New Egypt Day Festival and friends

We here at Vagrants, Vagabonds, and migrant Visitor birds met and greeted hundreds of people at our Bluebird awareness table this past Saturday, May 16th, in Plumsted township.  It was a beautiful day and we met some beautiful people of the community. 

What was surprising or not too surprising was the amount of people that showed such great interest in our town’s Eastern Bluebird population and the bewilderment on the faces of some when we told them of the existence of these bright balls of blue in our area.  One of our driving passions is to reach people, children in particular, and encourage that curiosity and new found interest in bird watching.  At the festival we raffled off 2 copies of Kenn Kauffman’s bird field guides( English and Spanish versions) and a Bluebird basket containing a Bluebird book by the Stokes.

After the close of the festival we determined the winners and contacted one of the families that had won the Bluebird basket.  Their daughter Lawron had won the basket and my wife had asked them, “If they wanted to see a Bluebird at Colliers Mills WMA?”  We gained so much inspiration and satisfaction from the experience of sharing the afternoon bird walk with this family of 4. 

 The Bluebirds weren’t hard to find and neither were the smiles on the two young girls’ faces as they got up close views of nature and built lifetime memories of first ever sightings of our Avian friends.  One of my favorite quotes is from author Richard Louv, “We only value what we know and what we love.”  That’s plain common sense.  But seeing how much a brief walk in the woods can do for a family is inspirational; shared experiences, learned passions and respect, and lifetime memories.  The lesson of the day is to go birding, and take a friend or in our case a whole new family of friends.  A brief list of our highlight birds are below.

Location: Colliers Mills WMA

Observation date: 5/16

Notes: Sunny late afternoon.

Life birds for new found friends: 6

Eastern Bluebird

Eastern Kingbird

Eastern Phoebe

Great Blue Heron

Baltimore Oriole

Life bird for me even: 1

Common Nighthawk-flying in a clear sunny sky over the lake