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Great Dismal Swamp Birding Festival
An experience anything but dismal!
© Rebecca Wynn/USFWS
Don’t let the name fool you -- the Great Dismal Swamp is alive with birds! Particularly at this time of year, lucky visitors will find newly arrived Neotropical migrants. In conjunction with International Migratory Bird Day, the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge will host its sixth annual Birding Festival, April 25-27, 2013. [Check the refuge website for information about the yearly festival: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_dismal_swamp/] Visitors can participate in guided bird walks, a photography workshop, a beginning birding class, and bird banding. Venture into parts of the refuge normally not open to the public, go birding by canoe, and prowl for owls at night. An experience anything but dismal!
BirdNote®
Great Dismal Swamp Birding Festival
By Todd Peterson
This is BirdNote.
[Swamp morning in Spring]
Don’t let the name fool you; the Great Dismal Swamp is alive with birds! At this time of year, lucky visitors will find newly arrived migratory songbirds like the Swainson’s Warbler.
[Song of Swainson’s Warbler]
In conjunction with International Migratory Bird Day, the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge will host its sixth annual Birding Festival, April 25th through the 27th (2013). [Check the refuge website for information about the yearly festival: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_dismal_swamp/]
The refuge offers migratory and resident birds a great expanse of unbroken habitat. Covering 113,000 acres straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, the refuge is a magnet for woodpeckers, owls and warblers such as the Prothonotary Warbler.
[Song of Prothonotary Warbler]
Twenty-five years of bird banding records show stable nesting populations of Neotropical migrants at a time when some are in decline across much of their range. [And just what is a “Neotropical migrant”? Well, it’s a bird that flies north in spring after wintering south of the Tropic of Cancer.]
Like many free birding festivals, visitors can participate in guided bird walks, a photography workshop, a beginning birding class, and bird banding. You can venture into parts of the refuge normally not open to the public, go birding by canoe and prowl for owls, like this Eastern Screech-Owl, at night. [Call of the Eastern Screech-Owl]
An experience anything but dismal!
To attend this festival or locate one near you, begin at birdnote.org.
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Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Song of Swainson’s Warbler [110271] recorded by W.L. Hershberger; song of Prothonotary Warbler [85160]; call of Eastern Screech-Owl [94516] by W.L. Hershberger.
Swamp soundscape morning and night recorded at Wambaw Swamp Wilderness, SC, by Gordon Hempton of QuietPlanet.com.
BirdNote's theme music was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2013 Tune In to Nature.org April 2013 Narrator: Michael Stein
ID# wetlands-02-2013-04-17wetlands-02
Check the refuge website for information about the yearly festival: https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_dismal_swamp/
Todd Peterson
Writer