Photo of the Week: Third Annual October Big Day of Birding

chunky brown bird with brown smudges on white breast and thin white eyering perches on bare tree.

Hard to believe 2020 marks the third year of October Big Day, a global 24-hour event for birdwatchers around the world to watch and report all the birds they’ve seen.

This year had an added bonus for October Big Day, this weekend was also the first Global Bird Weekend.

I’ve participated every year and was happy it didn’t rain this year like it did for my first October Big Day in 2018.

Word has spread about the fun you can have birding!

The first year, over 13,000 people participated. In 2019, more than 20,000 people participated in Global Big Day.

And for 2020, I joined almost 29,000 people in submitting 66,843 checklists of 6,799 species (as of October 18, 2020 at 6:30pm Eastern Time). Continue reading Photo of the Week: Third Annual October Big Day of Birding

Photo of the Week: Purple Finch at Our Feeder

Raspberry-colored medium-sized bird perches on edge of green bird feeder.

“Wait a minute,” I said to my husband as I peered at the feeder in our side yard this weekend.

“That bird doesn’t look like the brown-colored House Finches.

It looks like it has a raspberry wash over it.”

And the other House Finches on the feeder didn’t seem very happy with it.

The raspberry-colored bird kept chasing the other birds away from the feeder. Continue reading Photo of the Week: Purple Finch at Our Feeder

Photo of the Week: Common Gallinule

gray and brown marsh bird wades along the edge of the Lake Erie marsh looking for food.

Check out those green legs of the Common Gallinule! It’s been over 20 years since I saw my first Common Gallinule, but I’ve only seen their long green legs in the past two years. The unexpected leg color always makes me smile. I remember the first time I saw a Common Gallinule, in the mid… Continue reading Photo of the Week: Common Gallinule