Okay … summer is still one month away, and last year we actually had snow during late May. Regardless, the summer bug eating birds have reappeared and are looking for mates. One of those birds is a Bobolink.
When I was a young boy in the 1960’s, bobolinks were one of the birds in my National Geographic Song and Garden Birds of North America book which I most wanted to see. However growing up in the Boreal Forest meant seeing a bobolink was a pipe dream. Although my parents liked birds, none of us knew about Sax-Zim Bog (only 35 minutes away). This book moved with me to prep school (Exeter), college (Dartmouth), my job in the Twin Cities (Honeywell), and finally back to Duluth! Some books are worth keeping! I think the combination of this book and our two bird feeders drove my interest in birds. What made you become interested in birding??? 
Make certain to read the comments to this post. Folks are starting to add how they became interested in birds!
Yesterday morning I had a grand time watching and listening to Bobolinks. Not many females are yet back in northern Minnesota, but the males were singing up a storm (email subscribers view / listen to this bobolink video). All the birds in this post were seen yesterday in the non Boreal portion of Sax-Zim Bog.
Bobolinks
Eastern Kingbird
The Sandhill Crane Family (wait for me!!!)
OK, I’ll add mine. I’ve liked birds for as long as I can remember and learned the names of the common ones at least simply by growing up around people who knew what they were. As a kid I had a copy of The Observer’s Book of Birds (I’m a Brit, the Observer’s series was great and covered many, many topics) and I just about memorized it. As I grew older, my interest in birds became much more passive as other interests and work competed for attention, but it never entirely went away. Once I retired from my job in Boston and went to live in rural Wisconsin I found birds everywhere and had the time to study them. All that childhood knowledge came in very useful! It still surprises me that people can start birding as adults with zero knowledge of the most basic birds. I’ve no real idea about how I absorbed the names of most American species, but it certainly impresses the neighbours when I reel off the identities of the birds that are visiting their feeders!
Thanks for the blog, I love Bobolinks. Saw my first of the year today.
Jill
love that book! i remember scarlet tanagers as a little girl in the summers. birds have been a treasured part of my life
Thank you for these wonderful stories and photos. I became interested in birds when my mother joined the Issac Walton League back in the 1970’s. My name is Phoebe, but I have yet to see a Phoebe Bird.
I so love your posts. I’m a bird nut because of my 4th grade teacher, Mrs Reynolds. Each week she would teach us about a different bird. I was so interested that I began keeping a log of the birds I saw. My interest in birds has only increased 100 fold over the years.