Avon, MN

Avon Hills Important Bird Area in Stearns County Minnesota

The Avon Hills is roughly 72,000 acres of excellent bird habitat, the area is included in the Important Bird Areas Program in Minnesota. The Avon Hills IBA is expansive, including the areas of St. Wendel Bog, St. John's Arboretum (including the St. John's Campus) Max Partch Woods, the Avon Hills SNA, and 3 waterfowl production areas. Avon Hills IBA has several small and medium size lakes. The most notable of the lakes in the area are Kramer Lake, Big Fish Lake, Big Watab Lake, Lake Sagatagan, Pelican Lake and the Spunk Lake Chain in Avon.

The bird varieties in Avon Hills includes Wood Ducks, Common Loons, Blue-winged Teals, Common Mergansers, Pied-Billed Grebes, Red-Shouldered Hawks, Cerulean Warblers and Blue-winged Warblers just to name a few. The Minnesota Audubon has set up monitoring for several species for more information on these monitoring programs just click on the birds name and you will open the link to their monitoring page: Red-Shouldered Hawk, Peregrine Falcon and the Bald Eagle.

There are over 10,000 Important Bird Areas in the world. The program was originally developed by BirdLife International as a way to preserve important habitat for the protection of our bird populations. The Important Bird Area program in the United States in administered by the National Audubon Society, the local chapters are more invloved with each of their respective areas.

There is international criteria that each one of the areas must meet in order to be considered for the progam. Each IBA must be:  

• Globally threatened species
• Restricted-range species
• Biome-restricted species
• Congregations

Recently protecting our bird population here in Minnesota has hit front page news with the announcing of the state's first hunting season for Sandhill Cranes. The Minnesota Audubon has sent a letter to the DNR in protest of the newly enacted hunt. This is an interesting development as prior to the press release announcing the Sandhill Crane hunt the 2 organizations have had a very close working relartionship, as evidenced from this direct quote off of the Audubon's own site. "Audubon Minnesota and our partners in the Minnesota DNR Nongame Program oversee the Important Bird Areas Program in Minnesota." As a bird enthusiast and a hunter I will be watching the evolution of this situation.

Throughout the state of Minnesota 240 sites have been recommended to become part of the IBA program while only 15 areas have been identified as part of the program. We are very lucky to have 2 Important Bird Areas near St Cloud, the Sherburne NWR IBA and the Avon Hills IBA.