Well, life has been a been a whirlwind since I last blogged. Thank you for your patience! These past few weeks have been filled with lecture prep, basketball playoffs, band concerts, first-of-the-season baseball practices, scouting events, school field trips, 102 degree fevers, and drivers ed classes. Such is life during a Mom’s Big Year, right? Or any mom’s year, in fact. And oh yeah, the 2015 holiday cards are still staring at me waiting to be addressed and stuffed in envelopes. (You are totally allowed to laugh at that one.) 🙂

I’ve been happy to insert some days of birding into the mix, but somehow I *blinked* and the month of March has already kicked into high gear. Next week is Spring Break for UMBC.. so that will allow me time to get out in the field and to catch up on some pending posts that are burning a hole in my keyboard 🙂 I can’t WAIT to share them with you!

February 20th marked a fabulous field trip sponsored by our local Howard County Bird club.. A search for owls… One of my favorite flavors of field trips! 🙂

We were in search of the same owl that my son and I missed a month or so before… But this time we had several more sets of eyes. That’s never a bad thing when looking for a needle in a haystack. 🙂    While on a mission of this sort- hours spent searching for owl pellets and whitewash, one has the opportunity to meet new friends and reconnect with old ones. I love that!

But after about 3 hours of bonding over pellets and bird poop, truth be told, we were close.. very close.. to throwing in the towel. We knew the afternoon crew heading out later in the day would have a greater chance of finding a fresh pellet, and ultimately, the bird. But we just didn’t want to give up.

I had my son’s basketball playoff starting in a few minutes and I decided I was standing below the LAST tree I had time to comb through for the day. A fellow bird club member stood with his keen eyes at the base of one side of the pine, gazing up into the thick tangle of needles above, while I stood on the other.

“Bingo.”

Anthony V’s tone was quiet and understated, yet certain.

And from that….. in a split second, I knew his eagle eyes had found the prize..

Isn’t she a beauty?

More blog tid-bits to come soon.. once I get a good night’s sleep this weekend.. perhaps?

Teaching, mommying, birding… it’s all a juggling act.

As I started my Big Year, a very wise member of our local bird club noted that I would not be getting much sleep this year.

She was 100% right. 🙂