Great Birding in Wildlife Refuges Featured in Bird Watchers Digest

The diverse bird-watching opportunities on national wildlife refuges are featured in an article by best-selling bird author David Sibley in the upcoming March-April issue of Bird Watchers Digest. Sibley, artist and author of several bird field guides, highlights the unique birding opportunities in each region of the Refuge System, among them:

• Northwestern coastal refuges such as Grays Harbor in Washington are critical staging areas for the western sandpiper. The recovering cackling goose now winters on national wildlife refuges in western Oregon and Washington.

• The green jay and great kiskadee are found in the Santa Ana and Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuges – and nowhere else in the United States.

• Horicon National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin is one of the most important goose staging areas in the Mississippi flyway, and habitat for pied-billed grebe and American bittern.

• The national wildlife refuges of the Georgia coast, such as Wassaw and Harris Neck, provide the stronghold for the Atlantic population of the painted bunting.

• The shrub habitat on Northeast refuges such as Silvio O. Conte provides hope for golden-winged and blue-winged warblers.

• The mountain-prairie refuges, such as Upper Souris in North Dakota, are home to all the American white pelicans nesting in the United States.

• The tricolored blackbird, found almost exclusively in California, depends on the wetlands of that state’s central valley wetlands, including the Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge.

• The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge provides nesting habitat for 40 million seabirds, including most of the world’s population of red-legged kittiwake and whiskered auklet.