sophia_sol | BIRDS ARE THE BEST

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anent: birds

BIRDS ARE THE BEST

just realized that....I may not have ever mentioned here that I found a new hobby, which is birding! twitter has been receiving my EXTENSIVE enthusiasm for birds of late because I can just throw quick and immediate thoughts there, and I don't even know if I have long-form thoughts about birds and birding? But it feels wrong to not tell dw about my latest obsession!

I got into birding last august or so. I have for many years looked sidelong at birding, thinking that it looked exactly like the kind of hobby that could swallow me whole, and assuming it would probably one day come for me, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere it did. It clicked. Birds came knocking on my brain and said "hello pay attention to us now." And then I was a birder.

I am still not a very GOOD birder; I've been doing this for over 10 months and my life list is at 54 species, and there are folks out there who can see 54 species in one day if they put their back into it. (I don't have a good visual memory which makes ID challenging, and I struggle to pick birds out of the natural landscape visually, among other things.) But birds bring me SO MUCH JOY?

As I told twitter recently, I am still not over how there are so many kinds of birds in the world and you can just! see them! there are so many species of birds around you even in places you wouldn't expect! if your eyes are open to birds then they are everywhere!!

Birds are Good. Is the moral of this story.

I love birds a lot and I love seeing birds, both the cheerful regulars and the exciting rarities. I saw warblers for the first time on the may long weekend! I saw FIVE different kinds of warblers! and last weekend I saw a PILEATED WOODPECKER and they feel like a bird that cannot exist in reality for me to actually just see. but there it was!! I learned how to recognize the song of a song sparrow this spring and now that I know it I hear it everywhere and it always makes me happy because song sparrows are a delight! red-winged blackbirds are handsome fellows who pose all over the place for you to admire! Yesterday I randomly saw a killdeer in a semi-abandoned parking lot!

idek, birds are just amazing and I love them a lot.

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Pileated woodpeckers are the absolute best. And I like how red-winged blackbirds perch on fenceposts and sing as people bike by. So glad to hear your joy in your new hobby!

I am a very amateur very casual birder and I'm slowly learning to recognize some of them by sound, which is fun, since I'm no good at picking them out visually either.

yes, I'm also working on learning to ID by sound! it's challenging in whole other ways but you're very right that it's fun!

Yay, birds! :D Since my dad is an ornithologist, my eyes were opened to The Many Kinds Of Birds from a young age. I'm not serious about birding either and I've never even formally made a life list (horror!) but I do love watching and identifying the various birds that live all around us, and I never get tired even of the most common ones.

you will probably be amused to hear that it is only since I got into birding that I realised the reason your icon is a bird is because a pauraque is a type of bird *facepalm* I am sure growing up with an ornithologist parent would make you far more familiar with birds than I was!! And yes even the most common birds can bring joy, because birds are just great :)

You are far from the only one to not know that a pauraque is a bird! This has come up many times in the... uh... 20 years I've used the name online. In fact, when this (points) used to be my default icon on LJ, not everyone even visually parsed the picture as being a bird. Some people thought it was a coiled snake!

I like the name though, I kind of wish I'd named my internet identity after a bird now too!

and yeah that profile picture does give strong bird vibes to me but I can absolutely see how one could parse it as other things like a snake, your current icon is much more unmistakeable

I'm not a hardcore birder and am actually slightly terrified by how intense birding fandom can get, but I love to watch and identify birds, and like to read bird field guides for fun. :D It's always delightful to see a new one, especially as we don't have a huge variety of birds here because we're very far north and very inland.

Edited 2022-06-07 02:56 (UTC)

I feel quite insane in intensity, but then I think of the retired men with deep pockets that pay for travel to every continent, field guides and tours in said places, top of the line glass (scopes, binoculars, camera, you name it) and life lists of like 5000+ and I'm like. I'm fine. But man this hobby really got me. 🤣

I definitely didn't mean to sound like it's bad to be into it! I'm delighted that everyone is having that much fun with it. :D I'm just basically at the "ooh, look, a robin" stage. XD

Oh don't worry!!

