Double Coverage

Maybe it was all the twos in 2022, but when this year began, my management of the Facebook page for the Black Hills Audubon Society hit a fitting milestone.

On May 22, 2019, I started managing the page. At that time, it had amassed 364 followers in a little more than seven years. By January 1, 2022, that number had doubled to 728.

To add to the excitement, January 2022 has given the page a good start toward the next 364. Already this month, the page has 21 new followers.

The growth during the last 32 months means a lot to me. It is great to see my work having an impact, and it is equally satisfying watching the organization's Facebook coverage expand.

You could say it's twice as nice when achievements like this go toward a good cause.

More Birds of a Feather

Facebook pages of bird-watching groups don't have followers; they have flocks. And the flock following the page for the Black Hills Audubon Society (BHAS) grew a lot last year.

In 2019, I started managing the BHAS Facebook page. As I reported last year, the page saw some encouraging results in the first eight months.

I am happy to report that the trend continued in 2020. From February 1, 2020, to February 1, 2021, the number of followers went from 472 to 619, an increase of 31.1 percent. Furthermore, from my first day back on May 22, 2019, the followers have increased 70.1 percent. Page likes show similar trends, increasing 29.5 percent (417 to 540) from February 1, 2020, to February 1, 2021, and 57.4 percent overall from May 22, 2019.

Despite having fewer birding events in 2020 because of COVID-19, the BHAS Facebook page continued attracting attention. I am proud of the results and look forward to continued growth in 2021.

I'll do my best to keep people flocking in.

Cooped Up? Learn from the Birds

Since the COVID-19 coronavirus has limited our movements these days, it's a good time to look to the birds for lessons and inspiration, and that goes double for children and their parents.

Juvenile tree swallow.

An innovative idea from the National Audubon Society has perfectly responded to this new stay-at-home world, giving children and parents wonderful tools for learning and staying connected to the environment. Titled Audubon for Kids!, the program provides online access to lessons, activities, and a wealth of information about birds.

Audubon for Kids! is a science-based approach to learning with an emphasis on engagement that puts the world of birds within reach of the Internet. Of the program, the National Audubon Society says, "We’ve adapted classroom science curriculum for at-home learning and created lots of birdy DIY projects to stir your family’s curiosity and bring the joy and wonder of the natural world to your home."

This is an important time for everyone, especially children, to stay engaged with the environment. Nature has a lot of enrichment it can provide to our lives, and birds are among its best ambassadors. Check out Audubon for Kids! here.

When our wings are clipped, we look to those who fly free.

A Big Leap Day

What's one more day? This year, it means February sightings of violet-green swallows and a northern saw-whet owl.

If this had been a normal year, my last February addition to my yearly birding list would have been a pine siskin on February 27. Not too bad. Pine siskins are an understated bird with a fun song and a flash of color for those who look closely enough. This being a leap year though, last month ended in an unusually spectacular fashion.

A violet-green sighting in February would have been enough to merit recognition for February 29, 2020. I was shocked to see the birds on my jog. They were two weeks earlier than I have ever seen their species before. That alone made the day a major birding moment. It even seemed fitting because earlier in the month, I marked the very rare universal calendar palindrome of 02//02/2020 with an addition to my yearly birding list. That day, I saw a big group of bushtits (also on my jog), forever commemorating a calendar event that hadn't happened in more than 900 years.

A northern saw-whet owl I sighted in June 2014.

Leap day apparently wanted to make sure it went down in history too though. Sitting at my desk around 9:30 p.m., I heard a long series of low "too" sounds like a faraway, old train whistle. At first, I thought it came from some alarm, machine, or device in the distance. After considering it a while longer, I thought it might be a northern saw-whet owl, so I went outside and tried to call it in with recorded saw-whet sounds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Within a few minutes, an owl flew over my head, eventually landing in a tree in the yard. It was my first sighting of the species since 2014. While watching the bird in the yard, I also heard another farther away. What an exhilarating end to an unusual month!

February 2020 certainly made its extra day count for a lot on my birding list.

Taking Flight

After a few practice flights, my work managing the Black Hills Audubon Society's (BHAS) Facebook page has begun to take off in earnest.

When I started the work for BHAS last May, I blogged about it here. During the course of the ensuing nine months, I tried a few different things to engage and increase the organization's followers. Starting with 364 followers, I saw a small increase initially, but as I fine-tuned my strategies for making posts, the follower totals and the engagements began to soar.

November represented the point at which everything started to come together. The daily reach of posts dwarfed the rate seen earlier, going from 27 on January 1, 2019, to a current high of 377 on February 10, 2020, (see Graph 1). Likewise, the number of people viewing the site jumped up, particularly when it came to people viewing the homepage and scheduled events (see Graph 2). Paralleling these trends, the number of followers saw a marked rise. Currently, the page has 484 followers, an increase of nearly 33 percent in nine months. What's more, all of those growth points coincided with an uptick in people attending the organization's events, and many of those individuals credited the Facebook posts with bringing them there.

