Eat more cookies

Some people dream in color; I dream in “bird.”

On many occasions, I have seen and heard birds in my dreams. That’s not so unusual for a birder, I guess. If there’s a cardinal singing outside my window before my alarm goes off, then there’s clearly a reason for me in those last few minutes of sleep to dream of cardinals. The interesting thing is when I dream of an uncommon bird - one that’s highly unlikely to be sitting outside my window. Sometimes those birds appear to me later in the day and I am left to wonder: Was this bird outside my window while I lay snoring on my pillow or do I have some form of psychic birding ability?

This happened to me most recently on Saturday. I had planned to go birding in the morning, and I had a most pleasant dream overnight that I heard the first phoebe of spring. “FEE-bee! FEE-brrrrt!” What a cheerful soundtrack to accompany the leafing trees, the dancing midges, and the dandelions spreading their leaves to the life-giving sun! When I awoke, however, there was no phoebe in my backyard. There shouldn’t be either - my yard is too urban for phoebes. But an hour or so later, I was introducing a beginning birder on our field trip to her first ever Eastern Phoebe. They were back, and singing emphatically! So had I heard a phoebe in my sleep or did I psychically detect that phoebes in general had returned?

My craziest experience of this sort happened several years ago on a trip to California. I dreamt of Golden-crowned Sparrows - the first and last time I’ve ever done that. This was odd because that species wasn’t even on my list of potential western birds I was hoping to see on my trip. But there they were the next morning, hopping around in the parking lot of the first winery we visited that day! That experience really made me wonder: Of the roughly 700 North American birds I could have dreamt about that night, why Golden-crowned Sparrow? I had given the species zero (conscious) thought before then. And it wasn’t like I found them at some point somewhere on the several day trip - I was completely surprised by them within a few hours of having the dream. Very strange indeed.

If I am a psychic birder, then it only happens in my sleep. It’s too bad I can’t turn the power on and off at will, ’cause I bet it would significantly improve my ability to actually find birds in the field. But it does mean that I should probably pay more attention to the birds that show up in my dreams, and pre-empt all the next day’s tasks to go birding. That time I dreamt of a Blue-crowned Mot-Mot? I think I missed out on a North American record!

~tjo

Springtime is the season when a lot of ranchers in Oklahoma set their fields on fire (or as they call it out here, “afar”) to encourage fresh growth of grasses. The cattle - or in the case of The Nature Conservancy’s Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, the bison - will preferentially graze the new grass on the recently burned areas and leave the more rank growth alone. Patterns of burned and unburned plots create a mosaic of habitat types in prairie that range from heavily grazed short grasses to tall “weedy” patches.

In the mixed praire and oak patches around here (the “crosstimbers”) we use fire to keep the invasion of redcedar into the prairie in check. Last week, some OSU fire ecologists burned one of my favorite birding areas, and we took the kids out to see while it was still smoldering.

The burning will help restore the scrubby patches to more of an oak and prairie savanna, and in the short term, it will keep the number of ticks down this summer at my favorite birding spot!

Katie likes kitties.

They wrote this haiku themselves.

James is a doggie.

(Not particularly inspired we know, but they were both dressed as these respective pets when they wrote it.)

Shattering the previous record of 61,049 checklists, birders this year submitted an amazing 80,288 checklists for the Great Backyard Bird Count (GBBC). This means that over a four-day period one weekend in February, somebody went birding somewhere more than 80,000 times, and in each case, cared enough about the data they had collected to take the time to submit it via the GBBC website.

In Oklahoma, our 595 checklists is at least 100 more than our state total last year. I’m especially proud of Stillwater’s fantastic showing to again lead the state, this time with 144 checklists. Around here, we’ve really tried to increase participation in organized counts like the GBBC over the past couple of years, and it looks like we’re starting to see some success in reaching our local pool of college students who are potentially interested in birding. We haven’t offered all that much extra credit; the students are showing interest on their own!

I can’t say what contributed to a continental jump in over 20,000 checklists from one year to the next. Maybe mild weather got people outdoors. Maybe many more people acquired high-speed internet access over the past year, and found it easier to learn about the GBBC and submit their data. Maybe people are increasingly craving opportunities (excuses?) to take time out from their busy schedules and go see some birds. Maybe there’s a renewed sense of urgency among birders that we have a contribution to make to help future generations appreciate the natural world as we do, and organized counts like the GBBC make us feel like we’re doing our part.

Whatever it was, I hope people keep doing it. The more we bird, the more we learn. Going birding equates to practice and, like anything else, we get incrementally better each time we practice. When we go birding with others, we collectively improve, and we can get exponentially better by, for example, participating in a field trip led by expert birders.

As Spring springs upon us over the next few weeks, some of the best birding of the year will begin as birds stream northward to nest. Find a field trip, go dip your toe in that stream, and bring a friend!

http://www.birdsource.org/gbbc