Cutting the ribbon on SoWBA’s newest sanctuary, appreciating the bounty of nature together, and birding with new and old friends: here are some of our highlights from this year.
Photo by Nathan Flick/Creative Commons
Winter 2025
Help Keep Watch Over Wisconsin’s Eagles: Donate a Spotting Scope
To make the Bald Eagle Nest Watch program more accessible, we are working to collect 50 spotting scopes to share among our partners and volunteers statewide. These scopes will be donated to Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, but will be made available for use across Wisconsin by our partner organizations and citizen scientists.
Hope
As a teenager, I was charged with speaking on the virtue of faith at a Catholic retreat for some schoolmates. I read my draft to the group organizing the gathering, which included a kind, elderly priest. He spoke after I finished saying, "Topf, that was not a good presentation on faith but quite excellent on hope." That about sums up my spirituality and outlook on life then and now, short on faith but long on hope.
Photo by Mandy Martin
Preventing Bird-Window Collisions at Home
Window collisions are the second biggest killer of birds with just under half of those collisions being with homes and smaller buildings. In a study last year, about 3.5 billion birds died from Bird-Window Collisions. The two biggest factors for why birds fly into windows are transparency and reflectiveness. The birds either see something on the other side of the glass that they want to get to — we call this the pass through effect. Reflectiveness is when they see a reflection of something they want to get to.
