders to sit down while viewing the feeders. This feeding station you will have to park on the Kelsey Whiteface Road and walk a short distance down the path to the feeding station. These folks will be adding signs along the road to help birders locate the path. The other neat thing about this location is that they own a hobby farm and have year round Bald Eagles and Black-billed Magpies hanging out on their homestead. I also added a map to the Admiral Feeders which are located on the Admiral Road in the bog and a map showing locations to find Sharp-tailed Grouse. Some other news is for those that have a Facebook account is that we have a Sax-Zim Bog page which is also another way to share sightings, photos and video of what you are seeing in the bog. You can visit the page at http://www.facebook.com/SaxZimBog This should be a very exciting winter season for many reasons. First of all Boreal Owls will be the headliner for this coming winter season! So far Hawk Ridge banding stations have banded 8 or more Boreal Owls this fall season! Every four years Boreal Owls irrupt due to the crash of Red-backed Voles. When Boreal Owls irrupt in most cases other owl species are effected by the lack of voles such as Great Gray Owls and Hawk Owls. So this winter other than Boreal Owls making news we might see more than usual reports of Great Gray Owls in northern Minnesota. I do not know what the future holds for winter finches and Bohemian Waxwings this winter season but as winter approaches we will know more. As always there should be a good selection of gulls in the harbor and I am sure there will be some Snowy Owls in the Twin Ports. The Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival offers field trips to give participants the best chances to view all the winter bird specialties. That is why I added Lake County this year, to give birders the best chance to locate Spruce Grouse, Three-toed Woodpeckers and Bohemian Waxwing. Each field trip will have 1-2 field trip leaders on board to assist festival participants in viewing these winter bird specialties. More importantly this is the best way for people from all over to come and visit Sax-Zim Bog up close and personal rather than read about it in a book or hear about it in a movie. Come and meet the locals who were born and raised here and be part of a festival that is designed not to be huge money profit festival but rather a home cook festival with a small town feel. So please stop by our website: sax-zimbog.com and check out the website and consider visiting us this winter for our 6th annual Sax-Zim Bog Winter Bird Festival! Thank You! 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
