North Central Illinois Ornithological Society

Per the homeowners request, the last day to come and view the Green-breasted Mango outside of Beloit, Wisconsin will be Wednesday, October 3rd. These wonderful people have been so gracious to open their yards and be part of birding history. This has been wonderful for the birding community!

A while back I was contacted by the Illinois Ornithological Society (IOS) to help them construct an events calendar for our area. I submitted our entire birding events calendar and they now have a statewide calendar of events up on their Website. It lists Chicago Area, Northwestern Illinois, and Southern Illinois calendars. For Northwestern Illinois, our club has the only events listed. These are the same events listed on the NCIOS Website’s calendar of events.

Hopefully this will give our bird club and birding area a little more exposure.

Link: IOS Birding Calendar

- Eddie

The meeting and field trip schedule has been updated. If there are any additions, changes, or errors, please email Eddie. Also, if you know of “target” birds for any of the field trips, please let Eddie know so he can add them to help promote the field trips.

Information about the Crane Count in April and the Spring Bird Count in May have been added to the website – www.ncios.org/birding.html.

As always, if there are any corrections, additions, or suggestions, please contact Eddie Callaway at birdfreak@birdfreak.com.

This is a reminder/update about the upcoming Earth Day happenings at Rock Valley College. NCIOS will be running a booth to talk about the birds in our area, conservation of bird habitat, and about our birding club. Currently there are only two members who are signed up to manage the booth – Jennifer Outcalt and myself. We would really like one or two (or more) people to come help us out. The event runs from 12:00 noon to 4:00 PM. If you could make it for any part of this time that would be great.

Full info:

Where: Rock Valley College, P.E. Center (PEC)
When: 12-4 PM on Saturday, April 21st
Details: We will have a booth with the club name and various materials. We are scheduled to have electricity and internet access so can hopefully display the blog/website and other birding materials. We are planning on having pencils, bookmarks and club info to pass out.

If you wish to join us, please call Jennie or me at 815-226-1051 or my cell 815-323-0011 ASAP. This is a great tool to reach potential new members and increase our ranks of birders and conservationists!

Here is a flyer that was sent to us:

Just to let everyone know, some information about finding “special” birds in our area has been added to the website under birding. Birds like Cerulean and Yellow-throated Warbler, Yellow-breasted Chat, Henslow’s Sparrow, Bell’s Vireo and more! Check it out and thanks to Barbara Williams for providing the info. It is our goal to add many details about our wonderful birds in Winnebago county (and beyond).

Also, the blog will now have more categories to choose from: individual categories for area birding spots – thus if you are reporting birds from a particular area, you can select the place as well as any other category. This will help because if someone clicks the category, they will get all posts (and sightings) under that category. **If you don’t see a birding spot on there, let me know so it can be added**

I’ve created a user name for eBird for the bird club. If anyone is interested in posting their sightings on this wonderful service, email me – birdfreak@birdfreak.com – for the user name and password.

eBird is a wonderful service that allows you to submit bird sightings via checklist format based on location (you set the location). What this does is it generates graphs that you can review, etc. I thought it would be cool if club members but sightings they had so we could have records of them for years to come. Here is an example graph (cropped to fit)

The data only began in March so it is a bit limited but you can see a bit how it works.

This blog is going to be great! I have had Tree Sparrows at my feeder in Stillman Valley for 2 months now – the first winter in years that they have stayed this long.

This blog is going to be great! I have had Tree Sparrows at my feeder in Stillman Valley for 2 months now – the first winter in years that they have stayed this long.

On behalf of the North Central Illinois Ornithological Society I would like to welcome you all to the NCIOS Blog. This blog was created as a way for area birders to connect with other birders to increase our birding enjoyment.

Birding is the fastest growing outdoor activity and provides endless amounts of joy. Northern Illinois has some of the finest birding in the midwest.

If you would like to contribute to the blog please contact me with your desired user name, your full name, email address, and password (you can always change this, but it is needed for setting up your profile):

Eddie Callaway – birdfreak@birdfreak.com