All birds, all the time, this weekend
The region is bird-crazy this weekend.
The centerpiece is New Jersey's World Series of Birding, and Sheila Lego of New Jersey Audubon wrote about it so nicely that I'll pretty much just cut and paste her description here:
In baseball the season is just starting and the pennant race is wide open. But in the world of competitive birding, it's already come down to the biggest game of the series.
On May 9, 2009, millions of birds and hundreds of bird watchers will take the field to see who can spot the most species of birds between midnight and midnight.
The playing field is the entire state of New Jersey – one of the most bird rich places in North America. For twenty-six years, teams of birders from across North America and abroad have come here to test their skills.
"New Jersey is to birding what Augusta National is to golf," says Pete Dunne, the founder of the event. One of the reasons the event was founded was to draw attention to New Jersey's strategic, and overlooked, importance to birds.
We've got a wealth of natural areas. We're positioned right on the migratory mainline. In one compact and highly birdable state, teams can go from Canadian zone forest to Carolina coastal habitat and not even stop for gas.
Winning totals for the event often top 230 species.
About 100 teams will be competing. Team supporters pledge money on the number of species found by their favorite team. The money — nearly $9 million since the competition began — is used to support the bird conservation efforts of each team's sponsoring organizations.
"There are a lot of Golden-winged Warblers looking for nesting habitat and Red Knot searching for horseshoe crab eggs that owe a measure of thanks to this event," says Dunne.
The event has grown since thirteen teams first took up New Jersey Audubon's challenge in 1984. Now there are multiple divisions, including a popular youth division, a senior division, and several different categories.
By the way, this year Dunne is going it alone. Complications intervened for potential team members, but even that couldn't keep him away.
Dunne's first teammates included Roger Tory Peterson (who is credited with naming the event) and David Sibley, author of the "Sibley Guide to Birds."
(By the way, you can follow the progress of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's "Team Sapsucker" on Twitter or learn more by going to www.bigday09.org)
Teams can plan routes that cover the entire state; individual counties; even remain in a single, 17 foot circle and record birds without leaving that spot.
In 2007, a World Series team set a national record by recording 139 species from one fixed location.
This year a new "Carbon Footprint Cup" category has being inaugurated. All birding must be done using human powered means of transportation. Contestants can walk, run, bike, row... Anything that doesn't require energy tied to fossil fuel.
The official website is www.worldseriesofbirding.org.
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In a similar event, the Delmarva Ornithological Society began its third annual Bird-A-Thon fundraiser last weekend, and it continues through Sunday. Individuals or teams count the number of different bird species seen or heard over any 24-hour period in backyards, fields, forests and wetlands throughout Delaware.
The society hopes to raise more than $45,000 to help purchase vital migratory bird habitat along the Delaware Bay, along with funding migratory raptor research and other similar conservation causes. The website for this group is www.dosbirds.org
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Saturday is also International Migratory Bird Day, a project of Environment for the Americas, a non-profit group working to increase awareness of birds and their conservation throughout the Western Hemisphere.
In celebration of that, there's going to be a bird festival that includes self-guided nature drives, children's craft activities, decoy carving and educational displays at the Jacques Cousteau National Estuarine Research Reserve in Tuckerton.
The Reserve, managed by Rutgers University, is at 130 Great Bay Blvd. The event is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and is free, although an additional 8 a.m. bird walk at the Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge is available for $5.
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Also in honor of the day, a group of professional raptor and wildlife biologists and conservationists will hold a press conference at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton to bring people up to date on their efforts to secure national designation for a Kittatinny-Shawangunk National Raptor Migration Corridor.
Known around the world for its autumn raptor migrations proposed area is a 250-mile-long stretch of the Kittatinny-Shawangunk Ridge and its adjacent corridor that crosses parts of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Neotropical migratory songbirds, bats, butterflies and various other fauna also use the ridge as a migratory route.
The Raptor Corridor Project website is www.raptorcorridor.org