Birds & Birding
For more than twenty years we've been busy in many activities related to birds, such as, watching, feeding, trapping and banding, photographing, etc. Like many others, our interests evolved from just watching birds in our backyards and gardens to backyard feeding. This led to involvment with local chapters of national birding clubs that sponsored educational programs and forrays. As we became more experienced, we began taking birding vacations, by ourselves and with others, to world-reknown birding destinations such as Cape May, New Jersey; the Rio Grande Valley, Texas; south-eastern Arizona; Snake River Canyon, Idaho; Chincoteague, Virginia; Everglades National Park, Florida; Veracruz, Mexico; and most recently the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador.
The beauty of living in Northern Virginia is that we are located along a major avian migration corridor, the Atlantic Flyway, where during the Spring and Fall migration millions of birds travel to and from their wintering grounds in the south to their breeding grounds in the north. Several wildlife refuges, parks and management areas have been established along the east coast to protect habitat deemed important to the migrating birds during their travels north and south. These protected areas are prime viewing locations where a birder can see thousands, if not millions of birds during the peak of migration. In the Mid-Atlantic region, we've had the privelege of visiting many, but not all of these areas, including Chincoteague NWR, Bombay Hook NWR, Edwin B. Forsythe (formerly Brigantine) NWR, and Cape May Point.