Also....want to be pulled further down the rabbithole :D? :D?

oh lol yes birders can get SO intense and I'm a little intimidated by the idea of interacting with other irl birders as a result!

I'm not familiar with what birds Alaska has, what kinds of birds do you see where you are?

Welllll, in the winter there are about 5 kinds and that's it. (Black-capped chickadees, ravens, redpolls, and some assorted birds of prey, and very little else.) In summer we get a bunch of migratory waterfowl, small songbirds of the sparrow/warbler variety, robins and thrushes, sandpipers, and such.

But we don't really have a lot of different varieties of each one. So, for example, the only sparrow I have EVER seen around here is the white-crowned sparrow. We have yellow warblers and they are lovely, but I've never seen any other kind of warbler here. So basically it cuts down on the identifying ambiguity quite a lot, as opposed to living somewhere that if you see a small sparrow-shaped bird, it could be any one of 20 different kinds of basically very similar-looking sparrows.

Every now and then I see a new kind that I haven't seen around before, sometimes even something I didn't know came to Alaska at all, and that's always exciting.

Wow, fascinating! A very different experience of birds than where I am. I just checked and apparently we get 14 different kinds of sparrow where I live, not to mention all the other small brown sparrow-sized birds, lol. Though so far my count is only at 4 sparrow species that I've seen personally!

Are you sure there's no other sparrows?
I just pulled a bar chart for a good hotspot in Fairbanks, Creamer's Field State Migratory Waterfowl Refuge. A bunch of sparrows - American Tree, fox, chipping, dark-eyed junco (very populous), definitely white-crowned, golden crowned, savannah, lincoln's. The white-crowns are super distinctive though so you're probably right when you see one. But there definitely are more out there! Plus birds that look sparrow-ish - several kinds of flycatcher, horned lark, pippit, snow bunting, lapland longspur...

For warblers I'm actually slightly jealous, look at how long these guys are there with you instead of 6 weeks total across May/Oct!! Northern waterthrush, orange-crowned, yellow, blackpoll, yellow-rump, Townsend's, Wilson's.

And this kind of ebird output is raw data. I live in MA and there are about 1,000,000,000 birders, including some extremely good ones, so a lot of hotspots are very very very closely monitored. I don't think there's that level of population watching in Alaska (and reporting on ebird. At the height of spring migration there's like 20 checklists [set of observations reported by a group or individual] a day at one of the cemeteries here, it's insane). So all the totals reported there are almost certainly under-reported, and I feel pretty confident there's a lot more birds that aren't even pulling because there's just not that many people reporting. If your landscape is good enough to support big mammals like moose, there are gonna be a lot of birds. NYC can't support moose, but you should look at the Central Park hotspot (273 species!).

I pulled the list for the past 20 years, but if you go back further, there are a LOT more records haha: https://ebird.org/barchart?byr=2000&eyr=2022&bmo=1&emo=12&r=L128537

I LOVE THIS. Also love "birds came knocking on my brain" hahahaa

lol yes thank you!! :D

birds came knocking on my brain -- like a pileated woodpecker going tap tap tap!

Birds are so wonderful! Red-winged blackbirds are the best blackbird; their lovely liquid call was the first birdcall I ever learned to recognize. I'm just starting to get into birding a little too, though I'm not very good at it yet. I rely a lot on the Merlin app to tell me exactly which white, gray, and black seabird I've just seen!

yesss I LOVE the merlin app, it is so useful! I especially adore the sound id feature which really helps me know what birds around me I should be keeping an eye out for!

and you are braver than me with the gulls, so many of them look so similar, so I haven't put much effort into learning them yet! I seem to be focusing more on songbirds so far, though of course I'll pay attention to whatever birds are around me :D

I'll be back with more comments but YESSSSS join usssss all I've done in May is bird 🐦

I have been going nuts about warblers this spring - have you seen this comic?

https://www.birdandmoon.com/comic/the-four-stages-of-watching-warblers/

As I told twitter recently, I am still not over how there are so many kinds of birds in the world and you can just! see them! there are so many species of birds around you even in places you wouldn't expect! if your eyes are open to birds then they are everywhere!!
This is my thought exactly! Sure, if you want to see all of them, you'll have to travel a lot and be very lucky, but birds are seriously everywhere. There are so few environments they have not been to. They live at both poles. They travel staggering distances. They live in the driest and wettest habitats, out at sea where we only barely see them, and in the most concretey jungles we have built. All you have to do is look and you'll see them. <3

I love song sparrows so much. Just, such a wonderful song. I love watching birds in general sing, especially the tiny ones - their whole bodies quiver with the song.

