Featured Bird Blogger of the Week

Howdee all,

We finally made it to warm! We are in Titusville Florida, at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival as this post goes to press. Can’t wait to learn some more about Birds, goodness knows I need all the help I can get. I wish you all well and hope that you can all find some Warm this winter. So…here we go again….this is week 12 of

~Featured Bird Blogger of the Week~

This week….I am pleased to take you, via cyberspace, to a very cold wintry Vermont where our featured Bird blogger, Chris Petrak, resides.  Chris’s academic back ground is in History and Theology. In his blog, Tails of Birding. Chris weaves history and lore into many of his posts about birds.  Chris also writes a birding column for a local Vermont newspaper. A keen birder and traveler~Chris has traveled extensively throughout the United States. Internationally in Europe, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, India. Most recent travels: Texas, Trinidad, Quebec, Alberta. Coming up this year: Belize and Wyoming. I am sure you will enjoy Chris’s blog as much as I do. So……….Without further ado………I bring you a wonderful writer, birder and blogger.

~Chris Petrak~

I began birding about thirty years ago, but until I moved to Vermont fourteen years ago, I did not have the time or flexibility to become involved in the birding community or to go birding with experienced and skilled birders. I was completely self-taught.

In addition to pursuing my birding hobby with much more purpose after my move to Vermont, I was also

Chris Petrak~VT

invited to contribute to “Tailfeathers” in our local paper, the Brattleboro Reformer. I am now in my eleventh year of writing the weekly column. The column is a continual incentive to learn more about the life histories of the birds, the science, the folklore, their interaction with human observers, and their conservation.

As digital photography emerged with improved equipment and slowly falling costs, I began photographing the birds I was seeing, primarily for documentation purposes. The limitations of point-and-shoot cameras finally brought me to quality digital SLR equipment. This opened a whole new dimension to birding, photography, and nature observation.

I began blogging about five years, primarily posting my weekly column for local readers and friends. The scope of blogging has increased tremendously, especially in the last two years as photography has become a key part of my birding. I try to write and blog for the non-specialist, hoping to be informative and interesting, sometimes entertaining or provocative. Photography has also expanded my blog, providing a thousand words with each image.

A researcher at heart, I dig through musty old books and troll the internet, doing the best I can to get the science, history, facts, and IDs about the birds all correct, but if I mess up, as I sometimes do, I sure hope readers will let me know. Most of all, I hope readers of “Tails of Birding” find enjoyment for the mind or spirit.

“That is the way nature is: tough and no nonsense. Often brutal and violent.”

“But that is not the way it is. The world outside of our climate controlled cocoons, outside of our frantic and over busy lives, outside of our technological insulation and electronic amusements, does not exist for our escapism. That world is an complex laboratory for life, a continuous experimentation in what works, what works best, what will best survive.”