How do you know it’s the weekend of the Great Backyard Bird Count? At Fisherman’s Park, serious bird-watchers stand before tripod-mounted cameras with one hand focusing their long lenses as the other clicks birds off checklists on their smart phones. They report what they see in real time, and the information is instantly visible to birdwatchers all over the world. This is 21st century birding!
Northern Cardinal by Christine Geist, from the Great Backyard Bird Count photo contest: http://gbbc.birdcount.org/photo-subs-2015/
In my own backyard, things started out more old school. I poured myself a cup of coffee, grabbed my brand new bird identification book, and sat on the deck to watch the morning bird show. The task seemed easy enough. Just note the bird’s color and size, flip to the appropriate section of the resource book, learn the name of my backyard guest, then tick the bird off the Great Backyard Bird Count list. How hard could it be? Within minutes, however, I realized I was mostly staring at pictures of birds in my book rather than counting the real ones flying between my feeders. Every so often, a cardinal or blue jay flew into view and made their way onto my checklist, but the majority of birds I saw in my yard that morning remain unreported strangers.
For a novice birder, the variety of sparrows, wrens and finches is daunting! And if the number of checklists submitted to the Great Backyard Bird Count is any indication, there are many novices. This year, birders from 100 countries submitted nearly 150,000 checklists reporting over 5,000 species of birds- almost half the existing bird species in the world! The Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have been sponsoring this citizen science project since 1998, and this year’s participation was higher than it’s ever been. More people are becoming interested in birding each year, and projects like this make it easy to get started.
A quick look at the list of the top ten most reported birds led me to believe that my experience of being able to identify only the most distinctive birds was a common one. Of the eight species I reported, five were in the top ten. Cardinals, blue jays, woodpeckers, chickadees and doves dominated the checklists, but I have no doubt that, like me, many of my fellow novice birders must have watched on helplessly as dozens of small brown and gray birds flew away unidentified.
That evening, I attempted a new strategy. Instead of trying to name any bird that flew into my backyard, I selected an easily visible, active pair of birds that flitted between the trees to identify. My goal was to learn to see just this one species. There is an abundance of online tools for beginning birders, and I played around with a several of them, keeping in mind some of the recurring themes from our Master Naturalist training.
When identifying plants or animals, our instructors first focus on features that distinguish families from one another rather than trying to know random species. Several speakers have mentioned starting with one particular plant or animal and then learning to see what makes it a part of a larger group, so rather than looking at pictures of similarly colored birds, I began my search by looking at families.
As a newbie, I found the website WhatBird to be more helpful than the Cornell website in getting started on a search. Even though I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a wren, warbler or sparrow, I recognized my bird as having a “perch-like” shape, and this gave me a place to begin. WhatBird allows you to add attributes, such as beak and tail shape, wing size or color pattern, one by one. Each time you make a selection, it eliminates species until you are left with only a few options. Through this process, I started to notice features that I had previously ignored, and several birds that had seemed indistinguishable began to look different.
After narrowing my bird down to a small handful of possibilities, I considered another Master Naturalist tip: focus on the life in one area. The Great Backyard Bird Count website allows a birder to search checklists submitted within a region, and it even identifies the exact location of the sighting. It was fun to browse the local reports, and I was happy to see several familiar names participating; our Lost Pines Chapter is well-represented among Bastrop’s bird reporters! Since it seemed unlikely that my backyard visitor would be an uncommon bird, I looked at the species that frequently appeared on my neighbors’ checklists, and I narrowed my options even more.
By this time, I was pretty sure that my visitor was a yellow rumped warbler, but he lacked the color pattern shown in my resource book. To be certain, I revisited the Cornell website which proved very useful once I had a particular bird to consider. Among other tools, it provides a short video of distinctive behavior and movement, and it gives information about how a bird’s color changes with age or season. My yellow rumped warbler had more subdued colors than the picture simply because I was viewing him in the winter. But what confirmed my identification was its call. The Cornell site features sound clips of calls and songs, and I instantly recognized the sharp chek of my new friend!
yellow rumped warbler in winter: http://www.northrup.org/photos/yellow-rumped-warbler/
Years ago, I worked as a cave guide in the Ozarks, and I always got a kick out of how thrilled the city tourists were to see deer. They’d pull out cameras and shriek with excitement over an animal as common, to me, as a house cat. The yellow rumped warbler is my city folks’ deer. It’s such a common bird that it probably doesn’t excite many of my fellow Master Naturalists, but it’s special to me because it’s the first bird I learned to see!
When it comes to seeing the natural world, whether it be trees or butterflies or fish or birds, all the naturalists I’ve met in recent weeks have given the same advice for newbies like myself: focus on one thing at a time, learn it well, then slowly add more. In addition to the yellow-rumped warbler, I can now include the house sparrow and Carolina wren among the birds I know, and by next year’s bird count, I hope to submit a count list that better represents the life in my backyard.