34 Nebraskaland • April 2025
brothers from Creighton and Wayne, and two of just seven
birders in the state who have checked off more than 400 birds
in Nebraska on their life lists. As it turned out, Mark had done
his student teaching under Corey's father at Wisner-Pilger
schools. The next day, when they crossed paths again, the
Brogies and their party invited the Webers to join them in the
woods. "We saw a bunch of stuff we had never seen before,"
Andi said, noting a prothonotary warbler was the highlight
of the day.
Warblers piqued their interest early on, and they purchased
the warbler identifi cation course from the Cornell Lab of
Ornithology's Bird Academy to help them identify subspecies,
something that can be tricky with these small, colorful birds
that fl it among the treetops. Other courses have followed.
The interest in warblers led to a vacation in High Island,
Texas, in the spring of 2019. The birdwatching destination
boasts the only strip of forest for miles on the Gulf Coast,
and it is where millions of neotropical songbirds, including
warblers, stop to rest after fl ying across the Gulf from their
wintering grounds farther south. The Webers were among a
group of bird-watchers when Silas, 10 at the time, made an
impression.
"Silas is up front, sitting down, and he says, 'There's a
chestnut-sided warbler.' And I hear someone say, 'Hey, that
little kid's right,'" Corey recalled.
When the coronavirus pandemic shut the world down in
2020, the Webers did their social distancing in the woods,
often twice a day in the spring and fall.
"The pandemic really helped because I barely had any
schoolwork, and I was able to go out every day in the spring,"
Eli said.
"We were killing it," Corey said. "We just saw so many
birds. It was a great use of time when there wasn't much else
to do."
The brothers each bring something to the table.
"Eli is the engine room," Corey said. "He's got the insatiable
appetite for it, and he kind of motivates the rest of us. Silas
has outstanding ears and outstanding eyes but takes a little
prodding to get going. Once he gets going, he loves it. But
sometimes he's not dying to get up early and come out here.
But he's good. He's spotted a lot of birds for us."
Silas's eyes have made him good at spotting and identifying
Five-year-old Eli Weber holds a white-breasted nuthatch at the fi rst bird banding workshop he attended at the Fontenelle
Forest Nature Center. COREY WEBER