Do you want tips about bird spotting?

yes I have seen that warbler comic before and I LOVE it, it's so true! I love bird and moon's comics in general.

and yes exactly! there are always birds to look at, no matter where you are, and it's amazing!!

please DO give me tips on bird spotting, I would love to up my skills on this!

Rosemary Mosco is awesome :D

Haha I'm not an expert either, but I've spent so much time birding lately.

1 - habitat - different birds like different habitats, so I try to vary where I go. Forest, meadow, mature forests, new successional, seashore with sand, seashore with rocks, rivers, marshes, ponds or lakes, far from humans, right with humans, etc. It's also easier to see birds along the margins, like if there's a trail that goes along a field that adjoins a forest.

2 - listening for birds!! TBH I think this is key to finding more species. A lot of the time what people are seeing is actually what they are hearing, because birds are so small and good at hiding in thickets. So learning to id by song (or call) is huge. I mostly taught myself and when I looked at what more experienced people were seeing vs me, a lot of that gap was the birds they could hear and not see. Merlin has sound ID, which is the best of the bunch, IMO, although I'm usually careful if it's telling me it's a rare bird for this region/time, sometimes the ID is not right. I'll try to find it by sight. But it's pretty good at what it does, and you can listen to recordings in Merlin too (into earphones if you don't want to bother the birds) and compare to what you hear in the field, right there, too.

I actually took Cornell's birding by ear course and I personally found it super helpful, although it is a bit expensive. It helped give me vocabulary and tools for thinking about bird song, and shifted my mentality from filing birdsong as background noise into foreground information, if that makes sense. It also made me practice, and then led me through how others saw and thought about birdsong - you can look at sound when it's translated to spectrograms, which is very helpful. I'm not very good at studying the song cold -> going into the field and knowing song, I find I can really only reliably remember song if I hear it in the field (especially if I can SEE the bird singing haha) but it definitely helped to know a few bird songs and to listen to what I knew, and then build outwards from that.

here's the course: https://academy.allaboutbirds.org/product/bird-song-basics-getting-started-with-birding-by-ear/

here's a free page from Cornell about song, very helpful: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/how-to-learn-bird-songs-and-calls/?pid=1059

3 - Always look in the direction of song! Look in the direction of whoever is singing or chipping. Listen for rustling in the undergrowth, especially quiet rustling. Loud rustling is usually a squirrel haha. If you're sitting down or pausing, look for movement - this is a huge one, most birds do not sit still. At ponds or rivers I always scan the shoreline. In the winter, you can look for shapes in the branches, but in the summer I look for movement.

4 - If you can, I would absolutely try to join a bird walk. My local Audubon runs walks, and there are also local bird clubs who offer them, and I've benefited enormously from them. I started learning early in the pandemic (Nov 2020) before vax was possible, so I learned a lot alone, but it was hugely beneficial to have someone show you the trail, help ID birds you would probably spend forever trying to figure out, and just having a group means more eyes and more ears. I think groups are good for both experienced and new birders - so long as you're not so enormous a group you're scaring all the birds away, having more observers is massively helpful. Plus once someone says "oh that's x!" you can then spend time carefully looking at it.

5 - do you know about ebird's hotspots? https://ebird.org/hotspots/ Really good way to see where's good to bird, what's been seen there (this also helps with ID), what kind of birds you might see, etc.

