First Friday deadline: Aug. 2

There's no dearth of good writers in the birding blogosphere, and it'd be a pleasure to see them turn their minds to crafting short stories about birds, birding and birders. Clare Kines of The House & Other Arctic Musings wrote the winning entry for the first edition, an intriguing tale called "The Climb."

For the purposes of First Friday -- the monthly birding fiction contest -- we define an appropriate entry as a fictional piece of 500 words that contains a setting, a character or characters, a conflict and a resolution. One more stipulation: The birds will not be anthropomorphized.

The writer of the winning entry can choose a recently published book from the bookshelves of the WildBird office, where we regularly receive review copies of new titles. Because the book reviewer chooses only three titles per issue, I can offer a nice selection of books to the winning wordsmith.

The second edition of First Friday will appear on Aug. 4, with entries due via e-mail on Wednesday the 2nd. Please send them as Word or text files.

Questions? Please holler.