BETTER BIRDING LECTURE SERIES
Hampered by hawks? Stumped on sparrows? Flummoxed by flycatchers? The Better Birding lecture series will solve your avian anxieties. With slides, videos, humor and exuberance, Bryan Pfeiffer offer his secrets and easygoing approaches to birdwatching enjoyment ... and enlightenment. Two workshops for beginners will be free.
DATES: First Mondays of the month (with a few exceptions) from 6:30-8:30pm.
LOCATION: First Baptist Church of Montpelier, a block down School Street from the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. Here's a map.
FEE: $10 per session.
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OK, it's not all about birds. The season of glittering wings begins. It unfolds in vivid images with this introduction to insect enjoyment. Don't miss Great Spangled Fritillary, Sparkling Jewelwing and other summer gems. After having warblers dart away from you during spring migration, you'll love it when butterflies and dragonflies perch at your feet!
If you wait to learn them in September, it will be too late. Shorebirds are already moving south in "fall" migration. Bring your binoculars to this session. You'll first learn a system for approaching the correct identification. Then we'll practice by watching videos of hundreds of shorebirds feeding on mud flats. We'll ID them together.
Roger Tory Peterson called them "confusing fall warblers." We'll confront the confusion and allow you to enjoy these little gems for a few more months. When the fallout comes to your backyard, or when you join Bryan on Monhegan Island this fall, you'll be ready.
They arrive like clockwork, soaring and gliding along our mountain ridgelines. No more will hawks appear to you as little unidentified specks in the sky. You'll become a hawkwatcher. We'll cover some general approaches to shape and flight pattern, which are critical to hawk identification. And you'll learn specifics on key species, such as separating Sharp-shinned Hawk from Cooper's Hawk and Bald Eagle from Golden Eagle.
You need not board a boat to see jaegers, rare gulls and alcids. Some of the finest fall birdwatching happens along the shores of Lake Champlain or the Atlantic coast in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. We'll cover
what's floating and flying offshore.
If you have a spotting scope you can use it to take amazing bird photos with your little point-and-shoot camera. Even with your iPhone. But you can't simply point and shoot. In this session, you'll learn a few tricks for setting your camera to capture great photos and videos of the birds you love. By the way, that's a digi-scoped shot below. (Can you ID the three species?)
They are some of the classic challenges in bird identification: Common Goldeneye or Barrow's Goldeneye? Snow Goose or Ross's Goose? Common Loon or Pacific Loon? Female Blue-winged Teal or female Green-winged Teal? Fish Crow or American Crow? Pewee or Empidonax? Fall Chipping Sparrow or Clay-colored Sparrow? You'll learn a dozen or so dastardly duos and how to sort them out before you find them in the field.
