Birding with Kenn and Kimberly

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: In a few days, the Midwest Birding Symposium (MBS) will roll into Lakeside, Ohio, for the fourth time.   I spoke at the first one there, in 1997, and Kimberly attended the one in 1999, but we didn’t know each other then.   We were both involved when the MBS came back to Lakeside in 2009, and we’ll be even more heavily involved this time: for example, we’re giving a keynote talk together on Friday morning, September 16th.   And Black Swamp Bird Observatory and Kaufman Field Guides are sharing one of the major booth spaces in the vendor hall.   We’ll hope to see many of you at the Symposium! If you attend, you’re bound to have a good time, no matter which of the many alternative activities you choose. But there are a few simple things you can do that will make your visit good for the birds, as well as for you. I’ll describe a few of them, in separate posts. 1. Go talk to Birds & Beans. This company is a sponso...

From back home in Ohio already, Kenn writes: I had a whirlwind weekend, giving three talks in two days, in three very different settings. On Saturday I would get to address an audience of about 300 at the "Shreve Migration Sensation"; on Friday night it was a smaller audience of the top movers and shakers of Audubon’s statewide organization in New York; but in this post I want to talk about what happened Friday afternoon. The Friday afternoon event was a small gathering, by invitation only, organized by Nancy Castillo and Lois Geshiwim, owners of the Wild Birds Unlimited store in Saratoga Springs, New York. These two had decided some time ago that they wanted to promote the idea of shade-grown, bird-friendly coffee. They had started using their store and their website to educate their customers about this issue, describing how coffee grown in traditional shade plantations supported large populations of native birds, while factory farms of sun-grown coffee would support essen...

From home base in Ohio, Kenn writes: Last weekend, Kim was posting updates while I was away in Massachusetts promoting shade-grown coffee. She promised that I would provide more info on that, so I’m here to make an honest woman out of her. Black-throated Green Warbler: often winters in coffee plantations in Central America If you read Bird Watcher’s Digest (and you should!), you may have seen my column in the Jan / Feb 2009 issue, talking about coffee. To recount it briefly: as a birder in my early twenties, I spent a lot of time birding in Mexico in winter, and I soon found that coffee plantations were great birding spots. These were farms growing coffee the traditional way, in deep shade. The growers (usually family groups or villages) would clear out the undergrowth in native forest and plant coffee bushes, tending to their crops by hand. My friends and I found that such spots were full of birds, both local tropical species and many migrants from the north. All winter I could enj...