Cheyenne Bird Banter

A compendium of local and national bird news but also a backdoor look at a family's outdoor memories, Barb Gorges has compiled 25 years of her Wyoming Tribune Eagle "Bird Banter" columns, plus a few Roadside Attractions and other writing in "Cheyenne Bird Banter: 25 years of Bird and Birdwatching News."

Watch how the digital age creeps into the birdwatching community. First, it's a listserv taking the place of the phone number for reporting rare birds in Wyoming. Then it's eBird, a place to make personal bird observations available to scientists. And then it's Merlin, technology in a phone app to help identify birds by sight and song.

The academics and other speakers Barb meets while programming talks for Cheyenne-High Plains Audubon Society, in the space of a year (but who can remember what year), switch from carousel slide projector to laptop PowerPoint shows.

Scientists adopt bird tracking techniques that as the technology shrinks, can be fitted on smaller and smaller birds, getting a clearer picture of where they go. But at the same time, Barb documents more and more human intrusions into bird safety.

Leavening this collection are stories: the bird family drama playing outside the kitchen window, the antics of Hootie the rehabilitated red-breasted nuthatch, the hidden house sparrow nest that could have started a house fire, the rosy-finches that can only nest on cliff faces at high elevation and attract researchers risking life and limb.

Running throughout like warp threads are the annual bird counts: the Thanksgiving Bird Count, Christmas Bird Count, Great Backyard Bird Count, Cheyenne Big Day Bird Count and the winter-long Project FeederWatch.

Finally, "Bird Banter" is about wild birds, and the people who love them.