One more resource - I've been reading Kaufman's Field Guide to Advanced Birding. I don't think you have to be an expert to read this! I enjoyed it on a couple levels - it's actually quite a fun book (I kept laughing and going YES THAT'S IT, you understand what it's like to panic when you see a sparrow and get totally confused) but he also writes about how we look at birds. Stuff like how expectation can change what we perceive, the (sub)species problem, how does molt affect birds, etc. It's also the first book that made me actually understand plumage and anatomy, lol - lots of detailed pictures showing the wing opening and which feathers are where at this stage, etc. I also like that he talks about trying to slow down and really watch birds. There's definitely a brand of birders that just likes chasing species count, and which I mean, people should hobby the way they want! But if you want to spot rarities or get good at identification, you have to get good at seeing what is common, and understanding it well, so you can pick out the unusual, and not get confused by garden-variety variation in a species.

Ooh thank you, some of this is stuff I already know and have been working on but some of it is new and helpful! And the Cornell course on birding by ear was something I've been eyeing for a while so it's great to hear that it's good and worthwhile, and I need to make time to actually do it! and that Kaufman's Field Guide sounds AMAZING actually and now I need it.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

<33333

Heeee! You know how this is potentially just the entry level into a nerdery that will never end, right? Like, after a while you might be, oh, let's look at butterflies too? And dragonflies. And plants. Etc, etc. In 10 years you will be sitting there with your microscope examining bryophytes.

Or maybe this is just me (though actually for me it started with plants and not birds). *has 3341 species on the life list*

lollll I THINK I am safe from that slippery slope, though you never know! my partner is really into identifying plants and mushrooms, and although I enjoy listening to R enthuse about such things I don't feel moved to put energy into those categories. There are many wonderful things in nature which I definitely appreciate, but somehow birds seem to be a special category for me!

But I am SO impressed with the breadth of your attention, and the sheer scale of your life list as a result, that's truly amazing!

I'm glad you are enjoying the birds! : )

By the way, is it true that the bird watching is not a male-dominated hobby in North America?

tbh I don't have much experience with the broader swathe of birders in North America, so far I've been doing this as more or less a solo hobby! But I did a quick google and it looks like at least in the US (stats for canada are always harder to find lol), women make up about 42% of birders, so although it skews male there's a strong contingent of non-male birders. However I also see that men are much more likely to be in positions of leadership, men are the birders who tend to get the visibility, men can be very exclusionary to birders of other genders, and other to-be-expected forms of sexism still exist in the hobby. So....sounds like the answer to your question is both yes and no. Sigh.

Thanks! It is definitely more male dominated than that in Sweden. Though as you say, I'm not surprised that more birdwatchers in positions of leadership or visible ones tend to be male, even where the numbers are relatively equal.

I would say there's a lot of women birding (I'm one!) but if you look at Top Lists, like the kind where it's ranked by # of species seen, the tour guides, etc, it's much more heavily male skewed.

update I just impulse bought a field guide to plants of my region so I may be doomed!

Hee! A little further down on the slippery slope. *g*

BIRDS

BIRDS!!!!!!!

I got into birding last august or so. I have for many years looked sidelong at birding, thinking that it looked exactly like the kind of hobby that could swallow me whole, and assuming it would probably one day come for me, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere it did. It clicked. Birds came knocking on my brain and said "hello pay attention to us now." And then I was a birder.

This is charming! I am so happy that this is bringing you joy!!!

I admit to not caring about watching birds, but I absolutely love listening to them and birdsong is one of my favorite things in the whole wide world.

:) it brings me SO much joy!!

and I am glad you enjoy birdsong even if other aspects of birds don't draw your attention in the same way, it really is lovely to listen to. And birds have so many interesting and varied songs and calls, and I love how as you move between habitats you hear a whole different soundscape from them! And they have such personality in their songs!

♥

Birds are Good.
*nods emphatically*

The world is pretty cool.

YOU GET ME

I love birds a lot! I am a very casual low-level birder to the extent that I don't even really call myself a birder but it makes me happy to see birds and know what they are! I saw a pileated woodpecker for the first time this year and they're so HUGE, aren't they?? I also didn't believe it.

seeing birds is such a delight, no matter what level birder you are! :) and YES pileated woodpeckers are UNREASONABLY LARGE and it's amazing!

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BIRDS ARE THE BEST

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