The successes on the BHAS Facebook page have also brought two intangible results. First, I have thoroughly enjoyed doing the work. It's a great combination of strategy and fun. Second, because of the measurable results in followers, engagements, and event attendance, managing the page has been very fulfilling. I can see the impact of my work and know that it's helping a great organization.

Stay tuned to see how high this project flies.

The Real Lost World

It's quite an irony that we make films about the dangers of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction while we threaten the existence of their avian descendants.

Jurassic Park and its four sequels like The Lost World: Jurassic Park have hit home the consequences of wielding genetic power to resurrect the dinosaurs. One of the themes from the films challenges humans to think about the damage they may inflict before mindlessly plowing ahead with a harmful action.

We aren't bringing dinosaurs back at any point in the near future though, so it might be best to first examine how we already impact existing species. If we don't want to stray too far from dinosaurs, let's check out what we are doing to birds, the dinosaurs' living legacy.

A rufous hummingbird, one of the species
most at risk of extinction from global warming.

In a new report, Survival by Degrees: 389 Bird Species on the Brink, the Audubon Society shows how global warming threatens two-thirds of all bird species in North American with extinction. Half of the species in Washington state alone face extinction from a temperature increase of three degrees Celsius. Instead of the power to create addressed by Jurassic Park, we are wielding the power to destroy, and we are doing it just as recklessly as John Hammond and the host of other characters who tried to cash in on dinosaurs.

The report from the Audubon Society does a great job of helping us visualize the possible consequences of our actions. We should take it as an opportunity to consider where we go from here.

No horror from any of the Jurassic Park stories could match the awfulness of wiping out the animals most closely related to dinosaurs.

By the Sound of It

What looks like frustration but sounds like satisfaction? Bird-watchers know the answer is a flycatcher.

Willow flycatcher at the Billy Frank Jr.
Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.

Many types of flycatchers look maddeningly indistinguishable from each other. Generally, they appear very plain with many of the species lacking clear, visual identifiers. Using sight alone, about all people can be sure of is that they saw some sort of flycatcher. (The birds do have a distinct profile with a large head and a common habit of perching near the tops of trees, flying out to catch insects, and returning to their perch to repeat the hunt.) But was it a willow flycatcher, a Pacific-slope flycatcher, or maybe a western wood-pewee? Even with photographic evidence, a birder can spend hours trying and failing to decide.

I speak from experience about the vexing nature of identifying flycatchers by sight. Until the last couple of years, the difficulty in doing so nearly beat me into submission. The longer the identification process takes, the more upsetting it becomes until it reaches the dejecting feeling of failure: There's a bird right in front of you, waiting to be added to your list, but you just can't make a certain determination, so the opportunity is lost. After several failures like that, you kind of don't want to bother with flycatchers anymore.

Then, there's the peace, joy, and empowerment of identifying flycatchers by sound. Learning their songs and calls is really the only way to deal with flycatchers, and once you've done that, you might as well be the smartest, most powerful person in the world because that's how it feels. I've gone from staring at photographs in exasperation to walking along and making an identification without even turning my head to see the bird that made the sound. By itself, the contrast in processes and outcomes is enough to put a smile on my face, but the knowledge of the birds' sounds carries something more powerful: the confidence of connecting to and understanding the surrounding environment. It's like knowing some great secret of life, a secret those confounding flycatchers have kept all this time.

Trying to identify flycatchers by sight is an aggravating process that makes you feel like you can't do anything, but learning to identify them by sound gives you a feeling of nirvana and omnipotence.

New Horizons on Feathered Wings

From scholarship to writing and public relations, I've done a lot of work in communication, but starting today, I have the opportunity to do something new.

A yellow warbler I photographed on a recent outing
with the Black Hills Audubon Society.

Despite my time in public relations and my experiences teaching best practices for using social media and even employing Twitter and Pinterest as teaching tools in my classes, I have never managed an organization's social media. That changed today when I started managing the Facebook page for the Black Hills Audubon Society (BHAS).

Envirofinn reflects my affinity for birds. Many of the posts focus on bird-related topics, including my successes in bird-watching during the last few years. On one occasion, I even blogged about a birding event BHAS led. The organization does a nice job of making birding fun and accessible, so when they put out a call for help with their Facebook page, I didn't hesitate to offer my time.

With my background in communication, I can help promote BHAS's events and overall presence. In return, I now have the chance to use social media strategically for a topic I love. I couldn't wait to make my first post, which went up this morning. If you'd like to keep up with the posts and what BHAS is doing, click here.

When looking for new horizons, follow the birds.