Nature Blog Network

Meet this week’s featured blogger, Christopher Ciccone (no relation to Madonna, thank you) from PicusBlog. Christopher started birding in 2003 and has been blogging about his experiences for about two years now. At home in Massachusetts, many of his posts revolve around birding in New England. However, he and his wife love to travel for birds and especially enjoy sharing those trips with readers. Christopher is the proud captain of the Bloggerhead Kingbirds - a team of competitive bloggers that participate in the Superbowl of Birding.

You can reach Christopher at

• E-mail: Picusblog {AT} comcast {DOT} net
• Twitter: picusblog
• Facebook: Christopher Ciccone
• The Blue Goose Galleries on pBase

Christopher, why do you blog?

Good evening, Wren.  Thanks for inviting me…  hello?  Is this thing on?  Testing 1…2…3…  A-ha, there we are. This is really an honor - I mean,  just being nominated by the committee is more than I could have ever dreamed up when I was just a small boy growing on a farm in Indiana, hoping that some day my name would be on Broadway…

Wait… What? Oh, sorry…

I started blogging for the same reason that a lot of other people do - to carve out my own little bit of the blogosphere and tell my story. Blogging is a vehicle to share my birding experiences and photos with friends, family, and anybody that will listen to me (and there is no doubt that I enjoy spinning the narrative). I still approach it that way - I think of my readers as a larger circle of friends, so the tone remains very familiar, and anybody who want to listen in or join the conversation is welcome.

What’s the best thing about blogging?

I think one of the best things to come out of blogging is networking and making friends far and wide (more about that below). I enjoy blogging the most when I have something that I am really excited to share. You know when you have something happen that you want to tell everyone you run into - well, this is a good way to do just that! And anybody who knows me will tell you, when I am excited to talk about something, it’s hard to shut me up. The other side of that coin though, is when there is a lull… and I feel like I ought to be posting something, but just don’t have it in me.

How has blogging changed how you think about nature? or how you write?

I don’t feel that blogging has changed much about how I think about or approach nature. As I am out and about birding, I do always have the thought in the back of my head “I might be blogging about this experience, so I want to make sure I remember this, or make sure I get a photo of that.” I’d never done much writing before, so really it’s not affected how I write, as much as it has given me an outlet.

How do you promote your blog and attract readers?

Frankly, I am guilty of not promoting my blog as much as some other bloggers do. There seems to be a big push lately for finding all kinds of ways of promoting your blog, increasing your exposure, etc. I’ve not changed much of what I do from the time I began blogging. I’ve not given a lot of thought to how I choose my words to get results in search engines, or use specific keywords or anything like that. I just do what I do, and I’m happy with it. I’ve participated in memes like”Bird Photography Weekly,” “Wordless Wednesday,” and “Skywatch Friday” as well as participating in a few “I and the Bird” (IATB) editions. I hosted an IATB a few months back that I really had a blast doing.

One thing I’ve done to promote my blog is to post the blog’s info with the Nature Blog Network and Fatbirder’s Top 1000. One of the things that helps to give your blog some legs is to have links from other blogs. I’m a big proponent of supporting blogs that I like through linking them - both in the body of posts, and in a blogroll. I have had the honor of having some of these great bloggers provide links to my blog as well, and I think that has provided more “unique hits” than anything else.

With regard to the social networking end of things, I have been known to pop up on Twitter for a bit here and there (though not as much lately and for no good reason… which reminds me that I’ll have to check in with my tweeps), and I’ve been using Facebook a lot.

Is there a story behind the name of your blog?

Since I began birding I have had an affinity for woodpeckers and the latin name for the family is picidae. The name comes from Roman mythology. Picus was a king turned into a woodpecker by the witch Circe because he scorned her love.

I felt that if I was going to be putting a part of myself out there, it should reflect my passion for this industrious family of birds. Choosing the name of the blog was the easiest part of setting up the blog!

Do you feel you’re part of a community with other nature bloggers?

There are a lot of bloggers out there that are really amazing. They write wonderfully educational, politically enlightening, and truly entertaining blogs with a regularity that simply blows my mind. I’ll be honest, for a long time I didn’t feel like I was a part of this community - I was just a local boy bloggin’ about my personal experiences. (I mean come on, who cares where I went birding on Saturday, right?)

Well, there are a lot of readers out there, and many of them are bloggers too. You start feeling that sense of community when you see readers’ comments or when another blogger links to something you’ve written. You may not have been looking for it, but it gives a sense of validation that feels pretty good - especially when it comes from somebody whose work you admire. It might have sounded like I was joking earlier, but I am really honored to be selected as a featured blog in the NBN - it adds to that feeling like I’m part of a community.

I think I most felt it this past November when I attended the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, where a number of other bloggers that attended recognized me and the blog. For some reason, I was rather surprised by that.

Have I made new friends through blogging? You bet I have, and it really seems to have snowballed in the last year. About a year and a half ago, I hit on the idea of putting together a team of bloggers to compete in Massachusetts Audubon’s Superbowl of Birding - a competition in the same vein as the more famous World Series of Birding. I sent out invitations to a number of bloggers that I admired, and was thrilled to get an “interested” or a “definite yes” from most, if not all of them. This was my first time meeting other bloggers face-to-face that I’d previously known only online. As you might suspect, we got along great, and I knew I’d made some really great friends. This year, we’ll be doing it again, with a few of the guys from last year, and a few new friends joining for the first time.

Also this past year, Dawn Fine (of Dawn’s Bloggy Blog) and I planned the first outing of what has become known as “Birders who Blog, Tweet, and Chirp.” While she and her husband were in town we gathered a group of birders from as far and wide as New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine, and of course, Massachusetts for a day of birding. The idea has taken off, as Dawn travels around the country getting groups of bloggers together to bird wherever she is. In addition, other groups have been getting together, and there is a web site dedicated to the BwBTC, thanks to John Briggs of Birding in Maine. Since that first meeting, I have attended two additional meetings organized by bloggers who also liked the idea and took the reins to do the same. It’s always fun to meet other bloggers, and see them comparing cameras or asking how one did something on their site or even just compliment each others work.

Any words of wisdom for new nature bloggers?

If you are interested, just go for it. There are a lot of ways to enter the blogosphere, with easy click-to-publish formats via Blogger and Wordpress that don’t require a knowledge of web design.

Write when the muse strikes you (sometimes she hits me with a giant club, and other times I can’t find her no matter how hard I look). Do it because you like it and enjoy it - but don’t let it become a chore. There are times when I think “I really ought to post something to the blog” and I find that when I write because I feel like I should, those are my weakest posts, and the ones I am least happy with.

Finally, don’t be afraid to contact other nature bloggers with questions or for advice - everybody I’ve been in contact with - whether in comments, via e-mail, or in person - have been incredibly friendly and willing to help.

Anything else you’d like me to ask you, or that you’d like to volunteer without being asked?

Be sure to check in, learn more about the Bloggerhead Kingbirds, and see how we did here.  Please click through to my teammates’ blogs as well to get their takes on it too!

Thank you for the opportunity to let me babble a while on another forum.