The

Raven's

Nest

November

2025

Friends,

Recently I had the opportunity to travel to Taipei, a city I had never visited before. While most of my time was in a meeting room, I did have a few hours free one day to explore and experience the city—and its birds. It is always fun to go birding in a new part of the world because even the most locally mundane birds are a new delight. The black-collared starlings and light-vented bulbuls were completely ignored by the locals who see them daily while I sat mesmerized.

But in a nearby city park there was a decent bit of wooded and wetland habitat in the midst of all the skyscrapers, and the birding there was surprisingly good. I also encountered a good number of resident birders. At one point I came around the corner and suddenly was in the midst of a few dozen birders all focusing their binoculars and long camera lenses on both sides of a very narrow strip of hedges by the sidewalk. I don’t speak any Chinese and none of the birders spoke English but two of the locals showed me their pictures on the backs of their cameras to let me know what they were looking at. I focused in as well and within a few minutes got some good looks at a Middendorff’s Grasshopper Warbler, an East Asian migrant renowned for skulking deep in the vegetation and rarely giving birders as good of a view as we were getting. That these birders were delighting together in this rare sighting— and invited me into their midst— is one of the many pleasures of being a birder. I find the community of birders to be open and inviting to all wherever I travel.

Blue Ridge Audubon relishes the wonderful bird-centered community we have here in western North Carolina. Indeed, we host a wide variety of events in part to cultivate a vibrant birding community. Our regular Saturday Outings are always attended by regular members and very often by visitors just in town for a week. But patterns and preferences within our birding community are changing, especially as this community has evolved since the Covid pandemic. The Bird Trivia events we have started having in the last year or so are proving to be rather popular—the one last week had over 70 people show up! Other programs are becoming less well-attended—several weekday evening Speaker programs have been attended by less than 15 people in the last year.

We want to know what interests our bird community and welcome your feedback. If new kinds of events like our Crepuscular Crawl at Beaver Lake on November 22 (see below or the link for details) interest you, we’d love to know that. If you like the evening programs but prefer the zoom option to tune in, please tell us that! If you have any ideas for other kinds of programs or events (Birding the French Broad by kayak or canoe?), don’t keep them a secret. We are seeking feedback for what our birding community wants to participate in, so drop us a line at blueridgeaudubon@gmail.com — and we hope to see you at an event soon!

John

Crepuscular Crawl

November 22nd, 2025 @ 4:30 pm

Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary

Warm up those paws, dust off that fur and join us for a crepuscular crawl! It can be tough to spot mammals in the wild. At the beginning and end of each day, there's a special hour around sunrise and sunset where many animals begin to stir, we call this time "crepuscular hour". It's more common to see mammals during crepuscular hour, so we're crawling the trails at Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary late in the day to see if we can spot some of our furry friends! 



We will host staggered crawls throughout the bird sanctuary every 30 minutes beginning at 4:30. We will meet in the Beaver Lake Bird Sanctuary parking lot near the trailhead at the start of each walk. We will also have mammal artifacts to observe, activities set up throughout the duration of the program and more. This event is open to all ages and will be organized as a "come and go as you please" style program. There is no need to stay for the entire two-hour duration unless you would like to.

This event is FREE but registration for ecoEXPLORErs is required.

Check out activity at our Motus Tower

By John Koon

Blue Ridge Audubon's sponsored Motus Tower at King's Bridge has recently detected several wood thrushes, two Swainson's Warblers, a Whip-poor-will and a Swainson's Thrush during fall migration. Check out the activity on the Motus website!

The Wild Turkey Is a Comeback Bird We Can’t Take for Granted

By Jessica Leber, Deputy Editor, Audubon magazine

Only a few weeks after hatching from ground nests, Wild Turkey poults can fly up to a roost—where the hen will still protect the youngsters. Photo: Robert F. Cook/Courtesy of the NWTF

Caroline Barnes, an illustrator in Massachusetts, had never seen Wild Turkeys until about 20 years ago. In the dead of winter, she was surprised to spot two of the fowl—among North America’s bulkiest native birds—roosting in a tree outside her home in Brookline, near Boston. “I fell in love,” she says. 

She was witnessing one of the 20th century’s great conservation wins. Before colonial settlement, millions of turkeys roamed North America from the Atlantic coast to the southern Rockies. But by 1930, logging, agriculture, and overhunting had nearly driven the bird to extinction. In much of the East, the species had already disappeared. A Massachusetts official even grouped turkeys with now-extinct Passenger Pigeons and Great Auks: all “gone forever” from the state, all cautionary tales.

But these quintessentially American birds were more resilient than anyone realized; they just needed a chance. Harvest regulations and land management warded off extinction, and biologists began restoring populations in the 1960s by moving some remaining birds into healthy woodlands where they’d vanished. By the early 2000s, these programs and other conservation initiatives had succeeded beyond expectation, with an estimated 7 million birds roaming 49 states. “Populations exploded,” says Michael Chamberlain, who runs the Wild Turkey Lab at the University of Georgia.

Wildlife conservation, however, is rarely static, and soon after, the Wild Turkey’s success story took a complicated turn.

In many suburbs and cities, turkeys began making themselves at home, and the arrivals weren’t always welcome neighbors. They pooped—a lot. They ripped up gardens. During breeding season, males attempting to establish dominance over other birds chased people and attacked vehicles instead. In Brookline, for example, while many shared Barnes’s affection, complaints about the birds’ disruptive behavior spurred police to hold a community meeting in 2012.

A flock of gobblers, displaying their breeding season finest, stop traffic in Wisconsin as onlookers gawk from a distance. Photo: Anne Readel

Nationwide, clips of gobblers’ antics have become a local news staple. “It’s almost like a social science experiment,” says David Scarpitti, a Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife biologist who regularly fields turkey concerns from residents across the state. “How many animals can people tolerate?”  

Blue Ridge Audubon is a chapter of the National Audubon Society, serving Buncombe, Henderson, and surrounding counties in western North Carolina.

We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Donations are

tax-deductible to the extent

allowed by law.

Raven's Nest Editor: 

Jennie Burke

jennifer_bradbury85@yahoo.com

Blue Ridge Audubon Chapter

PO Box 18711

Asheville, NC 28814

Blue Ridge Audubon's mission is to protect birds and the places they depend on. We believe that a world in which birds thrive is a world that benefits all living things.

Our vision is a vibrant and just community where the protection of birds and our natural world is valued by everyone.