Dear Iowa Chapter Leaders ,

In case you have not already heard about it , we wanted to pass on a link to information about the Fall IOU meeting in Iowa , which will include speakers , seminars and field trips. For details , please see http://www.iowabirds.org/iou/current_meeting.asp

Sincerely ,

Lynn

Hello,

I thought you might be interested in this new report by the fish and wildlife service on people who participate in birding. This new report shows that one of every five Americans watches birds, and in doing so, birdwatchers contributed $36 billion to the U.S. economy in 2006, the most recent year for which economic data are available. What’s neat about this report is that it also shows that Iowa ranked 5^th in participation rates. (See chart 7 page 7 of the report). The five top states with the greatest birding participation rates include Montana (40 percent), Maine (39 percent), Vermont (38 percent), Minnesota (33 percent) and Iowa (33 percent). My guess is it’s because of winter time bird-feeding.  Ed

Link to report: http://library.fws.gov/Pubs/birding_natsurvey06.pdf

Ed Thelen

Natural Lakes Investigations

Iowa Dept. of Natural Resources

122 252nd Ave Spirit Lake, IA 51360

712-336-1840 (phone)

712-336-0921 (fax)

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Do you know what Geocaching is?

 Check out www.geocaching.com

 What about Letterboxing? Do you know what that is?

 Check out www.atlasquest.com

So geocaching is a type of treasure hunt you do with the use of a GPS: Global Positioning System. Basically you use longitude and latidtude coordinates to find somewhere or in this case something. You log into the site, do a search for the area you want to geocache in and it will give you a list, get the coordinates in your GPS and follow the route, which in this case will lead you to a sort of treasure chest. In the cache will be a log book to record your name or trail name, the date and in some cases trade trinkets. They come in all different sizes, some as large as a large restaurant pickle jar and some as small as a bullet. Some have trinkets to trade, some just have a log book to sign.

Letterboxing is the same sort of hunt only you use written clues to find your treasure and in these containers are a rubber stamp and a log book. You carry a stamp and journal with you. When you find one you take the box stamp and stamp your journal and use your stamp to stamp the box journal. Sign log, date it. Same in your journal.

Both of these have way more details on the websites.

Why am I telling you this....With permission from the Audubon President, Ryan(Bubba) and I have placed a geocache and a letterbox in the Audubon sanctuary in Spirit Lake. I have not yet posted about the lettebox but we posted the geocache before the 4th of July and so far 8 people have found the geocache.

My Mom helped us stock the geocache with Audubon flyers, business cards with this web address on it and some Audubon pins for trading. We can not ask for money/donations/memebers etc.. with geocaches but can provide information for those who would want it. We also posted it was a bird theme cache but it wasnt limited to bird items. So far one person left an owl, before we could go check it out someone else found it the next day and took the owl and left a geocoin ( that has a special number on it that can be tracked through the website).

So the sanctuary is going to get alot more action now. Some caches we have found have a hundred or so names in a year or so time.

We added a guest book to the website so maybe some geocachers will stop by and let us know they found the cache and for anyone else just looking around.

One person who found the cache commented that they have lived here for many years and didnt know the sanctuary was even there. Cachers are very earth friendly and very secretive of geocaching and leaving the area undisturbed as much as possible. Besides a little beaten down grass you probly wont even know there were there.

Just thought you all would like to know.