Marshall Helmberger
For me, taking part in this year’s Christmas Bird Count in the Cook area was like a walk down memory lane. I took part in my first CBC, as they’re known, back in the mid-1970s when I was still in junior high. I had begun to develop an interest in birds a few years earlier, but when I walked one evening into a meeting of the Minnesota River Valley Audubon Club at Oak Grove Junior High in Bloomington, where I went to school, a whole world began to unfold.
It was a club dominated by middle-aged or older members, so the arrival of a gangly kid at their monthly soiree definitely caught their attention. By the time I left that evening I had open invitations from a half dozen of the members to go birding and had my official introduction to the sweet little old lady, whose name I have sadly forgotten, who sold the really good bird seed you couldn’t find in stores out of the back of her garage.