Theodore Wirth Park offers more than 600 acres of highly varied birding habitat just west of downtown Minneapolis. It's at its best in the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden, a rolling landscape offering compact and intense birding. Two-thirds of a mile of meandering trails give you a chance of seeing or hearing more than 100 species of birds. There is woodland, wetland and a prairie with a view. Birding is good year-round. Feeders are always filled. Check Wirth lake, just north of the wildflower garden, for waterfowl. There is a quaking bog down the hill and across Wirth Parkway from the gardens: another pocket of special habitat to explore. The garden atmosphere encourages strolling on its chip-padded paths. That's a perfect speed for birding.
A special almost secret place is the path running between two swampy areas just across Glenwood Avenue from the lake parking lot. Find the unmarked east entrance to the path by walking 30 feet between the swamp on your right and the manicured picnic ground to the left. Migrating warblers and swallows are bug vacuums over the water and in the shoreline willows.
The birds you see in your yard or wish you did -- chickadees, nuthatches, blue jays, woodpeckers, cardinals and finches -- are in the park 12 months a year.
