BIRDS ARE THE BEST

[sophia_sol]

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.

Comments

[sophia_sol]

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?

[sholio]

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.

[sophia_sol]

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!

[silverflight8]

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