Greetings Fellow Bird Lovers and Welcome to our first FatherSonBirding post!

My son, Braden, and I decided to create this blog both to share our adventures and to encourage other families to experience the thrills and satisfaction of birding for themselves. By coincidence, we experienced one

Our Lifer Snowy Owl! (photo by Braden Collard)

of our most memorable adventures last weekend. I picked up Braden after school on Friday and we high-tailed it from our home in Missoula, Montana up to Kalispell. Why? To see a bird we’d been longing to see since we began birding: Snowy Owl. Apparently, two of them had been spending the winter near Kalispell, but we didn’t know if we’d find them before they fled back north to breed.

We arrived just before sunset and began driving around the neighborhood where they’d been seen. Nothing. After half an hour, and with darkness closing in, we turned down one last road.

“I think I’ve got something!” Braden exclaimed, peering through his binoculars.

Sure enough, an owl sat on a rooftop a quarter mile away. Even better, it let us approach to within a hundred yards to observe and photograph it. Exhilarating! The next morning, we located the owl again, but from a much greater, inaccessible distance. No matter. We were thrilled by this latest birding adventure. As a bonus, we picked up our Lifer Harris’s Sparrow and got our best looks ever at Common Redpolls. Even if we don’t find exactly what we want, the birds never let us down.

A gorgeous Common Redpoll in breeding plumage (photo by Braden Collard).