This Thursday my team, "the Hawkeyes" will be participating in a BIG DAY! What this means is that Anna Hallstrom and I will spend 24 hours trying to see or hear as many bird species as possible. We are doing this to get sponsors to raise money for a very cool and very important field station in Sonora, Mexico, the Navopatia Field Station of the Alamos Wildlands Alliance. The field station exists in a very unique desert/cactus habitat along the eastern shores of the Sea of Cortez. Every year, more and more of this habitat has been ripped up since NAFTA to farm your squash and tomatoes. Of course we like those veggies, but the markets that drive it, and the economy that makes it happen is not sustainable and the long term future of this enterprise is dim, yet the habitat is not recoverable. MANY of our nation's songbirds use this habitat to winter over and many more use it to fatten up during the boom monsoon seasons during migration.
This year, the Hawkeyes are putting a new twist to the Big Day! We are calling it a fifty / fifty challenge. That is, you sponsor us, and if we don't see fifty species, we will donate your pledge to the Alamos Wildlands Alliance out of our pockets! If we do see fifty species, you're on the hook for your donation, plus fifty cents for every bird species over 50! Get it? This is significant because in Rhode Island in February, it's not all that easy to see fifty species in a day, and the max that we could pretty much ever hope to see is about 70. So either way, we won't be breaking the bank, but it'll be fun either way!!
A fun way to help an awesome cause and some amazing people doing research on critical issues around the songbirds that call Sonora home. To read more about AWA's research and field station please click here!
To Donate to our team, the HAWKEYES click here
Also, I'll be tweeting throughout the day about our adventure. Follow me here.
