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that colony of Acorn Woodpeckers known to be there. Hour after hour, we travel east, driving and stopping, driving and stopping, looking for the next species.
With all the stops, we finally make it to Burns around sundown, just in time to checkout the ponds and wetlands, happy in spite of the mosquitoes. After a dinner in one of Burns' better restaurants, we pile back into the van and drive the last hour in the dark to Malheur to stay in a WPA barracks for the night. Malheur was one of the very first Wildlife Refuges created by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 to protect the Egrets and Sandhill Cranes, which nest there in great numbers.
After too short of a night, we drag ourselves out of our sleeping bags around 3:30 am so we can get out to a lek before dawn to catch the Sage Grouse males in their courting display. Then it is non-stop birding around the refuge until it is time to head back to Portland.
Eventually, how you do is dependent on how good your team is at locating birds, how good of an ear for bird songs and calls team members have, how hard you work to get that extra bird and how much of that mysterious factor known as birding karma you have. People with good birding karma always see that bird that everyone else missed. We have a birder in Portland with serious birding karma who not only IDs birds no one else sees, but also seems to attract rare birds. What else explains why the only Rhinoceros Auklet on the coast would float by Yaquina Head when he shows up?
Birdathons are incredibly effective in raising funds for Audubon and are for avid birders worth every hour spent looking for another bird. They are fun, competitive, and attract people with obsessive personalities that like looking for birds. If you are lucky, you will find yourself on a trip with some great birders who can teach you a lot about birding. And if you don't want to participate yourself, you can contact your local Audubon society to find a group to sponsor. After all, it is for a good cause.
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