Talking about my birding hobby is only tenuously on topic for my art blog, but I paint birds, so why not? If you, too, are interested in looking at birds, here are my top tips for getting started with the hobby.
What is birding?
The goal of the hobby is to go out and see birds. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
It is common to count species, to try to see how many different types of birds you can find (overall, in a specific region, at a specific site, etc.) For example, the book and movie The Big Year depicts birders competing to find as many species in North America as they can in a single year. However, you do not need to be number-oriented. You can sit and watch the same sparrow every single day, and that’s birding.
Why should I bird?
Like art, birding is about observing the world around you. Birding pairs well with nature walks, hiking, and nature journaling. And while I find it hard to bird and paint plein air at the same time, I enjoy doing both alternately in the same natural locations.
More stuff I love about birding:
- It’s zen. It is a point of focus that allows me to enter an observant, curious, focused flow state. When I am birding, I am very much in the present moment.
- It gets me outside. Most of my other hobbies are indoors, and many are in front of a computer. Birding lures me outside, which brings me other benefits, such as exercise, vitamin D, looking at things more than 6 feet away from me, and a sense of calm from “forest bathing.”
- It is a pathway and companion to other nature-focused activities, such as nature journaling/plein air art; nature photography; plant and tree ID; hiking; stewardship and conservation volunteering.
- As a hobby, it makes no demands on you. The birds don’t care if you see them (they’d probably rather you didn’t). I sometimes feel bogged down by obligations, even when they are fun ones I have taken on as a hobby. Birding never feels like an obligation, but always a joy.
How do I bird?
At its most basic, birding is noticing a bird that you see. This can be done without any special equipment.
But I quickly found, once I got into it, that I found it more rewarding to add a few features to my birding trips to make them really feel like birding:
- Using binoculars
- Keeping a checklist
- Recording sounds (optional)
- Taking photos (optional)
- Sketching (optional)
Binoculars
You can start birding without binoculars, but you will pretty quickly get to a point where you’re trying to identify birds you can’t see well with the naked eye. If you’re not sure you want to invest in a pair of binoculars, go on a guided walk; many walk leaders will have extra binoculars available to borrow for people who don’t have their own.
You can go down a whole rabbithole on binoculars, but the minimum you need to know is that the best ones for birding are 8×42 (they magnify things 8x with a 42mm lens). 8×25 are lighter-weight pocket binoculars, which makes them easier to carry, but they can be harder to use due to smaller field of view. More magnification is not necessarily better as it introduces a smaller field of view and more handshake. 10x binoculars or a spotting scope can be useful for long-distance birding (e.g. hawkwatching, sea birds), but 8x is ideal for most birding.
To find a good value for your budget, check out Cornell Lab’s binocular chart, Audubon’s Guide to Binoculars, or Wirecutter. Affiliate links to my equipment can be found at the bottom of this post.
How to use binoculars
- Use the naked eye to scan for birds and find them in the landscape. You have a much larger field of view without binoculars.
- When you see a bird, lock your eyes on it. Don’t look down at your binoculars. Without looking away from the bird, lift your binoculars to your eyes.
- Adjust the focus knob until the bird is in focus.
Checklists
When I go on a birding trip, I note the number of each species of bird that I found. Birders have been keeping these records for generations, and the vast body of records resulting from this hobby – across time and around the globe – has resulted in valuable data for scientists studying bird populations. I keep my checklists on a website/app called eBird, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which collates all this citizen scientist data into a huge open dataset. I like to make my checklists in the field, while birding, using the mobile app, but it’s also possible to add them on the website later if you made notes on paper.
Not only is this data valuable in aggregate for science, the folks at Cornell Labs also make it available in useful ways for birders: you can see your own stats, and you can also see where others have seen birds near you.
Recording Sounds
Sometimes you hear a bird sound and you don’t know what it is. Well, there’s a Shazam for that – the Merlin app, also by Cornell Lab, allows you to record bird sounds on your phone and it identifies them in real time. This has helped me to learn or verify many, many sounds, and as a hard-of-hearing person, it is often hearing things I can’t! I don’t put down birds on my checklist if I (or someone in my group) has not personally observed them, but if Merlin tells me there’s a bird around, it helps me to set my eyes or ears to find it.
Merlin is not always right (though it usually is), so it’s helpful to save any legible sound recordings and upload them as multimedia to your eBird checklists, where they can be verified by volunteer checkers.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, there is no easy one-click export of sounds from Merlin to checklists, so it’s a little kludgy. I use Merlin’s Share function to email or airdrop myself the sounds, then do some light audio editing with Audacity on my computer (cutting out irrelevant parts of the recording), then save the edited file and upload it to my checklist on eBird.org.
A nice thing about adding media is that it gives me a new mini-goal. After you’ve been at it awhile, it becomes harder and harder to add new birds to your life list, but eBird also counts the number of birds you’ve documented via audio or photo, so that gives you another number to gamify if you’re motivated by that sort of thing.
Taking Photos
Once I started birding, one of the first things I wanted to do was to take pictures of the cool birds I was seeing. But bird photography is notoriously difficult and can lead you down much more expensive rabbitholes even than binoculars. After taking some disastrously failed iPhone photos of birds, I decided almost stridently that I was not going to be a bird photographer. It was enough to just see them with my eyes. To simply enjoy having experiences, not miss them while trying to record them for posterity.
I think this was the right choice for my first few years as a birder. It removed a source of stress that comes with a difficult learning curve and expensive equipment, and allowed me to bird more mindfully and in the moment. When you take photos, you’re always worried that your photo may not have come out well, or that you missed a cool moment; if you’re not worried about photos, you can concentrate on enjoying what you saw, even if you didn’t catch it on film.
