where natural history meets art
August is a great month for growing and fattening up… especially if you’re a bird! We have some great pollinator plantings around the museum, which supports insects, which makes for plenty of food for many birds. We’re lucky enough this month to see and hear some of them—and some surprises too!
The most relaxed birding around. And around and around …
How many birds (and birdwatchers) can we identify from a 17-foot diameter circle between sunrise and sunset? Can we beat last year’s record? We’ve seen birds big and small, in night and day: from Kinglets to Great Blue Herons, Barred Owls to Turkey Vultures.
This is a great long-running community science project. Pledges and donations welcome:
We are observing from Dawn to Dusk. The Museum is open from 10am – 4pm.
Call or email to ask about joining the observation team.
For much more info, see https://www.thebigsit.org/ .
Check out the reports from previous years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 (overall), 2021 (ours), 2022 (overall), 2022 (ours), 2023 (overall), 2023 (ours), 2024 (overall)
July is a month of rich growth: baby birds grow rapidly! By the time we see most of them, they are often nearly adults. It’s a amazing how some come into adult plumage patterns, while others spend a season or even years in juvenile colors (looking at you, id-resistant young hawks).
Wowie zowie, what a bird list! I guess June is really the month from “So Much Singing” to “Oooh Babies at the Feeder”!
May is such a bursting month! Birds, birds, buds, buds. We’ve held our regular monthly monitoring walk, and our weekly Early Birder Morning walks, and of course been amazed but what we see and hear. Next year, we might hold the first two Early Birder walks at 7:30 or 8 am (it can be a little slow and chilly at 7); let us know what you think about that!
April can a be a bit of a slog for some of us (mud… warm … cold … more mud), but we have the treat of early migrants and brightening feathers and spring blooms!
Noisy Wood Frogs, busy Chipmunks, and some nifty Sparrows!
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
We love sharing
birds with you.
We had a relatively cold stretch of weather this January, which can lead to extra activity at the feeders. Perhaps that explains the one unusual sighting?
Visit us February 14th, 2026, to see what birds we’re counting for the Great Backyard Bird Count!
We’re open from 10-4 on Saturday for the GBBC
Members admission: Free!
About the GBBC:Friday – Monday, February 13-16, 2026 • All Over the World
From the Great Backyard Bird Count website:
Launched in 1998 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society, the Great Backyard Bird Count was the first online citizen-science project to collect data on wild birds and to display results in near real-time.
Since then, more than 100,000 people of all ages and walks of life have joined the four-day count each February to create an annual snapshot of the distribution and abundance of birds.
For more info visit Great Backyard Bird Count website