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Binoculars & Habitats: Birds, Migration, and the Nature Around Us 02-23-2026
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In celebration of the Howard County Bird Club's 54th year, Rachann talks with club president Val Swan and longtime club member Bonnie Ott about the rhythms, surprises, and hidden patterns that shape the lives of birds across our landscapes. We highlight the connections between birds, plants, pollinators, and habitat diversity. It’s a conversation that invites listeners to slow down, look closer, and rediscover the living world around them.
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Audio file
RCP Podcast Howard Co Bird Club Total Release Date 2-23-26.mp3
Transcript
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Today, as always, we have a set of fun and interesting guests.
Could you ladies introduce yourself?
You're from the Howard County Bird Club.
My name is Val Swan and I'm the president of the Howard County Bird Club.
And I am Bonnie Ott, a longtime member of the Howard County Bird Club and very excited to be here.
And I have to say for all of our listeners, these two ladies have been incredibly generous.
Our first recording did not go well.
I appreciate you both for coming back.
You are part of the Howard County Bird Club.
What is that, and how did it form?
Wow, so we're in our 54th year.
Is the Ornithological Society only in Maryland, or is it a national organization?
And then there are big universal groups.
groups that people might also become members of.
But our club is one of many chapters in Maryland, and not every county has its own chapter.
But Howard County is one of the largest chapters member-wise.
What do you think makes the Howard County chapter so involved?
huge variety of things that we offer people.
So there's something for everyone.
We have a variety of different types of field trips.
Regular, we have field trips for beginners.
We have a whole young birder division where it's students taking other students out for field trips.
So that's a great wing of the bird club, so to speak.
And then we have field trips that target specific birds like owls or woodcocks.
Or if you have mobility issues, we have feeder watches.
There's a little bit of everything that's offered.
We play games, wingspan, bird trivia.
We're involved with eco events.
I think there's something to please all peoples out there.
A huge chapter of field trips are going to be butterfly related.
So we do field trips that might involve looking at dragonflies, wildflowers.
So we are primarily a bird club, but as anybody will tell you, birding is the gateway into nature.
And those other natural creatures are part of the environment that help sustain the birds.
All important stuff, really important things.
I don't know why I'm wearing a hat, but I'm wearing a hat, and I'm setting out somewhere.
If you have specific birds you're looking for, you're going to look in the habitat where they would
It depends on what you're looking for.
Are there certain times of the year?
When I see myself putting a hat on, it's because it's sunny.
And I guess that means it's summer when I'm heading out to do this.
But every season has different birds.
That's part of the beauty of birdwatching is the unfolding of migration and the seasons.
And by the way, we wear our hats year round.
You just don't want that glare.
But the unfolding of the seasons is really awesome.
It's part of what keeps birdwatching interesting throughout the year as things change.
So you'd have to understand migration.
to understand the unfolding of the birds.
So migration is the northern movement of birds, mostly at night, and they're going to their...
The Arctic tern greater than 50,000 miles per year travel.
Does that mean they're going around the Arctic?
What does the Arctic tern mean?
So the Arctic tern travels from one pole to the next for migration.
So northern breeding, southern wintering.
Okay, the north to south migration?
Birds that are out now, maybe you've seen the dark-eyed junco at your feeder.
Little gray bird with a pink bill and a white belly.
I like how your eyes light up when you say these.
And then some birds are just migrating by passing
So you're only going to see them for three weeks or four weeks in May as they're traveling N.
Cape May warbler comes to mind.
So you'll see Cape May warbler in May and then also in September.
When it makes the return trip.
When it makes the return trip, exactly.
So you'll see different birds, different
So we have an advantage of seeing some of those birds that would not normally come down here.
And so we're kind of waiting for that first one to show up.
I know we've had listeners e-mail in and say, is it the robins?
What does the woodcock look like?
It's a stout little shorebird with an extremely long, heavy bill.
Would we see it in the Frederick, Maryland, Howard County area if it's a shorebird?
Yes, it's a very interesting shorebird that actually has nothing to do with the water.
