Allegany & Garrett Counties' Bird Club blogs

Upcoming Schedule

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:49:50 -0400

I'm trying to finish the 2007-2008 schedule. We have some interesting new ideas for the upcoming year and I'm pretty excited to try these new ideas. First off we are planning a movie night (probably in September). We will watch an episode of the BBC special "Planet Earth". Then we are also planning to have an amateur photographer night where we will look at slides contributed by our membership. For the banquet Dr. Gwen Brewer and George Jett will be giving a presentation on "Birding in Columbia". We also have world traveler Hank Kaestner coming to talk in January. We also have some local talent including David Yeany who is studying Bird Communities and Habitat at Finzel Swamp while at FSU and Dan Feller (MD DNR) who will talk about the Allegheny Woodrat in Maryland.

This year's May Count

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 21:15:01 -0400

I was more than a little disappointed in the turnout that I received for this years Allegany May Count. I had to ask compiler Fran Pope how she was able to get 48 participants to our 8. Admittedly, I don't do much advertising for the count so perhaps it would help to get this in the paper. Incidentally the Garrett May Count had a banner year this year with 150 species! I'm envious of those numbers.

Comparison with the CBC
I don't usually have much territory to divy out on the Christmas Count because the circle is small, much of it is in West Virginia, and much of it is downtown Cumberland. Birding in downtown Cumberland isn't usually very productive unless we are trying to up our Starling, House Sparrow and Rock Pigeon numbers. Feeder counters help out quite a bit and rarities have been known to show up at feeders in the winter time ! I can never have enough feeder counters on the CBC (as long as they are in the circle). I may have found some help covering WV by posting to the West Virginia Birds Listserv. I have a list of folks to try and contact next year. I have tried covering it when nobody else does, but I'm sure I don't know that area very well.

Spam

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 22:15:46 -0500

I don't know if anyone else has ever seen the effects of this, but this website has been routinely hit by spammers. They create an account and fill it with links to websites that have nothing to do with the bird club. I've dealt with this by simply going in and deleting the bogus account. This is why I've decided to change the policy for creating an account on this site. From now on a new subscriber will need to be approved by me before they can complete the creation of their account. Hopefully that will end the problem. Existing accounts will not be affected.

My Zeiss Binoculars

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 15:40:33 -0400

My Zeiss Binoculars have finally had it. The focusing mechanism is completely jammed. It started to get stuck over a year ago but I could work it loose enough to use by moving it back and forth a few times. I may have to send the bins back to the manufacturer. My inclination is to NOT try to lubricate the mechanism myself but I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this. Is there some kind of lubricant that I could use that wouldn't damage the binoculars or is the mechanism too well encased to apply anything from the outside ... or would lubricant potentially damage the binoculars ?

Fair Hill NRMA

Sat, 10 Sep 2005 05:10:31 -0400

I just read that there is a plan afoot to turn Fair Hill Natural Resources Management Area into a Horse Park. For those of you who don't know, Fair Hill is a treasure to the birders in and near Cecil County. For more information, see the following two websites.
www.savefairhill.com
www.savececil.org

Blogging

Thu, 08 Sep 2005 21:37:52 -0400

Wow ... ok ... you found my blog. Not much here yet. I'm working on making it possible for all of you to create your own soapbox. For now you can make comments on my Blog.

Blogging is one reason I decided to use "Drupal" (that and the fact that the Sys-Admin at the Appalachian Lab is wild about this Drupal stuff). Ok I'm having fun poking fun but all in all I think this was a good idea for the club web page. I feel like I have all the power to create static pages like one might with Dreamweaver or my personal favorite html editor (Notepad) and we all have this additional ability to blog and/or post to a forum.