I had the great opportunity to give of talks at the Bridger Raptor Festival. This festival is a great educational event with many great exhibits and live rehab birds, including the Turkey Vulture that once threw up on me. The talks went well with great attendance. It has been a long time since the last time I spoke publicly, and it felt good to get back up on that horse.

An article from BirdLife International is announcing the great news that a recently undertaken survey of White-shouldered Ibis Pseudibis davisoni has revealed a record count of 310 individuals. It is always good to hear a bit of good news when we seem to be deluged with gloom and doom.

Every year, Montana birders descend upon on Freezout Lake, between Fairfield and Choteau, during the last weekend of March or first weekend of April. Why do we show up in the out of the way part of the state? White geese…10,000’s of Snow Geese. It is a scene that is only experience of few times in a full life, the simultaneous lift-off of a 100,000 or more Snow Geese at once and the incoming waves of returning geese.

Today on Facebook and Twitter, I posted a status, "Daylight Savings Time = Birding Time". Upon reflecting on this statement and the responses from friends, I would like to examine this premise a little further.

With the springing forward of the clock, we birders have a couple of uniquely useful resulting circumstances that benefit most of us greatly. First, we can catch the dawn chorus an hour later in the day. The birds are still stirring with the rising sun as they always have done, but we get the illusion of an extra hour of sleep in warm beds before don our birding apparel. Second, we have that glorious extra hour of daylight after the workday. It is now possible to run out the door with binoculars in hand and rejuvenate ourselves with avian company after a day at the proverbial grindstone.

Daylight Savings Time is Birding Time!