Eric Moore is the owner of Jay’s Bird Barn, with two locations in northern Arizona — Prescott and Flagstaff. Eric has been an avid birder for over 50 years. If you have questions about wild birds that you would like discussed in future articles, email him at eric@jaysbirdbarn.com.
I have been down in Tubac, Arizona this past week in the capacity of a Swarovski Optik vendor at the annual Tubac Hawk Watch event. The hawk watch is held at the Ronald R. Morriss County Park, directly adjacent to the Santa Cruz River.
Our new store location off of Black Drive has a beautiful conference room that we are using to host a variety of free workshops and presentations. This past week I taught a class on shorebird identification.
In my weekly column last Thursday, I mentioned how we’ve been receiving reports from customers of newly arrived hummingbirds. The day after my column ran in the paper, I led a store sponsored bird walk to Willow Lake, and we saw five or six Anna’s hummingbirds in the wild.
While the calendar shows it is only February, over the last week we have received several reports of a variety of different hummingbird species showing up in the Prescott area. Apparently, hummingbirds don’t look at calendars.
On Feb. 23, 1994, the month of February was proclaimed as National Bird-Feeding Month by Congressman John Porter when he read a resolution into the Congressional Record.
This past week I received an email newsletter from the National Audubon Society titled, “When it’s okay (or not) to feed birds.” Feeding wild birds, properly, can provide a benefit to many bird species.
This past week marked the 20th anniversary of my writing this weekly column for The Daily Courier. In honor of this event, I thought it would be fun to re-run my very first column.
Many people set aside some time at the beginning of each New Year to be reflective and perhaps even write down a list of specific goals. Maybe you have a bucket list of new things you would like to do in the coming year.
This past week, I attended the first birding and nature festival of 2024 in Arizona — the Wings over Willcox Festival. I drove down on Thursday, and the weather was wild, just like it was here last Thursday. It even snowed in Willcox!
This past week has been a cold one! Two mornings in a row, our home weather station read 12 degrees when I got up! I am not a big fan of cold weather; in fact, I’m not even a little fan.