It’s Your Call Challenge

Springtime brings us lots of sounds that we don’t hear the rest of the year. Geese honk overhead, peepers peep and wood frogs chortle in the wetlands. Barred owls mating calls range from their typical “Who cooks for you” to something that sounds (to me) more like laughing hyenas. Towhees admonish us to drink our tea, tufted titmice shout for Peter, and the warblers sing their little hearts out.

All those nature calls led us to create an It’s Your Call challenge for all of our friends, volunteers, members, hikers, and blog readers. Come up with your own springtime “call” for the Nature Center. Your call won’t be auditory, instead it will be verbal. Actually, written.

Your call will be something that represents the Nature Center. It might be words that make you think of us or sounds that you hear in our woods. You might choose a few words that will make people want to hike our trails or visit our programs, or a call to action for the environment. You may have another creative way to interpret what a Pfeiffer Nature Center ‘call’ is.

Most animals have relatively short calls, so in keeping with that concept, you’re limited to a maximum of 43 characters, including spaces. You may want to think of it as a dramatically reduced tweet. Why 43? That’s how many characters are in our full name: Pfeiffer Nature Center and Foundation, Inc.

Send in as many calls as you’d like by April 30. Submit your calls as a comment on this post, email your calls to me – director (at) pfeiffernaturecenter (dot) org, leave them on our answering machine (716-933-0187), or send them to me on a postcard (PO Box 802, Portville, NY 14770).

I’ll post all the entries on this blog in early May. We’ll come up with a cool prize for the winner.

Here are two quite different calls to get you started:

• A possible tag-line call, only 34 characters: Celebrate nature, share the wonder
• A call that begs to be said out loud, only 15 characters.  Said/sung to the tune of the Rufous-sided Towhee’s call: PNC, it’s for me!

Have fun with this!