Skywatch Friday: Looking for MOON birds

A few months ago I volunteered to help with the Monitoring of Owls and Nightjars (MOON) program from the Illinois Natural History Survey. The project involves monitoring for certain bird species between sunset and sunrise during periods close to the full moon. The monitoring takes place at 9 different locations along a route where volunteers listen for nightjars, owls and other species for a period of 8 minutes. The first window for monitoring was April 3-17. We did our first survey on April 9th under optimal conditions. I’ll have more about MOON in a future post. For now, enjoy these photos of the sunset I took at Pistakee Lake before we started our survey:

sunset1

sunset2

And these crazy-loud Chorus Frogs we heard at one of our monitoring stops:

And don’t forget to go enjoy the other Skywatch Friday posts submitted this week!

Share the birds, share the love!
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