Birding Despite Disability

Edit: This event has been rescheduled. Details here.

I am going to do my first event with Birdability this Saturday, March 13 at 9:00 Central. This will be their third installment in a series meant to highlight accessible birding sites, raise awareness of accessibility issues, and hopefully provide some live images of birds in the process. Videos of their previous outings can be found here.

I plan to broadcast from Hyland Lake Park Reserve, in my home town of Bloomington. This site is the number six hotspot in Hennepin county, with 212 species (the number one hotspot here has 253, as it features lots of shorebird habitat, which Hyland does not have). I bird Hyland all the time because I can walk there in about ten minutes from my house. Since I cannot drive, and with the relatively poor public transportation options in this part of the Twin Cities, this is where I am constrained to go when my wife is busy (which is almost always these days).

Birding here in March is not predictable, but we do have a consistent winter visitor at Hyland every year that is always a pleasure to see: a Northern Shrike. Hopefully I’ll find it and get it digiscoped live during the event. I usually see it on about half of my visits there. The photo above shows a shrike at Hyland – I took that in March of 2020.