Say hello to the winner of our Readers' Favorites owls survey

Posted Thu, Sep 2 2010 4:12 PM by Chuck Hagner

I'm happy to announce that subscriber Burt Stampfl of nearby Bristol, Wisconsin, was the winner of the drawing we conducted after our recent Readers' Favorites Survey about places to watch owls.

Read more about our Readers' Favorites Surveys.

See our readers' favorite places to watch eagles, warblers, hummingbirds, shorebirds, and hawks.

Thanks to our generous friends at Nikon Sport Optics, Burt becomes the sixth lucky participant in our surveys to win a pair of new Nikon binoculars. Burt will soon be birding with the super sweet 8x42 Monarch.

Read more about Nikon Sport Optics.

Burt (pictured at right in Las Pas, Baja Mexico) tells us he's a software developer and an avid birdwatcher who enjoys feeding birds in his backyard and watching them while traveling with his wife.

"We do not belong to a bird club but do belong to a dive club that gets us traveling, so we can take time to bird in the different countries we dive at," he says. "We've done so in Bali, Mexico, many of the Caribbean islands, and, hopefully, many more in the future. One of our most memorable was in the southern Yucatan Peninsula, where we saw birds we couldn't even identify till later. The colors were amazing."

He selected five locations as his favorite places to watch owls: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie and Ryerson Conservation Area in Illinois and Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary, Governor Dodge State Park, and Richard Bong State Recreation Area in Wisconsin. "I picked several because I live near them," Burt says. "Bong Recreation Area is less than a half hour from us."

We featured Bay Beach Wildlife Sanctuary and Governor Dodge State Park as "Hotspots Near You" in recent issues of Birder's World.

See all of our Hotspots Near You.

"The most difficult part of watching owls," Burt says, "is being there when the owls are active. I've had the most fun when we go out and call to them and have them find us. It's quite entertaining how, when [we're] under cover, owls will 'look' for the source of a call when they can't really find it.

"We've done this with Barn Owls at Bong while in a pop-up turkey blind along the marsh. We had spotted two owls earlier in the day while walking the area and went back that night to try to watch them. We took a concealment pop-up that we set up prior to dusk. When we hadn't seen anything for a while, we started calling a bit after dark. The owls would come to the calls and move all about our proximity trying to locate us."

How does Burt plan to use the Nikon Monarch binoculars he's won?

"Well, to watch birds, obviously!" he says. "I will be taking them with me on my travels, and they will be a welcome replacement for the pair I have sitting at the ready on my kitchen counter. Though I hope you won't mind my taking them to a baseball/football game on occasion."

Not at all! Mine come with me to just about every Brewers game I attend. I use them to peer into the opponents' dugout in hopes of adding the Cardinal named La Russa to my life list. --Chuck Hagner, Editor

Read more about our Readers' Favorites Surveys.

Read more about Nikon Sport Optics.

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