Tweet, Tweet, It's National Bird Day

Name five species in your backyard!
Our January calendar asks if you can name five bird species in your neighborhood, can you? I can identify the chickadee, blue jay, dove, seagull, and yellow finch. And though I can identify the birds by sight, identifying them by birdsong is quite another thing. What about you? The National Bird Day website has a birdsong quiz, see how well you do!

A few years ago I experimented with drawing birds and came up with a sketch that is one continuous line (plumage added). The image above is from earlier attempts, too many lines. The image below is drawn with one line. The drawings are fun to color and embellish (different eyes and added plumage create entirely different personalities). If you're interested, you can download a coloring page here and if you'd like more pages to color, sign-up on our home page for access to two more coloring pages.

Birding can be a casual hobby or consuming passion. Serious birders enter local and world-wide competitions, can identify birds by sight and sound, and travel great distances to see rare species. For the complete newbie,  The Big Year, starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson, offers some (Hollywood) insight into what it takes to win what is a real competition.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to the American Bird Association.

Chirp, chirp!