Thomas Blackburn
Fundraising on behalf of Northern Virginia Bird Alliance
BIRDATHON 2025
$2,420
Raised
21
Donations
$2,000
Goal
Board Birders
The Board Birders -- President Libby Lyons, Board member Tom Blackburn and former Board member Dixie Sommers -- are back for another marathon day of birdwatching and fundraising. Once again, we'll try to hit our goal of finding at least 100 species in one 24-hour period. The Board Birders have led the rest of the Birdathon flock in fundraising for the last two years. Please help us do it again this year.
Team report out:
The Board Birders -- Dixie Sommers, Libby Lyons and Tom Blackburn -- began our Birdathon at 6 AM at Dyke Marsh Wildlife Preserve.
It’s always great to start a Birdathon --- spotting the birds is exciting, and every species you see adds to your total. We got off to a good start – 45 species in 90 minutes. The highlight was a Lesser Scaup that evidently hadn’t gotten the Migration Memo, which we spotted thanks to Ed Eder, who apparently knows every bird at Dyke Marsh personally. We also found 7 warbler species, Orchard Orioles, Baltimore Orioles and 8 Bald Eagles.
Our next stop was Jones Point Park, under the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. We went there to find a bird that eluded us last year, the Rock Dove (pigeon). We bird in natural areas, where pigeons are in short supply, and last year we realized as it got dark that we hadn’t seen even one. We made sure that didn’t happen this year.
The highlights at Four Mile Run were 4 Wood Ducks and the hard-to-find Willow Flycatcher. At the parking lot for Theodore Roosevelt Island, we found Cliff Swallows under the bridge, and by using a scope we spotted Purple Martins at a martin house across the river in Georgetown. Our Birdathon rules require us to stay in Northern Virginia, but we can count any bird we see, regardless of where it is. We were also pleased to see a Black-crowned Night Heron. Monticello Park lived up to its reputation as a warbler haven: we got 10 warblers there as well as other birds. We made a brief stop at Jackson Abbott Wetlands Refuge, and were rewarded by finding Pine Warblers, which are reliably found in the pines along the water, and Yellow-throated Warblers, which we’ve logged there in other years.
As the day wore on, it became increasingly difficult to find new species. We arrived at Meadowood Special Recreation Area at 7 pm, hoping to find one or two new birds as it got dark. We were delighted to find Chipping Sparrows, Savannah Sparrows, a Yellow-throated Vireo, a Summer Tanager and Blue Grosbeaks, all new birds for the day. At our final stop at the Elizabeth Hartwell Mason Neck National Wildlife Refuge, we logged our last bird of the day, the beautiful song of a Wood Thrush, but we couldn’t see it -- at 7:45 PM it was too dark to see anything.
In our 14 hours of birding (including a 20 minute lunch stop) and nearly 10 miles of walking, we birded 14 locations and found 93 species of birds, including 16 warbler species. We beat last year’s total of 84 birds and went home tired but satisfied.
Thank you very much to everyone who donated to NVBA to support our Birdathon Team!
NVBA's annual Birdathon helps NVBA to support outdoor education, citizen science, habitat conservation and programs to encourage people to plant native plants and protect native wildlife. Birdathon also helps ornithologists better understand spring migration by reporting sightings through eBird, an online database of bird observations run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Northern Virginia Bird Alliance is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Our federal tax ID number is 51-0246325.
Photo: Baltimore Orioles, Eric Nie/Audubon Photography Awards