Bird & Nature Blog

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Keeping Your Summer Birding Fresh

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Welcome back to the Entryway to Birding blog! It’s now July—can you believe it? I hope everyone reading was able to celebrate a safe and healthy 4th of July.

With the heat of summer setting in over the last week, my birding habits have been changing. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a wimp—I don’t like getting eaten alive by mosquitoes nor do I handle heat and humidity well. Our current stretch of hot and humid weather has me looking for some more creative ways to bird, since sweaty, irritable birding is not my best birding.

This week’s blog post is for those of you who still want to get outside, get active, and enjoy those birds, but aren’t feeling inclined to stand around in the humidity while getting eaten by mosquitoes.

Photo by Caitlyn Schuchhardt

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Three Friendly B's

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Three Friendly B's

The harvest season has begun in earnest at our house with a quick flurry of honeyberries followed by the start of the juneberry and raspberry seasons with a few pie cherries thrown in for good luck.

I must start with a thank you to the bumblebees. As far as I can tell, they are the only pollinators of honeyberries and the principal pollinator of the raspberries. I'm not as sure about the juneberries but they probably help there too.

Photo by Hirotomo Oi

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What came first: the bug or the song?

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What came first: the bug or the song?

Looks like the summer will be wet and warm—good news for my nominee for the most fearsome of Wisconsin's animals. No, not our two rattlesnakes… no, not ticks as loathsome as they are… no, not our most dangerous mammals, the Holstein or Jersey bulls. Ladies and gentlemen, meet, if you dare, North America's largest mosquito, the gallinipper.

I don't think they are new to Wisconsin but I'm betting they are much more common. I speculate that our changed climate is the reason. The bugs need hot, muggy weather, and water standing in those pastures where their prime prey lives. The changed climate reliably produces that weather and those conditions.

Photo by Carl Wycoff

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A Beginner’s Guide to eBird Mobile

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Welcome back to the Entryway to Birding blog! In last week’s entry, we explored some of the many reasons that a new birder might benefit from joining eBird, a citizen science platform for recording bird sightings and observations.

This week, I’m going to show you just how easy, fast, and rewarding submitting an eBird checklist can be using the eBird Mobile app. For those of you who prefer to stick to the desktop version, I’ll have some website-specific resources to share with you too.

Let’s get started by looking at eBird Mobile, designed to be used on your smartphone.

Photo by Caitlyn Schuchhardt

DNR News Release: Survey Seeks to Identify Chimneys Providing Swift Habitat

One of Madison Audubon’s most popular fall field trips is A Swift Night Out. This nation-wide field trip/citizen science event invites community members to bring their lawnchairs and binoculars, and join in on counting chimney swifts coming into popular roosting sites (chimneys). Sandy Schwab of the Wisconsin Chimney Swift Working Group leads the event, teaching attendees about these amazing birds and how they can help reverse this species’ downward population trend.

Now, the WDNR is looking for information about where chimney swifts may be nesting. Below is the press release with more information. The more we know about the locations where chimney swifts are roosting and nesting, the better the prospects are for conserving this great species.

Photo by Nancy J. Nabak