Meet-Up at the Midwest Birding Symposium?

Monday here. I am getting excited for The Midwest Birding Symposium (MBS), taking place this weekend, September 17 – 20, 2009 on the southern shore of Lake Erie.

If you’re attending the event, be sure to look me up (see below).

Hosted by Bird Watcher’s Digest, The Ohio Ornithological Society and the Lakeside Association, the 2009 Midwest Birding Symposium (MBS) will be held in Lakeside, Ohio, a place others bill as a “charming Victorian Chautauqua community” but which I just call home. I grew up there, in a way, and used to spend halcyon summers there in a small cottage that squat right next to my grandparents’. I get back whenever I can.
I look forward to the event for many reasons: 

• The schedule of events and speaker line up includes some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining names in birding, including David Allen Sibley, Scott Weidensaul, Kenn Kaufman, Jim McCormac, Lang Elliott, Bill Thompson, III, Jeff Gordon, Paul Baicich, and nature photographer Arthur Morris.
• All the new birders I’m going to meet, especially the bloggers, Tweeps, and Facebook birders.
• The old friends I will see again. When I used to live in Ohio I helped launch the Ohio Ornithological Society, one of the organizers of the symposium. OOSers are crazy, fun people and will no doubt welcome all MBS participants with open arms. I am warming up my hugging machine.
• Birding at Magee Marsh. Lakeside is only minutes away from Magee Marsh, a well-known birding hotspot on the Great Lakes where close to 340 species have been observed, including scores of rarities. Birding should be pretty good during migration. I’m glad volunteers will be on-site to help ID those shorebirds. 
• The Inland Shorebird Identification Workshop. Speaking of shorebirds, this workshop will re-introduce me to shorebird ID and hopefully, more of it will stick this time! 
• The Lakeside Dock, a long pier that juts into Lake Erie, which is great place to eat ice cream, watch sailboats, and view distant islands through the haze.

The only thing I WON’T be looking forward to is that Lakeside is a dry town. So rowdy birders will likely head “across the tracks” over to one of the finer establishments in Marblehead to howl in the midnight moon.

If you are going to the symposium, I want to meet you, so be sure to say hello.  I’ll be wearing a khaki vest and binoculars? What? That doesn’t help? Okay, this is what I look like. Stop all tall brunettes to say hi and you should be fine. 

But careful not to get slugged in doing so. ; )

Visit midwestbirding.org to register for the MBS and for the latest programming and schedule updates. Hope to see you there!