Hello and Welcome to my first post!

Hello all! This is my first post. I haven't yet decided exactly what I'm going to talk about, but as you can tell from the title, it will be about birding and other stuff I feel like writing about. This blog is intended mostly to let my family in on our trip from Alaska to Pennsylvania. And anywhere else we happened to be. Right now I am in Anchorage, Alaska packing up my home for a move to the East Coast. Avoid moving like the plague! I don't understand how people can just pack up their stuff and move. Some on a pretty regular basis. Talk about stress. I'm not liking this getting rid of things that I have amassed in the past 17 years. Yes, I've lived in Alaska the past 17 years. So, we have a LOT of stuff. So, let me tell you about me. After being away from family for so long, I feel the need to reintroduce myself. I am an avid birder. Love, love, love birdwatching. AKA bird nerd. I am also what is affectionately known as a cork dork. I am into wine, my favorite being Pinots. Any of the pinots. Also like Zinfandel. I also like to cross stitch, crochet and quilt. Right now I am finishing up my position as an accounting clerk with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska. I will be done the end of this month, and then I will officially be on my sabbatical while we move. I am also an avid fan of Anthropology and Archaeology. So much so as to have gotten a degree in Anthropology. But back to the birds. Migration in Alaska is over. Baby birds are showing up all over the place. Today in my back yard, baby chickadees are calling for their parents while the parents are riping bugs off my shrubs. Yay! I have also noticed that magpies and stellar's jays are picking up stuff like apples, obviously feeding babies with never ending appetites. Peanuts are the meal of choice for the jays and magpies these days, although the pilot bread seems to be a close second. I also have a few common redpolls hanging around, as well as a red breasted nuthatch, pine siskens, and an orange-crowed warbler, a first for my back yard. Also in the area are 4 juvenile common ravens making a raucous loud enough for everyone to hear. They're like kids. You can hear them, but you really don't know what they're up to. There seems to be a lot of robins around this year. We always have robins in the summer, but this year there seems to be even more. And of course, the juncos, the violet-green swallows, and the mew gulls. Something had the cranes in a tizzy today too. But the best bird today was the eagle. It was calling in the sky while trying to catch a thermal. Never caught it. Just flew off toward downtown. That's all for now. I'll let you know what happens.