Galveston Featherfest this Weekend

What's this... two posts in one day? Sounds like Carey's making a birding comeback!

This weekend I'm going to Galveston Featherfest. If you've read through my blog, you'll remember that I went last year and had a fairly miserable time. It rained hard Saturday and while the weather wasn't much better on Sunday, but at least on Sunday I had a 100+ species day.

This year I was half considering not going. But then I saw who the keynote speaker was, one of my favorite birder/authors Ken Kaufman! He wrote one of my favorite birding narratives, Kingbird Highway, which is a memoir of himself in the 70s, when he attempted a big year with basically no money, hitchhiking thousands of miles.

So now I'm all signed up. I'm not expecting to see too many life birds, with the exception of Prairie Chickens, because I'm in my "home territory," but I can always be surprised. Rather than go on limited field trips and spend my money on a weekend in a hotel, I decided to go all out on field trips and just drive the 1 1/4 hour trip home each day ($12 a day of gas versus $70 a night in a hotel, after taxes). Here's my itinerary:

Friday (all sold out now):
5:00-10:45am Prairie Chickens
12:45-4:45pm West Galveston Songbirds
5:30-9:00pm Keynote Dinner - K Kaufman

Saturday:
7:00-8:15am Bird ID Warmup
8:30-4:00pm High Island
6:00-8:00pm Art and Music Social

Sunday:
7:45-2:15pm Island Sampler

I'm not looking forward to getting up at around 3:00am in order to make it to the Friday trip, but what can I say... I'm a cheapskate.

Then the following weekend is my Bird Day Challenge, in which I will be spending all day riding my bicycle around Houston looking for birds. I haven't been training like I want to, so it may be an abbreviated ride, but I'll still have fun doing it.