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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.
Marshall Helmberger
REGIONAL Did you know that the wild turkey population in Minnesota has increased almost ten percent annually since 1979? Or that the evening grosbeak population has declined more than five percent a year, while purple finch numbers have dropped about 3.5 percent a year during that same period?
If you’ve fed birds, or paid attention to their comings and goings over the years, you may well already have a sense that there aren’t as many evening grosbeaks as in years past. You may have even been surprised in recent years to see a small flock of turkeys picking insects along a North Country highway and recognized how unusual such a sighting would have been in the past.