And so the colloquial name is Timberdoodle, and so the club
They do this little pink, pink, and then they fly up in the air, do these cool
incredible spirals and then come back down to the ground.
And if you go to where they flew up from, they'll land in exactly that spot.
So you can be right there when they land in front of you.
Robins aren't the first to come back in our area.
So much of the myth around says spring happens when the first robins return.
No, there's other birds that are the sentinels.
So robins really do spend the winter here, but they change their habits.
And often in the wintertime, they're in larger flocks and they're in the woodlands.
So people don't necessarily notice them or see them.
There are some what's called leapfrog migrations.
So our robins may go to Virginia,
Pennsylvania robins may come to us.
There's a little bit of a shifting with these birds, but they do stay here all winter.
You brought up something I'm sure many of us have seen, but maybe not know what we're seeing.
No, and the word for that is murmuration.
which is actually an introduced species, but they will create those beautiful flocks.
And that's actually a defensive mechanism that would confuse a predator when they move like that.
It makes it appear like it's one large organism.
And say the word again for me.
like fish, it's a murmuration of birds.
When the migration starts, we just have birds moving everywhere.
What do you think attracts people to bird watching?
It's probably not the hat and the binoculars and the field guide that I'm heading out with.
It's probably something more that keeps them coming back.
For me, it's the love of outdoors to being
And the movie The Big Year addresses that.
You can birdwatch alone or you can birdwatch in a group.
Birds are beautiful and their behavior is just fascinating.
Do those behaviors, we've talked about migration, but do those behaviors of the birds signal things?
Does the movement of the birds that you're seeing
There's always something fascinating happening.
Winter has been very hard on a lot of birds with the snow and ice on the ground.
And you're like, okay, spring is here.
He's singing, trying to attract his first mate.
Well, there's the social aspect of being part of a club.
But there's also a sense of not only community there, but participating in conservation projects.
Bird Club is involved with a lot of conservation projects and also some research projects.
So the cat population affects the bird population.
It's one of the three main causes of avian death is outdoor cats.
feral colonies, but people that let their cats outdoors.
And as I said, even if they're well fed, they hunt.
And then there's bird strikes on windows is another cause of avian death.
We have information about that on our website.
And then we have all kinds of other conservation efforts to create more habitat.
We put in an 11-acre pollinator meadow along
And then we've built a shorebird habitat on a private farm.
When we come back, can we talk about the larger purpose of ornithological societies?
Welcome back to Raising Connections.
Today we're talking with two folks from
from the Howard County Bird Club.
How did you personally get involved?
How did you get where you are?
How did you end up in the bird club?
So the passion was created by my father, who was a nature lover.
I was one of the children that grew up in the woods and loved
birds in nature from very early on.
And so I went for my first bird convention in Frostburg, Maryland.
Just absolutely took me down the path of lifelong love of birds and birding.
And so ever since then, I have been birding every day, and it is one of the passions of my life.
know when that spark is going to hit somebody?
I was very lucky getting into the club when I was young, and I had so many mentors.
To this day, they are still my best friends that encouraged me, helped me, taught me.
people explore and become familiar with birds and birding.
And we do small groups where we go out just as friends to the more organized field trips.
What are some of those projects?
We have done three different breeding bird atlases for Maryland.
And in fact, Maryland was the first breeding bird atlas ever done.
it in my 45 years of birding here.
You know, if you go back to the 1900s, we didn't have cardinals here.
Cardinals are a bird that has moved its range northward and is still doing so.
Same with, like, tufted titmouse, Carolina wren.
A lot of these birds were more southern species and now have become our common birds here.
and we're getting new birds all the time that I never expected to see here.
Some birds that have been coming up like anhinga, we had black-bellied whistling duck.
Do you think they've moved north or have they expired?
They unfortunately are extirpated due to probably habitat loss is the number one reason.
Do you see the birds paying attention to the master plans?
I think Val could expand on if you build it, they will come.
And if you create habitat, as the club has done with the wetland area at Waterford.
With that, I have two questions that are just hot and burning for me.
