New River Birding Festival

Thank goodness it rained, that's all I can say, because I started downloading photos from West Virginia's New River Birding and Nature Festival this morning at 9 AM, and it's 2:30 PM, and I just finished sorting and editing them. Because I am hopelessly ADD in spring, or anytime, actually, that isn't all I've been doing. I feel really bad for all the other nature bloggers who attended, who had their cameras out and were snapping away constantly, because I barely took mine out from under my slicker, and I'm still overwhelmed. Don't expect to hear much from The Flock for awhile. They're editing.

This is a great festival. One of our very favorites. I've been speaking and leading field trips at it for every one of its seven years; Bill joined me and has been even more heavily involved for the last six. I just checked my list and it has 90 species on it for only three days of birding. Twenty-three of them are warblers. You see the attraction. Fayetteville, WV, is the place to go if you like eastern wood warblers.

It's a small festival, but it was at capacity this year, and that's no surprise, because it's extremely well-run and homey. At this point it really feels more like a reunion than a festival. So many great people, both organizers, leaders and participants. So much fun.Dave Pollard, one of the festival's masterminds, far left, does the Life Bird Stomp. Happy birders watch a prairie warbler strut his stuff.

I'm going to try to give you a taste of it, and it really will be just the tip of the whole diverse particolored iceberg, because I was otherwise occupied for most of the time, running around like a beetle, trying to fulfill all my commitments.

Basically, what happens is you get up at 5:30 every morning and head to a central meeting place, where all the field trips depart. You climb on a long white van with your guides and drive 1 1/2 hr. or less (usually less) to a great birdwatching destination. It might be a mountain road or a high spruce bog or a national forest or a meadow popping with bobolinks. Wherever you go, it drips with birds. Your guides call birds in and set you up with stunning looks in the scope and you rack up the life birds.Me and Whipple Bird Club Royal Meteorologist Steve McCarthy, bristling with tripods, ready to show bird. Photo by Nina.

You get back around 3 pm and kind of lay around, alternately moaning, rubbing your warbler neck and sipping your beverages of choice or, if you're lucky enough to stay at Opossum Creek Resort, sinking into your hot tub until you're served a delicious dinner at 6 pm, capped by a program of some kind. So it's a week of all-day field trips and evening programs. Bill and I do both, and there are many other talented presenters.

Here's a typical New River festival experience. You're walking down a beautiful wooded road with about 15 other birdwatchers, and your guide stops and says, "Prairie warbler. Let's try for that."
And Jeff Gordon, a peerless field guide, whips out his iPod and plays a few prairie warbler songs. A minute or two later a tiny yellow bird darts in and everyone gasps and scrambles to get binoculars on it as it mounts to the top of a sapling and sings a challenge to the vanishing iBird.
And when it whirls off, not to be bothered by a recording of its song for another year, you lower your binocs and sigh happily, exhilarated because you've just seen your life prairie warbler, and it was so beautiful, and almost best of all there are a bunch of other birders standing right there who feel exactly like you do.

Note: People who like warblers are very nice people.


Leslie can't help doin' the Life Bird Wiggle. It was my honor to be there when she saw a number of life birds this weekend. What a feeling!

In case you think field trip leaders only want to guide people who already know their birds, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a blast to show people life birds, to watch them see something rare and precious that they've never seen before. It makes you see them afresh, with brand new eyes, all over again.
photo by Nina

My deepest thanks to Nina of Nature Remains, who sent me these pictures of Science Chimp in display mode.

Weird Little Toucans

Being here in Guatemala with Jeff Gordon, bird guide extraordinaire, is a dream. We have laughed our way through Tikal and now the cloud forest highlands. Being a guide for Victor Emanuel Nature Tours (VENT) for a dozen years has made Jeff sharp as the proverbial tack in bird spotting and vocalizations. It didn't take long for us to chuck our 6-pound Howell and Webb in favor of a walking, talking, laughing encylopedia of tropical bird lore. There are so many great people on this excursion, people who had only been names for me before. And there are old friends, too, and there's never a lack of someone fascinating to talk with. Put all that in a verdant setting with sun streaming down and you have a very happy, if tired, pair of Zick/Thompsons.
I especially love watching Bill ratchet down and relax and use his new camera. Birding is different through a camera. You look for good light and opportunities to grab an image. It's like hunting, and it makes you notice things and evaluate situations. It makes you conscious of light. It's really fun. I have been striking a pretty good balance between photography and field sketching. It goes like this: I take 900 pictures of a bird, and then I sketch it. If it's in rotten light or too far away, as most birds in the low humid forest are, I just sketch it and don't even bother to try to get a picture. Bill keeps hope burning and takes a lot more pictures than I do. I haven't got near the rig he has, but I'm banging away at the birds, too, and getting some pictures that, if not publishable, at least bring the experience back for me.

This fruiting fig tree just kept coughing up delights. Yellow-throated euphonias are incredibly snazzy little mini-tanagers with a huge appetite for fruit. I couldn't resist posting two pictures of this little dude working on a big ripe fig. Amazing how wide his gape is! The euphonias descended on the tree in a cloud and stayed there most of the day, communicating in lisping calls. They'd leave en masse before sundown, giving way to other birds.


Tikal boasts toucans, those highly desired tropical icons. Everyone who comes to Tikal hopes to see a toucan. Keel-billed toucans sit high in emergent trees, croaking like frogs, their yellow breasts shining in the sun, impossibly large bills glowing neon green, blue, yellow and pomegranate. Gorgeous birds. Less well-known are the small toucans known as aracaris, who have their own jerky charm. They're great fun to watch, as they strike poses and hold them for a few seconds like modern dancers or mimes. These photos were taken toward dusk, and lack a bit in saturation, but they capture the aracari's weird color scheme (oily green, silk yellow, and blood red) and personality.

Aracaris (are-ah-sah-rees) have weird horizontal pupils that give them an impassionate, goatlike stare, but they more than make up for that with their zippy personalities. It's almost as if they're overcompensating. Charming birdies!

The verdant greens, gentle breeze and magenta bougainvilleas are calling. I'm going to amble around the hotel grounds to see what I can see. I'm kept company by hooded warblers (they all seem to be guys), Wilson's warblers, and black-and-white warblers, along with the resident clay-colored robins, brown jays, and great-tailed grackles. There are peacocks, roosters, dogs and geese right under our hotel window. What Latin American hotel, no matter how luxurious, would be complete without incredibly noisy birds and animals under its window? The roosters start at 3:30 AM. The dogs go all night. The peacocks don't start hollering until we're showered and dressed. Today's wakeup was 3:40 AM for a 3 hour bus ride down winding mountain roads. It isn't ALL paradise...Just wanted to check in and give you another peek. I know your weather's rotten, and soon ours will be, too...flying back tomorrow (Wednesday). Sigh. I'll try to drag it out by posting about Guatemala for awhile after I get back.