Opinion
Yellow Bird: Gazing upward and looking for the birds


"My life experiences have greatly expanded since I've accepted birding in my life. I stand gingerly before the altar of the prairie, and gaze upward ... . Unfortunately, I always seem to be looking directly at the white, bright sun.

I am thinking about my new birding life because Wednesday, Herald photographer Jackie Lorentz and I went to the Red Lake Indian Reservation for a tribal council story.

I write this in hopes that UND's Dave Lambeth, my birding class teacher, doesn't read it, because there were so many birds I couldn't identify. Oh, I knew the easy ones such as the mallards and eagles, but those darn little birds are tough.

One day in class, we looked for a particular sparrow only to learn there are a "gazillion" sparrows, and they all seem to look alike. That was when I decided that, to me, those birds all would be just sparrows for a while.

I like big birds - hawks, eagles, herons, egrets and geese - because they are stately, beautiful and easier to identify."

Get the Story:
DORREEN YELLOW BIRD COLUMN: Flu-free, but feverish about birds (The Grand Forks Herald 5/6)

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