Discovering Birds with Better Technology

Birding was not on my post-retirement “to do” list.  Stumbling into it just when technology made it easier was fortuitous because it will continue to engage my waning faculties as I age.

My wife retired a few years after I did, and we happened across a local newspaper article about a birding group that gathered every Monday morning since 1985 at Huntley Meadows in Fairfax County.  We used to take our children to this pleasant pocket of woodlands a few miles south of us on weekends until displaced by soccer and basketball.  So on a pleasant Monday morning one spring some seven years ago, we took our old binoculars and joined about a dozen people in the parking lot.

The group ambled along stopping every now and again to admire a bird that someone spotted.  The many unfamiliar names – just adjectives like yellow rump, downy, etc. – meant little to us until some kind person would add the noun and help us spot the bird.  Even so, we struggled.  The group ignored the familiar Canada geese and Great Blue herons and focused on distant hooded mergansers and green wing teals that to us were just ducks.  On the way home, we picked up some books about birds at the local library: the “nut-hatcher” was in fact a gnat-catcher!  The following Monday, the groups greeted us as old friends.

We slowly learnt the basic skills of observing and listening, and discovered birds all around us: the local parks are bird havens and the eastern flyway brings many migrating species.  We began packing our binoculars and Petersen’s field guide on our hikes and travels and kept them within easy reach of our dining room window to see birds we had never noticed before in our backyard.  The Dakotas were no longer boring states to rush through on our summer journey to Yellowstone, Banff and Jasper: the prairie potholes scattered across the region are teeming with yellow headed blackbirds and breeding ducks of different types.

It is never too late – or too early – to take up birding.  A novice will benefit from being around better birders who gladly help and spring is a good time to start: easier to spot tiny warblers migrating north before the trees leaf out.  Links to some of the local groups and walks (free, and no reservations needed) are below:

1. The Northern Virginia Bird Club’s quarterly newsletter, The Siskin, lists dates and times of walks (just show up) and directions of how to get there: nvabc.org
2. Audubon also organizes talks and walks: audubonva.org
3. Maryland Ornithological Society’s lengthy newsletter, The Yellowthroat, has a lot of information to wade through before one gets to the lists of walks: mdbirds.org
4. The National Park Service has a Tuesday morning walk at Kenilworth Park and Aquatic Garden in D.C. https://www.nps.gov/keaq/planyourvisit/birding.htm

Technology helps.  Binoculars with good optics are lighter, clearer and cheaper than those available even a decade ago; smart phones are now an indispensable supplement, having largely replaced field guides.  Cornell University’s superb ornithology department helped build E-bird, a free cell phone app, where one can list the birds spotted and either keep it private or allow others to access it.  The app combines the various lists with their GPS co-ordinates and displays birding “hot-spots” around the world.

Merlin, another free app from Cornell, identifies birds from an uploaded photograph or the medley of faint calls recorded on the cell phone: it is amusingly fallible, but rapidly improving.  Other specialized apps include one where the bird’s image could be rotated with a finger to see its markings from every angle making identification easier.

Bird Cast is a website I look at each morning showing the bird count that depends on wind and weather.  Serendipity and remarkable ingenuity went into its creation: weather researchers at Colorado State University realized that the unexplained reflections (“noise”) the chain of Doppler radars detected were birds flying mostly at night between Mar 1 to June 15 and Aug 1 to Nov 15. https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/live-migration-maps/

Even with such technological help, I will never be as good a birder as my wife because I cannot hear high frequencies.  However, unlike squash or tennis, this disparity does not diminish the pleasure of birding together: I quickly spot what she hears.  When I grumbled about the optics we are now acquiring while trying to downsize, she pointed out that we will use them longer than our cherished hiking boots and backpacks.  Birders with walkers or in wheelchairs are common.

Several former colleagues were avid birders: some carried binoculars on mission and disappeared over weekends.  Many now live in other countries, and doubtless continue birding.  Would those willing to show visiting Bank retirees their local birding spots please get in touch with me with suggestions on how to develop and utilize this network?

sramachandran50@gmail.com

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KEYWORDS   binoculars, birding, technology