River Bird Blog features bird activity and other natural history at Aghaming Park and Preserve, 1400 acres of floodplain habitats on the upper Mississippi River near Winona MN. Richie Swanson lives beside Aghaming and has birded it since 1979. He will post accounts of bird migration and breeding activity once per week through June, every Friday if possible. Richie’s bird articles have appeared in Birder’s World, Western Birder, High Country News, www.gloriamundipress.com, and Mississippi Monitor. He has monitored bird populations for the Upper Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge, the city of Winona MN, and the Resource Studies Center at St. Mary’s University in Winona. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Association of Field Ornithologists accepted his Breeding Bird Censuses 1993-2000, okaying them for publication in the Journal of Field Ornithology. His 1998 study, the Breeding Birds of Aghaming Park, is at www.warblingrichie.com.
Richie won the Year 2000 National Peace Writing Award for an unpublished novel that contributes to peacemaking, granted by Peace Hope. His new fiction Creator Bird is forthcoming in Raven Chronicles, www.RavenChronicles.org. His story, So Hard Pull the Insides, was a finalist in Alligator Juniper’s 2003 national fiction contest. His short stories and myths have also appeared in Indigenous Fiction, Mobius: the Journal of Social Change, Innisfree, Short Stories Bimonthly, Ginosko: between literary vision and spiritual realties, Gloria Mundi Press and Transnational Perspectives.
