Friday, October 8, 2010:

9:00am - 12:00; (Meet in the Super 8 motel parking lot - car pool) Pre-workshop field trip for those who come in on Thursday night and want to jumpstart their I.D. skills. This first field trip is to a part of Big Stone NWR rarely visited by the public. There are extensive grasslands on the south side of the refuge that can be a huge migrant trap for sparrows as well as home for the resident species.

1:00pm - 2:00pm; (Super 8 motel; downstairs meeting room) Registration / Orientation / General information for the weekend.

2:00pm - 3:00pm; Our first classroom session will deal with the basic techniques that are unique to finding sparrows and getting ourselves into the right location with the right equipment to make accurate identification possible. In addition, we will take a preliminary look at all the sparrow species we hope to encounter during the course of the workshop

3:00pm - 6:00pm; Field trip - car pool. All of our field trips will focus on getting us very close to as many species of sparrows as possible. We will be on the private Coteau des Prairie Edge ranch that is also one of our best chances for finding Longspurs. Much of the area is short grass which these species prefer.

Saturday, October 9, 2010:

8:00am - 12:00; (Meet in the Super 8 motel parking lot - car pool) This field trip takes us to one of the most beautiful spots for miles around. High rolling native prairie that has never been disturbed by man with views that stretch 50 miles on clear days. This private property, the Waddell ranch will be open for the first time for our group and we hope and expect that the sparrows will be there waiting for our arrival.

12:30pm - 2:00pm; This will be a "working lunch". We plan to have our lunch (included in the price of the workshop) catered to the meeting room. The title says it all; "ID Without Field Marks". During this classroom session we will be looking at the clues to identification that are not shown in the standard field guides. Song, call, habits, habitat preferences, the general "Jiz" of a sparrow are all clues we sometimes need for identification.

2:00pm - 5:00pm; Field trip - car pool. (We leave from the Super 8 parking lot) This trip starts and ends less than a mile from the motel. We will be birding the Flynn Prairie Nature Trail, a recently reconstructed prairie / wetland / woodlot with a paved walking path. The combination of habitats makes this a very bird rich area.

7:00pm - 8:30pm: (Meet at the Pizza Ranch on Main St. - back room) We will study the identification field marks of the full range of species that occur in this area. It will also be a session for separating the hard to identify pairs of sparrow species.

Sunday, October 10, 2010:

8:00am - 9:00am; (Meet at the Super 8 motel meeting room) This session is a chance to evaluate our progress and consider the reasons we follow this strange path called "birding". We will also recap the work we have done during the entire workshop. It will also be a time to address any individual problems that still exist.

9:00am - 12:00; The final field trip and a great chance to use the skills that we have acquired during the sparrow workshop weekend.