Back in March the American Birding Association (ABA) announced that their bird of the year for 2012 would be the Evening Grosbeak. We are supporting the ABA with sales of Birdorable Evening Grosbeak merchandise. Birdorable is proud to support the ABA by offering Evening Grosbeak apparel and merchandise with 25% of sales going directly to the organization. All Birdorable Evening Grosbeak designs are participating in this promotion throughout 2012! All Birdorable Evening Grosbeak products, including shirts, stickers, mugs, and mousepads, are completely customizable via our production partner Zazzle. One great thing about offering our products via Zazzle is that customers can add elements like text or photos to products to personalize them. We are offering some "pre-personalized" ABA-branded merchandise in our Birdorable shop. You can find them here: ABA Bird of the Year 2012.

Here is a very short tutorial showing how you can customize Birdorable products, using an ABA Evening Grosbeak shirt as an example. From the shop page linked above, click on the Value Shirt thumbnail. This brings you directly to the product page on Zazzle.com. Click on the orange Customize It button.

The page refreshes with a new customization menu available on the right side of the screen, shown below. Notice that there are two design elements - one text and one image. Click on Change text to customize the t-shirt text.

A small text box pops up on the screen. In this example I have changed the text to read I LOVE THE ABA. I used the text size tool to increase the font size on the caption. Here is what my new shirt looks like.

There are other customization options - you can change the font style or color, change the placement of both the bird and your caption, or even add your own images. You can add your name or anything else to the back of shirts, too! Customization tools like these are available on all Zazzle-provided products, and there is no obligation to buy - so feel free to play with the tools and let your creativity shine! We've had fun with this before on our blog, adding funny text to our Kakapo shirts when a particularly funny video clip was making the social media rounds. Check it out, and be sure to look at the shirts at the bottom of the post: Shagadelic Birdorable Kakapo. If you play around with the customization tools, feel free to show off your creations, either by commenting here on the blog or by posting on our Facebook page.

For 22 days we're adding a new Birdorable bird every day as part of our Birdorable Bonanza 2012. We're counting up to our 400th species! We proudly kick off our Bonanza 2012 with a beautiful species native to the Americas: the Rose-breasted Grosbeak!

Rose-breasted Grosbeaks are small songbirds that breed across the Northeast of the United States and across much of Canada. These migratory beauties head south in the fall, spending the winter in Central and northern South America. Males have a shock of red on the chest, for which the species is named. Females look very different; they are sometimes mistaken for sparrows.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak by Putneypics

Did you know ...

• Most birds keep quiet while incubating eggs to avoid attention from predators, but male and female Rose-breasted Grosbeaks sing quietly to each other when they exchange places on the nest, and the male sings his normal song while near or even on the nest;
• Rose-breasted Grosbeaks love moonlit nights and sometimes sing all night long when the moon is shining;
• In areas where their range overlap, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks may cross-breed with Black-headed Grosbeaks. Babies can look like either parent, or have a mixed pattern;
• Its nest, which is built from twigs in treetops, is often so thinly constructed that the eggs can be seen from below;
• Birdhouses built for bluebirds may also be used for Rose-breasted Grosbeaks;
• Their large beaks allow them to eat large grasshoppers and other insects that have tough exoskeletons;
• Rose-breasted Grosbeaks love sunflower seeds and will be attracted to hopper feeders containing striped or black-oil sunflower seeds.

Tomorrow's bird is endemic to the Hawaiian islands. Can you guess what it will be?