silverflight8 | Entries tagged with birding

So I have about 5000 hobbies, and those hobbies get various amounts of energy from me at different times, and I do try to not fall head-first into new ones, especially if they start with a big outlay of cash - I just think that there's a difference between "knitting" and "I like buying supplies for knitting and being excited". Mostly there's just not enough time in the world. And I've been pretty nuts on some hobbies for a long time. But I feel like birding was almost in its own league, in that I encountered it at the right time and it absolutely mashed all my buttons.

I like hobbies that have a "discover something hidden" aspect to them. Letterboxing, Ingress, all appease this part of me. I love that birding can happen anywhere - nowhere on the planet is free from birds. You can be in the wildest and deepest part of the wilderness, you can be in Antarctica, you can be on deep pelagic waters or the most remote islands, you can be in a city or in the suburbs, there will be birds. Some places are better, of course, but it's an activity you can do anywhere. And people don't usually think that there will be birds in the city, and it's not the most biodiverse place ever (though there are some interesting caveats to this), so finding them is like finding little gems. Plus birding has a "chase after rarities" aspect, which I try not to do too much - but it's a hobby that has a lot of people who like to do it, and plenty of infrastructure built around it, like rare bird alerts.

I like travelling in general! I like seeing novel places, solo travel, urban exploration because I didn't learn to drive until very late. Before birding I would take a solo trip about once a year usually to Europe and just spend a week or two running about a country. I took trips via airplane but also by train, since Amtrak serves my area pretty well. I quite like public transit systems in general and have done a lot of travel via public transit. Especially once phone data became available, it's gotten very easy to do.

I like being out in nature! Honestly I have to stay indoors for a whole day I feel antsy. Let me tell you, I did not enjoy quarantining that one time I had covid. I love gardens. Before birding I also used to really enjoy going to various gardens - I went specifically to the moss gardens in Abbey Rockefeller Garden up in Maine, I've been to the Longwood Garden (the DuPont one) and many of the famous local ones nearby, the National Arboretum. When I stopped in LA to break up the Hawaii trip, I went to the Huntington Gardens, which were amazing, and I should have gone there twice instead of going to Universal, which I discovered was not for me. I like urban parks a lot, too. I live in a city and have to rent cars at frankly extortionate rates, so I still do a lot of birding in urban parks.

I care about conservation and think birding is a good way to get people interested and to care. I think it's important to advocate for wildlife, that we are animals and we rely on the ecosystem just like every other living being does. Since I do so much urban birding I get approached often, and I've decided to use this avenue to try to get people to be more interested; I carry around bird stickers with info on the back for getting involved (in birding, in conservation) and hand them out to anyone who isn't a birder who comes to talk to me. Biology is so huge and there just aren't enough biologists out there, so one place citizen science can step up is here.

I love deep time/natural history. I really like the science and taxonomy end of birding too, and there's a deep, deep well to dive into there. I like human history too, I think it comes from an overall "but why?" and the past is (part of) the key to the present.

I love data. eBird makes this so easy, because it not only stores your sightings, complete with comments, media (photos/audio), time/date/location, distance walked, but also offers different ways to view it. You can see who has gone to the hotspot recently and seen which birds, how many times you've seen this species and where and when, how many birds you've seen this year, breakdowns by country, sub-country divisions, sub-sub country divisions, etc (in the US this is down to the county level). Bar charts of frequency of birds seen at your self-defined patch, over the course of a year, averaged across all the years you've been reporting. The ability to have all your data exported in csv, so other people who can code have also created additional ways to look at your data, plus just the joy of exporting it and then messing with it in Excel or program of choice.

There's even an art and creative component - you can write up your trips, make art featuring birds, photography, all that.

I like that you can do it a little or a lot, and you can scale it back or ramp it up any time you want. I am really good at doing a once-a-day-challenge, so I've been submitting a checklist a day, but some days are me going out morning, noon, and afternoon; other days are 3 minutes looking out my apartment window; and on really busy days I'll just log a super quick incidental checklist, where you don't really stop to try to observe all the birds, just note one at x location at y time. You can bird from your yard, or go to an urban park, or a wilderness, or the side of the road. I really like that it can be done by yourself or in groups. I bird a lot, so most of it is by myself, but I've joined some bird clubs and go on walks fairly regularly, or go with friends, both of which are great. You can choose what habitats you want to bird - I personally really like forests and grassland and some seaside and marsh, but I hate boats, so I just skip anything pelagic, and that's perfectly doable.

So yes. That is why I am nuts. Fortunately the full on madness is passing a bit now that spring migration has passed, and I'm doing other fun things in addition to birding, though honestly at least half of that is related to how the weather is horrible...I'm excited for it to be less hot and for shorebirds to start coming back south.

