12 Months of Birding: Golden-Crowned Kinglet

Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Our 12 Months of Birding series continues with a bird we often see in February, the Golden-crowned Kinglet. This royally named tiny bird spends winters in our Pisgah National Forest neighborhood and the rest of the year in the northern U.S. and Canada. More often heard than seen, the Golden-crowned Kinglet can be challenging to find; generally we see and hear them in the evergreens and shrubby areas on the edges of the wetlands, which is at the southern end of the property where the boardwalk is located.

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Winter Birding and the Great Backyard Bird Count

Bird tracks in the snow

Wintertime is a great time to do birdwatching – it’s one of the activities you can do year-round here in Pisgah National Forest east of Asheville, North Carolina.

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North Carolina Mountain Birds: Chipping Sparrow

Chipping Sparrow By Vkulikov (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Look high up in the trees or on top of the high evergreen shrubs (and sometimes on the ground) near the birdfeeders at the Inn on Mill Creek and you may spot the Chipping Sparrow, our January 2017 pick in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn series on the blog.

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North Carolina Mountain Birds: Gray Catbird

Gray Catbird by John Benson via Flickr

Hear a noise that sounds like a cat who’s gotten itself stuck in the branches of  a tree? Well, if you hear that “Mew Mew” at the Inn on Mill Creek, it’s likely you’re listening to the Gray Catbird, our final pick of the year in our monthly Birding at the Inn series on the blog.

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North Carolina Mountain Birds: Eastern Screech Owl

Eastern Screech Owl by Albert Herring https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WR_-_Eastern_Screech_Owl_4_(5761936594).jpg

We’re big fans of the Eastern Screech Owl, a small raptor with a distinctive set of songs, none of which sounds like a screeching owl to us, but more like a bubbly, warbly, trilly, whinnying owl. So let’s meet our November 2016 selection in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn blog series.

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North Carolina Mountain Birds: Cooper’s Hawk

Cooper's Hawk [photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wildreturn/8474601987/}

For our October 2016 pick in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn blog series, we’ve selected a bird that, like us, loves to be in the woods. Since the Inn on Mill Creek B&B is situated inside Pisgah National Forest, keep an eye out for one of its year-round residents, the Cooper’s Hawk.

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