So you want to try birdwatching, or as some of us call it, birding. Something about our feathered friends has grabbed your attention. A great-horned owl, perhaps, hooting outside your window after …
SAN JOSE, CALIF. – OCT. 23: Children learn birdwatching at a Youth Science Institute field trip, Saturday, Oct. 23, 2021, at Alum Rock Park in San Jose, Calif. Something about our feathered friends has grabbed your attention. A great-horned owl, perhaps, hooting outside your window after dusk. Or an American robin slurping worms from your lawn. Maybe you spied a group of birdwatchers at the park across the street, hot on the trail of a rare warbler and, well, you want in on the action.
The thing about birding is anyone can do it. Old, young, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. And you can bird just about anywhere: a park, a city street, a forest, along a shore, deep within a nature preserve.Get yourself a copy of “The Sibley Guide to Birds: Second Edition,” which brims with wonderful drawings as well as quick reference guides for how to examine field marks and body types.
Keeping online bird lists also connects you to the greater birding collective. The data you provide helps ornithologists understand migration patterns and nesting habits and connects you to other birders. Most of my adventures are either solo or with one or two other birders. Recently, I joined Kai Mills, 23, a bird nest surveyor from Lafayette, to go birding at a nature preserve and a botanical garden along the central California coast. We were joined by Mike Bush, 70, a retired lecturer for horticulture and crop science who has been a director of botanical gardens in such places as Singapore, Bermuda and Oklahoma City. I met both of these experts while searching for birds.
Mills started birding when he was 12, back in Lafayette, where he’d visit a rare swamp sparrow every weekend. “I re-spotted it after it was originally found,” he said. “After that I was the first to find it every year for five winters.” He told me how he watched it join a sparrow flock, forage along reeds. “I knew its habits, where it would be at different times of the day.”
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