Birding Organizations in Minnesota

Compiled by Bob Ekblad

• MOU activities include field trips
• Field trips are listed here
• Co-sponsor for Salt Lake Weekend (usually the 4th weekend in April at Salt Lake in Lac Qui Parle County - near Marietta/Madison)
• Co-sponsor for Hawk Ridge Weekend (usually the 2nd weekend in September at Hawk Ridge in Duluth)
• MOU Board Meetings and Paper Session
• Board meetings are held at least 3 times per year
• Paper Session on the first Saturday of December (includes presentations of papers & and a chance to meet new/old acquaintances)
• MOU sponsors Hotline Bird Reports via two phone lines
• Twin Cities / Statewide - Tele 763-780-8890 or 1-800-657-3700
• Submit e-mail sighting reports of rare/unusual birds in Minnesota - Tony Hertzel, Editor
• Duluth / NE MN - Tele 218-834-2858
• Submit e-mail sighting reports of rare/unusual birds in the Duluth area - Jim Lind, Editor
• There is also a NW Minnesota RBA that is sponsored by the Detroit Lakes Regional Chamber of Commerce - Tele 218-847-5743 / 800-433-1888
  • Submit e-mail sightings or rare/unusual birds in the NW quarter of Minnesota - Jeanie Joppru, Editor
• Transcripts of all three of these RBAs are posted on MOU-Net (see info below) and on the MOU web page.
• MOU tracks bird sightings and keeps historical sighting records
• Handled by the MOU Records Committee (MOURC) and the Seasonal Report Committee
• Submit reports/documentation to MOURC, c/o Peder Svingen
• <>Listing of helpful websites on how to Document Rare or Out-of-range Species.
• MOU sponsored publications
• Minnesota Birding - Newsletter with information on MOU activities and about birders and birding in the state - Ben Wieland & Molly Malecek, Editors
• The Loon - Technical  journal - Tony Hertzel, Editor
  • A nearly complete archive of The Loon is now available on the MOU website at http://moumn.org. This includes almost all issues of the magazine from 1939 to the present time.
    • Access to Volumes and Pages:  starting on the main page of the website, click on MOU Publications -> On-Line Index to The Loon. Click on Issues. This brings up a page that shows all the covers of The Flicker and The Loon that have been scanned into the machine. You can access a volume by clicking on the year number (e.g. 1990.) This is slow since each issue is 6 - 15 Mbytes in size. Clicking on one of the issues brings up a page viewer. Using the same example, clicking on the Spring 1990 cover (Golden-crowned Sparrow) will bring up one-page at a time display. The buttons at the top of this page allow access to all of the 13,010 pages that make up The Flicker/The Loon archive.
    • Access to Articles on Specific Species:  on the main page of the website, click on MOU Publications -> On-Line Index to The Loon. Click on a family, then the species. An index shows what issue of the magazine has what information about that species. For example, click on Thrushes and then click on Fieldfare. Click on the blue number under Vol. and the page comes up in the page viewer.
    • Search for Something:  starting on the main page of the website, click on MOU Publications ->Search Index for The Loon. Type in key words and hit search. A group of pages are shown that have the search information. (The external company atomz.com has indexed all of the pages and provided the search engine.)
    • Caveats: 
      • Optical character recognition (OCR) is used to generate text from the scanned pages. Some of the characters may not be correct so a search might fail.
      • Issues of the Loon before 1967 did not count covers as pages, so an index into an issue could return the wrong page.
      • There is a lot of new software associated with this project, so there may be some errors. Please report errors and other requests to either Tony Hertzel or to Dave Cahlander.
    • Additions
      • Tony Hertzel has the missing issues from 1929 - 1939. These will be added when time permits.
• MOU sponsored internet communications
• Provide transcribed hotline reports to BirdCntr and the Minnesota birding community
• Provide listserv to allow interactive communications about MOU activities and about Minnesota birds
• Link to Jack Siler's listing of recent MOU-net messages
• Information on subscribing
• Provide information about birds, birding and the MOU on the MOU web page .
  • MOU Photo Gallery
  • MOU Video Gallery