[mou] MN CBC INVITATION

[Roger Schroeder]

I invite you to read the thoughts below, and further invite you to contact
your nearest CBC coordinator to see how you can help this upcoming CBC
Season.



Someone named Paul Egeland called me in early December 1995 asking if I
wanted to join him and his friends Lee and Joann French to help on something
called a Christmas Bird Count. I was new to birding in Minnesota, and did
want to meet other birders, so I accepted that invitation... and a whole new
world was opened to me.

>From accepting that invitation (and each additional invitation over the next
nine years) I have learned that winter birding in Minnesota does not have to
be reduced to looking out your window at feeders. By observing them in their
environment, I've learned some of the tactics birds use to survive the harsh
Minnesota winter winds. And I've been richly rewarded (I believe) with
spectacular winter sightings of Golden Eagle, Snowy Owl, Pine Grosbeak Hoary
Redpoll, 11 Western Meadowlarks, two Spotted Towhee, and Minnesota's first
CBC Eurasian Collared-Dove.

December 2003 brought an invitation from a man named Martin Kehoe, a retired
auto worker from Illinois who coordinates both the Baudette, and Beltrami
Island CBCs. His invitation to help on both counts included a free night's
lodging in his one-room cabin in the Beltrami Island State Forest. From
accepting that invitation I was treated with my most memorable winter
experience EVER! Imagine if you will, birding in a place so far removed from
man-made sounds that in the windless, quite, stillness you could actually
hear the snow fall.

December 2004, and another invitation - this time from Mark Alt with news
that KARE-11 wanted to do a story on the CBC. He invited me to tag along
with the KARE-11 crew, and although the news team was called off to an event
more "newsworthy" than invading winter owls, I had the joy of watching my
oldest two boys (ages 9 and 7) gaze with awe and wonder at their first ever
Northern Hawk-Owl, curiously study wolf tracks in the snow, and listen
intently to their grandpa spin wonderful stories of the birds he remembers
as a kid.

All this from accepting an invitation.

Roger Schroeder