It's hard to believe that a year ago today we launched the Utah birders Blog. Since it's inception more than 8,000 of you have visited the site, viewing our 200+ blog posts more than 45,000 times. More than half of you return to view multiple blog postings, a testament to you as our readers, as well as our bloggers.

Some of our most popular posts involved Raptors--which is no surprise with Jerry Ligouri's fantastic insights drawing a great deal of attention. Gulls, eBird, record committees, travel, quizzes, owls, history, commentary, migration, photography, and optics have been some other great topics--some stirring up controversy while others stoke great conversation between the members of this community.

In 2012 we plan some big changes for the blog and website and we thought we would kick things off ( a little Christmas comes early) by announcing our first new initiative.

The Utah Birders Blog was founded to be a voice for the birders in our state. As we've said, it is a blog "By and for Utah Birders". With that in mind, we want to expand our contributions to include more of these voices. This means we want your help!

We are now accepting submissions from Guest Bloggers. Please consider this your invitation to submit your own post on anything birding related that you think would be fun to share and that others would relate to. We're all birders but we each see things in our own way (through our own binocular lenses!), and we'd love to hear and share some more of those unique perspectives from the community. If you have an idea but you're not sure how to get started on writing a post about it or want to know what we think, feel free to write to us we'll offer some help.

Submit your idea for a blog post by clicking the button below:

We'll be periodically selecting from the pool of submissions and posting on the blog. We'll start out by aiming for one guest blogger per week but feel free to submit as many ideas as often as you'd like.

To get things going we asked a Utah Birder who has contributed greatly to the community in the past year to tell us a little bit about a tattoo he recently had inked. This is Shyloh Robinson's "Birds, Tattoos, and Tattoos of Birds".

Thank YOU for being a Utah Birder!

Sincerely,
The Utah Birders