monticello_bird_club_charlottesville_virginia

Welcome to The Monticello Bird Club
in Charlottesville, VA

   

The Monticello Bird Club is an informal group of about 150 people who join together to share their enthusiasm for birds. Our monthly meetings feature invited speakers from throughout the state who share their expertise with entertaining and informative presentations. 

Field trips with experienced leaders to local or distant sites take us to where the birds are. You don't have to be a member to join us on any of our birding field trips. Follow this link for information about our currently scheduled field trips.

    The 2008-2009 season marks the twenty third anniversary of the Monticello Bird Club. Our meetings and field trips are always open to the public without charge. If you want to learn more about how to identify birds, their behavior and their life histories, or if you just want to talk to others with similar interests, then please join us soon on a field trip or at a meeting.

Please note our new meeting time is 7:00 pm.

The Monticello Bird Club will hold the monthly meetings at 7:00 p.m. on the second Thursday of each month, September through June. The location is the Education Building at Ivy Creek Natural Area,  familiar to many  as the location of the First Saturday Bird Walks. The Ivy Creek Natural Area is on Earlysville Road about a half mile from the intersection of Hydraulic Road, just before the reservoir. Plenty of parking, compatible natural setting, easy access. See you there at future meetings! 
Click here for a map
to the Ivy Creek Natural Area (with dial-up connection approx. 20 sec. to load image).

Read our current newsletter online here.
The editor of the MBC Newsletter welcomes submissions including articles, photographs
and notices. Please email information to Doug Rogers at mbcnews@embarqmail.com or call Doug at 434-409-8156.


Join us at our February 11th Meeting.
Who needs pollination?

This month’s topic, “Who needs pollination,” is a very timely one. Much of our everyday food and all of our flowering plants rely on pollination. Wind is one effective pollinator but our
world is filled with others: bats, birds, bees of all sizes and descriptions, even ants, beetles, and wasps. The flowering plants have developed ways to attract pollinators, and the pollinators have developed their strategies to accomplish what the plant needs.

Today we recognize that pollinators are in trouble. That trouble comes not only from us and our actions on this planet but also from the vagaries of Mother Nature. Pollinators now need
our help and we can easily provide that help.

Our presenter, Ann Harman, had a career as a research chemist. This was followed by being Head of the Science Department at a private school. However, due to her lifelong interest in
honey bees she now serves as a volunteer teaching beekeeping skills and modern management techniques in Third-World Countries. To date she has worked in 29 countries on five continents for a total of 51 assignments. She has received the President’s Volunteer
Service Award three times. She has served in several international volunteer organizations helping to increase the incomes of some of the poorest people on earth and also to
those countries that had been denied access to developing technologies.

She is a member of national, regional, state and local beekeeping associations and hold offices in several of these. She is an Eastern Apicultural Society Certified Master Beekeeper. She actively teaches beekeeping in the USA in numerous courses and lectures at beekeeping
association meetings. She is an active member of the Na tional Honey Board, an agricultural
marketing board. She is a contributing author for Bee Culture, a national beekeeping
magazine, and for two international beekeeping journals. She is coeditor of Bee Craft America.
She has her own hives of honey bees. These hives are part of a teaching apiary used to teach youth about the value of honey bees as pollinators of our Virginia crops. Honey bees serve to enhance gardens and wildlife forage here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.


birder's guide to charlottesvilleIf you are looking for places to go birding around Charlottesville, then take a look at

The Birder's Guide to Charlottesvile and Vicinity.

This 34 page booklet was first published by the Monticello Bird Club in 2003. It has been updated to some extent, but not all information has been verified to be accurate at this time. Please let us know if you find that conditions have changed for any of the sites described here. You can download it and print sections of it as you like. Enjoy the birding !

To view or print this booklet you will need the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe. If you don't already have it you can download it here:
acrobat reader

The Monticello Bird Club Photo of the Month
Please submit your photos to kk@ecoventurestravel.com for a future newsletter.



Fiedl trip to Dutch Gap

All members are encouraged to submit photos !

To submit your photo(s) for Photo of the Month just attach it as a jpeg file (.jpg or .jpeg extension) and email it to Ken at: kk@ecoventurestravel.com.
Please include a brief caption for the photo: what it is, where it was taken, under what circumstances, or whatever you find most interesting about the photo. Photos may be cropped and resized as necessary to fit the available space.

 

THE MONTICELLO BIRD ALERT
Rapid Information Exchange about Rare Bird Sightings in Our Area !


The MonticelloBirdAlert provides birders in Central Virginia with an opportunity to post sightings of rare and interesting birds spotted in Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and surrounding counties. Members of the group should only post sightings of birds that are sited on public property or viewed from public roadways. Members may also post a siting of a bird on private property, if the landowner has granted express permission for you to make such a posting to this group.
Since its inception, birds reported on the MonticelloBirdAlert have included the Loggerhead Shrike, Fox Sparrow, Common Goldeneye, Horned Grebe, Horned Lark, Red Headed Woodpecker, American Woodcock, Surf Scoter, Glossy Ibis, Dunlin, American Bittern, and many more!


To join the group, please follow these steps: 
1) Go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/monticellobirdalert/
2) Click on the button: Join this Group
3) If you have a Yahoo ID, sign in and go to "Step 5"
4) If you don't have a Yahoo ID, click on the link: Sign Up.  (It's free.) 
5) Fill in the required information, read the terms of the agreement, and signify your agreement by clicking on "I Agree".
6) Once your a member, you can post messages by sending messages to monticellobirdalert@yahoogroups.com
7) Remember the cardinal rule (stated above) about respecting private property rights.

Please note: When you sign up, you'll have the opportunity to see individual messages or receive a daily digest of messages.  The individual messages will enable you to see photographs posted with email messages, however the daily digest does not enable photographs to be seen.  Since the MonticelloBirdAlert only provides a trickle of a small handful of messages a day, we suggest that you set up your account to receive individual messages.


Check out this link to the Macaulay Library, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, for 80 years of recordings of animal sounds and behavior, including 67% of the world's bird species. FREE. Click Here.

 

2009-2010
Board Members

President: Stauffer Miller;
stauffer@seepub.com
434-296-5505

Vice President: Jim Hill; jimcarhill@comcast.net
434-975-6523

Secretary: Peggy Cornett; pcornett@monticello.org
434-984-9816 

Treasurer: Henry Konat,; henryk54@verizon.net
540-948-4771

Field Trips: Stauffer Miller;
stauffer@seepub.com
434-296-5505
434-974-9293.

Programs: Pat Wilczek, pat.wilczek@comcast.net
434-985-4444.

Publicity: Ellen Dudley, emdudley@nexet.net 
434-244-2688.

Hospitality: Priscilla Kingston; Kingston@cstone.net
434-293-5173 

Newsletter: Doug Rogers
mbcnews@embarqmail.com
434-409-8156

Membership: Jim Nix
jim-nix@comcast.net
434-973-7366 

Birdseed Sales; Jim Hill jimcarhill@comcast.net
434-975-6523

 

 

Newsletter Submissions:

 Deadline for submissions to the newsletter is the 18th of the month preceding publication. Please email information to Amy Gilmer at akgilmer@comcast.net
or call her at 825-2170.