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.

If 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: