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Showing posts from March, 2009

Spark Birds - and Other Sparks

I was trolling through some of the regional outdoor blogs I post on getoutzine.com and came upon this one, from Bird Watcher's Digest: Spark Bird . It's a great concept: what bird sparked your interest in your lifelong pursuit of bird watching ? I knew my answer immediately. When I lived in Colorado, I spent many an afternoon cycling on the roads where the high plains meet the Rocky Mountains. I wasn't a birder at all. Nor was I much interested in the world around me except to play in it. But there was this beautiful - beautiful! - bird song that demanded I listen. Now I am demanding, or at least requesting, that you listen . Every time I jerked my helmeted head around to see where this song was coming from, a bird with a yellow breast with a big black V was sitting there on the fence. Could spotting it get any easier than that? I borrowed a friend's Peterson's Guide to Western birds and there it was - the Western meadowlark. Now I am only a backyard birder, but the