Every year, I have one particular fruit tree that I battle bagworms in that one particular tree.
Am I providing habitat, or are those bagworms part of what the wrens might need?
So, for example, there's a bird that we have here, the yellow-billed cuckoo.
So I would leave the caterpillars because they will really help certain species of birds.
That's absolutely fascinating.
So I guess I have to ask this question.
When I was in school, again, going back to my
education, I was taught about owl balls and I mistakenly thought that that meant a round owl.
That is not what that meant at all.
Owl pellets are regurgitated bones, teeth, etc.
actually identify an owl based on the type of bones and teeth found in the pellet.
In the Midwest, everybody I knew called them owl balls.
It was the first time I moved out this way.
I realized that they were called pellets and I was looking for something extruded like food.
like Val said, tell what species of creatures the owl has eaten because of the pellet.
And I would go to collect their pellets, and they almost always were crayfish.
Crayfish shell was what they were primarily feeding on.
We can learn so much about our environment and what's going on and how everything works together.
You can always learn from other people.
In fact, I learn from Bonnie every time I'm in her presence.
I didn't know about the stomach lining of the yellow-billed cuckoo, so thank you for that, Bonnie.
I mean, there's so much to learn about birdwatching.
I think that's, there's an arch just to bird watching.
And then the behaviors and the migration, the field marks, there's an intellectual challenge there.
The second one was, should we be using backyard bird feeders?
I've heard this is controversial, but maybe not.
Do we use these or do we not use these?
Do we not put out the bird, how do we do this?
Certainly this winter, feeders have been extremely important for the birds because of the ice cover.
You just need to make sure that you keep your feeders clean and full.
Last year, I learned a lot about the hummingbirds and what happened if the feeders weren't clean.
How do you clean a bird feeder?
So sometimes you see very beautiful decorative hummingbird feeders
that are blown glass, and they're just impossible to clean.
So we usually recommend getting something that's very easy to dishwasher clean.
And then the most important thing is to change the nectar frequently.
In the summertime, I change mine every other day.
And the same thing with your maybe tube feeder or platform feeder.
Are the birds also sharing what they bring with them on their migratory paths or in their diets?
They will eat all of those foods.
Unfortunately, then they will spread them by their movements and then when they're
leaving their droppings, those seeds can germinate.
So they are spreading those non-native plants.
It sounds like we have another program to do.
We have some more education and learning.
And you know, every time you make those connections,
your mind goes, I wonder about that.
For me, pulkweed is one of the things that we used to eat when it was very young.
And then as it grew, it was not okay to eat.
And then Elvis Presley sang about it.
And then we would come in and we would be covered in the ink from the pulkberries.
You both have so many bird experiences and so many bird stories.
I'm going to ask the hardest question of them all.
It's the white-breasted nuthatch.
Flashy little bird, small, easy to identify, has an interesting little voice.
It goes ha, ha, ha, which sounds French to me.
And they have this behavioral characteristic, which is unique to nuthatches.
But they walk face first down the tree trunks.
And I just find that really cool.
I have to admit, those are one of my favorites.
I was always so impressed by that.
Well, I have to go back to my first birding convention when I saw my first Lincoln's sparrow.
So I love our native sparrows.
To me, they are just an exquisite group of birds with
their subtle, beautiful, soft, brown, russet, coppery tones.
And that, to me, has been with me all.
all my life remembering seeing that Lincoln sparrow that first time when I was 16 years old.
And I think the beauty of native sparrows are that they really make you pay attention.
You can't just go to a field guide when you see a sparrow and figure it out.
You have to learn the nuance of the bird.
Oh, well, first of all, you don't need to be a member to attend any of our events.
Everyone is welcome, and we have loaner binoculars.
If you need them, we can arrange for that.
We have a website, Howard County Bird Club, and a calendar with our events listed.
There's a Contact Me at the bottom of the
If you have any questions, you're welcome to ask, and we'd love to have people come with us.
It's been wonderful being here.
I hope you as our listener have had a really, ooh, that was a neat connection moment.
Go ahead and look at some birds today.
We'll make some more connections.