Nature Blog Network

This weekend, five bird bloggers, myself included, will be heading to Massachusetts to participate in Mass Audubon’s annual Superbowl of Birding, a 12 hour birding competition similar to the more famous World Series of Birding, but different in a couple important ways.  First, the competition lasts 12 hours instead of 24 (presumably to prevent hypothermia) and second, scoring is determined by a point system in which every bird is graded by rarity.  And the intrepid bloggers, NBN members all, taking part in this madness?

Christopher of Picus Blog

Patrick of Hawk Owl’s Nest

Corey of 10,000 Birds

Quintus of Owl Box

and me of, um,  here.

We are… the Bloggerhead Kingbirds.

Nearly everything is ready.  We have great birds waiting for us (Ivory Gull?  Hawk Owl? King Eider?), we have a central location to stay, a van for us to get around, and a killer logo created by the incredible Amy of Birdorable.  But I didn’t stick this post up just to announce this collaboration of NBN members, as cool as it is.  I’m also announcing, that along with the competition, we’re making our presence and progress known in the internets.

At the ScienceOnline09 convention last weekend, in a session about blogging from odd locations, an idea I’d been tossing around in my head crystallized.  Not just to compete in a bird competition, but live-blog it.  It wouldn’t just be five nature bloggers on the hunt, but the whole nature blogosphere.  Fun right?

So you, reader and member of the NBN, should you so desire can follow our periodic updates on two platforms.

1. I’ll be posting fairly regularly via cell phone on my twitter feed, I’m NC_N8.  If you’re a twitterati, follow along (No, this isn’t a blatant grab for twitter followers, and I won’t feel bad if you decide to leave afterwards).  If not, sign up is easy, or you can just check the page.
2. Also, Quintus will be mo-blogging on his Owl Box blog, which may have pictures, though even cell phone technology isn’t to the point yet where we can guarantee they’ll be good ones.  If you want to follow here, I suggest an RSS feed or Google reader.

I can’t promise we’ll be keeping up a constant stream, we’ll be birding pretty hard after all and we have legitimate designs on winning this thing, but if you’re sitting around on Saturday at any point between 5:00am EST and 5:00 pm EST, check out what’s going on.  Knowing we’ve got a few people rooting us on may be just what we need to fight though those afternoon doldrums and pull it out.

Maybe you’ll be the first one to get the message, at 5:30pm, “We Won!”