What I learned from Birding

How ordinary walks became small adventures

I started birding. I can’t remember how, but I ended up downloading the Merlin Bird ID app. It’s one of the best apps I’ve ever used. You can take pictures of a bird and it will ID it for you with a very high accuracy. What is perhaps even cooler, is you can identify birds by sounds. It will listen on your phone speaker and tell you which birds are in the area even if you can’t see them.

Whenever you ID a bird it adds it to your Life List which keeps track of every bird you’ve ever ID’d with the app. It is a lot like playing Pokemon Go but only with real creatures out in the wild, and it’s a lot harder to collect the all.

I always thought that there were maybe two kinds of sparrows I’d always see around but now I realize there is a surprising diversity among these little birds and they aren’t all sparrows. So far I’ve seen a Chestnut-backed Chickadee, Swamp Sparrow, House Finch, House Sparrow, Black-capped Chickadee, Spotted Towhee, Song Sparrow, and a Dark-eye Junco. This is far from a complete list of these small sparrow type birds in my area, I have many more I’ve heard but haven’t been able to get a photo ID on. Even when you have your eyes on one, they jump around so frequently it’s hard to capture in a photo.

I’ve also noticed certain locations consistently have the same kinds of birds. Around my house there 3 or 4 kinds of birds around, but down the road at a park with trails, there are a couple different kinds. There’s a neighborhood called Fremont where I live and all the little birds running around there are almost invariably House Sparrows. Other locations like a nature preserve by my house have a huge diversity of birds.

Once you start noticing bird songs, you start hearing them all the time. I can identify a few birds now, crows are the easiest, Steller Jays also have a unique sound. The small sparrow birds all sound familiar to me although I’m unable to differentiate their songs enough to identify them only by song. Maybe in the future I’ll have a more fine turned ear.

I’ve been having a lot of fun going on walks in different locations and finding out what kind of birds are in that area, and it’s always very exciting when you ID a new bird for the first time. I wish I had this app when I was in Miami a few weeks ago as there is a whole different set of species there. I’m excited to go on new trips and see what kind of birds are in the area. So far though I haven’t had to travel far to find new birds. Parks, docks, rivers, lakes all have their own set of resident birds.

It used to be the case if you wanted to get into birding you’d have to buy a book and go through and try to figure out which bird you just saw, but this app makes the barrier to entry so low, you can just install it and take a walk outside you’ll have at least a few birds identified right away. It’s cool to be able to see all these birds I’ve always seen around and know the names of all of them.

I already went on a lot of long walks, and hikes, so this adds a new layer of fun to the activity, and has me exploring new trails. This will also make my next camping trimp more interesting.