52 species on a bird walk today I am REELING people trying to leave after the bird walk officially ended kept looping back because something else was spotted, I've never had a day like this. And it's fall!

Genuinely my favourite picture so far, doubly because it's a warbler, I love warblers. They're so small, they only come through very briefly, I usually see them high up in a tree and only see their butts...so this was so special.

Male prairie warbler. It just hopped up on a bush so close to me and sang.

Look at him!!!

I went birding today and saw a bunch of birds (I think about 15-20 species across 3 locations) but to cap everything off, while I was standing in this parking lot in the city center I saw this big red-tailed hawk. There was a ton of robins constantly calling and harassing it, which is what alerted me, so I went and watched it for a bit. Then while I was watching it sit in the tree, it suddenly swooped past me and caught a baby bunny as it tried to dive for cover.

The hawk didn't seem to care I was there, and brought it over to the fence real close to me, so I got a good shot.

( There's no blood but warning for animal harm image below, also some graphic description )

I feel a little bad for the bunny but mostly, admiration for the hawk. It was so fast, it was all over in a second. That's basically a bucket list item for me! I still want to see a hawk catch a bird on the wing, but this is already amazing.

Current Mood: excited
Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/448258.html

me: trying to make notes on my phone while in the field, about observed birds' plumage, beaks, behaviour, size, sometimes referencing mallards as they're a good reference point
google keyboard: autocorrects all the "ducks" to "fucks"

It was NOT fuck-shaped or -sized!

Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/445293.html

Actually, 35 days of checklist streak, as defined by ebird. Because ebird is trying to collect data that is useful for science, they have birding protocols. The most valuable is a "complete checklist", where your primary purpose is birding, you try to identify all the birds that you can see and hear, and you give number counts - estimating obviously, if necessary (and it's very necessary when faced with thousands of birds at sea, I'm totally overwhelmed. Counting is hard!!)

Anyway, it's been pretty helpful, because if I've learned anything about practicing, it's that if you practice every day you cannot fail to get better. It's a very comforting thought. Piano was the first thing I did this with - my parents made me - but I've also done smaller projects like this, like carving a stamp a day for a set period of time. (THAT project levelled up my carving skills so fast, but I need to do a 30 days of drawing. Design is now the sticking point.) I definitely think I've gotten better at birding. It's forced me to not only go outside every day, which I'm actually pretty good at doing, but also makes me focus on listening and watching, being active about observing. Also, though I think I've got a pretty high tolerance for going to the same place and watching it change throughout the seasons, I do get bored, so I try to change up the locations. I usually go during lunch since I can't reliably get out of work in time before sunset; the main pond nearby has other birders reliably covering that location, but there are smaller parks and wooded patches that aren't well-visited at all, so since I'm local I try to keep a watch on those.

For lazy days, I have a feeder filled with seed that hangs on the lilac in the back yard. I call it a yard, but it's not really - it's about two meters of dirt that is at the back of the apartment block, with a concrete wall (overgrown with ivy) separating it from the alley, and a concrete path that runs through to the back door. However, there's also a reasonably tall lilac bush and I've hung the feeder from there. It gets mobbed by sparrows and I do so enjoy watching their little interpersonal conflicts and their cute little faces. Blue jays drop in too, and cardinals and mockingbirds. I'm sure the starlings will be back - I'm amazed they haven't come by yet.

Anyway, what I was going to talk about is the study that was done on avian populations in North America, and the staggering statistic that we've lost about 30% of the bird population compared to 1970. 1970 is only 50 years ago. These aren't rare birds disappearing - common backyard birds have suffered huge losses. Here is the article: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/09/nearly-30-birds-us-canada-have-vanished-1970

There's another article which I cannot find now but was talking about a physics lab (I think) in the Midwest, where to accommodate the lab, there's land set aside, and it's interestingly enough turned into a bit of a wildlife sanctuary, because it's land that's not being actively used for human purposes. The ecosystem's just been left alone. There's a scientist at that lab who also birds, and there was a quote from him saying that it was so strange (and disquieting) to walk through the property there and now hear so little birdsong, because he remembers. Older birders remember a past that had more birds in it. The change has come so fast.

It makes me wonder about my memory and the future. 2020 is when I started really observing and listening. This is my start. This is the baseline, for me - I've always liked nature but lived in cities, so Pandemic Year 2020 will probably be my earliest memories of birding. I'm a young person and life expectancy is pretty high, there are a lot of years to go. I hope I won't ever have similar thoughts, and to be saddened by the silence of the woods & meadows. I think about how common mallards and Canadian geese are and how any patch of water might have a duck or two in it, no matter how small; I think about how even when running errands, passing by some ordinary city house's shrubbery I can hear a vocal horde of house sparrows chattering away; I think about the way I can stand still in a small urban forest and hear black-capped chickadees singing their distinctive song. I hope these don't become rare experiences.

Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/444066.html

Next weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count, which aims to harness citizen science and observation to create a detailed snapshot of bird activity and presence, globally. It's a challenge meant to encourage new birders and also those who aren't birders, just interested or wanting to be involved in the outdoors.

All you have to do is observe and record birds for 15 mins, between Feb 12-15, and then upload the count.

Here is the eBird link with information: https://ebird.org/news/great-backyard-bird-count-2021

If you have never birded, the Merlin app is super easy to use.

I bird both by going to places, and also by standing at my window. I live in a city, my window faces an alley and then another building's back, and the "yard" is really just a short distance to a concrete wall, but I see birds there (5 species so far this year!). So don't despair if you don't have ideal conditions. In fact, I think one of the reasons the GBBC runs is because while there is good coverage of popular birding spots, there are many dead zones where there is no record at all.

Crossposts: https://silverflight8.livejournal.com/441234.html

and it's SO fun. One of my friends through ingress convinced me I should buy a pair of entry level binoculars and it's probably one of the best purchases I made this year. I can see tiny little sparrows so clearly, I can ID raptors flying far above me, and they are so easy to use - honestly, the difference between these (Celestron's NatureDX, about a hundred twenty USD) and every other pair of cheap binoculars I've ever used is night and day. I could never get the others to work and they made me dizzy. These are a dream to use comfortably and super sturdy and waterproof, I love them.

To ID, I use Merlin, which is an app created by the Cornell Ornithology Lab. You put in the date and place of viewing, then estimate the size of the bird (smaller than a sparrow? the size of a robin? bigger than a goose?) and up to 3 colours, and what kind of habitat you saw it (swimming, soaring about, in a tree, etc) and then it gives you possibilities. With all the criteria it's not a long list and it's way easier than using paper field guides. When you start out you have no idea if it's a finch or a warbler! And since the app is made by Cornell, it pulls from the Macaulay Library, so there are about a half dozen clear photographs accompanying each bird description, as well a bunch of sound files for calls and songs so you can confirm the id by sound too. It's awesome.

I like solo activities generally, like being shut up in my room to do my projects, and I like that birding works well solo. I hike with other people usually since I'm afraid of breaking an ankle and having to be rescued - I'm not afraid of wildlife but am of my own fallibility, lol - but hiking with other people after an objective like "hike the trail to x point" means we go quickly through the terrain and also we are loud. But hiking solo means stopping whenever (and for however long) I want, staring into trees, standing still hoping that I'll see birds. And I do!!

Getting to forests is hard so I don't go that often - no car - but fortunately while I live in the city I live in walking distance of some very green parks. I actually cross the street and go to bird at the pond pretty much most lunches, just so I can take a break, and there's always a huge flock of Canadian geese hanging out there, a good dozen mallards, and also a great blue heron (majestic and definitely a Cool Dude) and a double creasted cormorant (hangs out on a tree branch that sticks out of the middle of the pond) who live there. The magic of the binoculars is that while I've known for years there are mallards and Canadian geese who live there, I've never ever noticed the cormorant or the heron or a bunch of other birds that clearly live/visit there all the time. It's honestly like being given the secret to seeing hidden things. And there are lots of my hobbies that intersect with this - ingress, letterboxing, etc.

The other interesting thing is that birding is obviously a huge and old hobby, and also practiced by people with incredibly deep pockets. Since Merlin is built by Cornell, they also have a connection between the app (main focus: bird identification for beginner/intermediate) -> ebird.com, which is as far as I can tell, a way to harness citizen observations to power ornithology science*. This is a hobby that is very much geared towards catch-em-all, and dear god, does ebird's myaccount backend cater to this: logging in immediately shows you your Life List, aka all the birds you have confidently identified, broken down by various categories like region. It's also got a little bit of socialness to it, built in; for example, people can see your profile and your life list if you choose to make both public. It's generally accepted there's about ten thousand bird species worldwide. There are people on the site who have a life list of 9,500+ birds. That's people who have seen the vast majority of this planet's birds. That's a huge investment of time and money into travel, equipment, tours, standing in one place staring into scopes, etc. I feel not at all weird about my hours into videogaming or fandom or whatever.

*So cool - even without being a scientist there are lots of processed data you can look at. For example, since there is just SUCH granular coverage, far greater than any consortium of university scientists could ever hope to cover (just think of how much grant money would be required to fund it!) there are incredible maps, species by species, of migratory behaviour, where they currently are at what time. It's so neat to see them move - it must be so cool to see all sorts of unusual birds migrate through the prairie states/provinces in North America.