However, recently I’ve begun dipping my toe back into the photography game. Like audio recording, photography gives me a new gamify-able mini-goal, and adds evidence to my checklists, which sometimes allows me to make an ID I otherwise would not have. It also gives me a source of reference photos for my bird photos!
Entire other articles about photography could be written, so I won’t go into detail here. I don’t have the best equipment but I have a relatively affordable setup that I think is the bare minimum for bird photography – affiliate links at the bottom of the post.
Sketching
Sketching birds from life is quite difficult because they tend to be far away, small, and quickly moving. I haven’t got much further than sketching robins or grackles from life, but there is something fun and magical about sketching a real life being in front of you instead of a still image.
When should I bird?
Time of year
You can bird all year round, but spring is a great time to start! It is a transitional season and birds are migrating, so you’ll tend to see more as leavers overlap with arrivers and visitors pass through. Fall is also a migration season, but it’s more difficult for birding. As birds head to their breeding grounds in spring, they will be singing loudly, so they’re easier to find.
Depending on where you live, different seasons will have different personalities. Where I live in, a temperate region of North America along a migration flightpath, the seasons are all interesting in their own way:
- Spring is migration season, the most exciting season of the year!
- Summer can be slow, but abundant. It’s a great time to find swallows and swifts.
- Fall is migration on hard mode, and a good time of year for hawkwatching.
- Winter is “weird duck season,” when coastal birds move inland, and it’s also a great time to find flocks of year-round birds foraging for cached seeds in the snow.
Time of day
Birds are most active at dawn and dusk. The morning activity seems to last longer. Generally, I have found that the earlier in the morning I go, the more I see, with activity starting at first light. Birds often sing quite a lot at dawn (the “dawn chorus”), but they will be out and about as long as the sun’s not too high or hot overhead.
Dusk is another great time to catch birds grabbing one last meal and finishing up their daily bird business before heading for cover for the night. Some birds can only be seen at night, so dusk is your best bet if you don’t have night vision goggles.
Where should I bird?
Birds are everywhere, but most non-birders are somewhat blind to them, maybe only noticing a generic “bird song” in spring or mildly noting flocks of black birds from time to time. Once you start noticing them, they’re everywhere. Even in the middle of a city, you’ll often find pigeons, house sparrows, starlings, gulls, and crows. In residential areas, you can find so-called “backyard birds”; where I live, this commonly includes robins, grackles, mourning doves, cardinals, blue jays, house finches, and mockingbirds.
Oh, you want more?
Go find some nature! Birds look for food sources (varies depending on their diet, but often berries and insects), water, and shelter from predators. Generally (but not always), this means a place with trees.
You don’t have to live in the country or hike the backwoods. Some of my best birding has been in very urban city parks, especially during spring migration. For migrating birds looking for a spot to crash for the night, a park is a green oasis in a urban desert; the less other good stuff there is around, the more likely you are to get a lot of birds in a single park.
Finding Hotspots with eBird.org
If I’m looking for a new place to bird, near home or while traveling, I search for hotspots on eBird.org. Hotspots are places where other people have reported finding birds. Go to the Explore Hotspots page and enter your address or a place close to you in the “address” bar, then zoom out until you start seeing little colored pins. The redder the pin, the more birds have been seen there.
Note that this is not measuring how many birds are there, but how many people have reported, so places that are more popular/populous will show higher numbers than places that are in the middle of nowhere. But it’s a good starting place to find the places that other birders like. You can also click into the details of the hotspot to find lists of birds and bar charts showing how commonly each bird is reported there at different times of year.
More Tips for Finding Places to Bird
- Honestly, my very best advice is to sign up for a guided bird walk. The location of the tour will be a great place to bird, and the guide will show you the exact places to look and what to look for. In this way you will understand the site much better than you would exploring on your own.
- Sign up for email alerts for your county or metro area to find out what’s been seen in the last day and where.
- Use eBird Targets to find specific species.
- Vary your habitats to find a greater variety of birds: forests, wetlands, prairie/plains, fresh water, salt water. You will often find more birds at the borders of habitats, where they can gather the resources from both: for example, a field next to a swamp or a wooded area by a lake.
Identifying Birds
So you went out, you saw some birds, but you have no idea what they are. What now?
Merlin
You can use the Merlin app to help you identify them.
- If the bird is singing or calling, you can record a bird’s sound and Merlin will attempt to identify it with good accuracy.
- You can upload a photo of the bird, although if all you have on you is your cell phone, I tend to find it harder to get a usable photo than a usable sound.
- You can answer a series of questions about the bird’s color, size, and behavior, as well as your location and time of year, which will show you a likely series of candidates to choose from.
Merlin’s great because it’s like a guidebook in your pocket, and you don’t have to carry anything extra.
Guidebooks
I also like to use physical guidebooks! I tend not to carry them in the field, but I like having one on my shelf to consult. They’re fun to flip through, and you can sometimes use the extra info to make an ID that Merlin couldn’t. I like guidebooks that are arranged by family and use illustrations. My favorite guidebook to North American birds is by David Allen Sibley; it comes in Eastern, Western, or combined editions. Everyone’s preferences are different, so I encourage you to visit your local library, compare several guidebooks, and pick one that speaks to you.
Pamphlets
The visitor center of your local nature reserve may also carry pamphlets, which can be great: easier to carry and consult than full guidebooks. A pamphlet of your area’s common backyard birds, such as Sibley’s Folding Guide to Backyard Birds of the Northeast, is a great starting point because it won’t confuse you with birds you’re unlikely to see. Spending the winter living near a river, I saw some unusual ducks, and I consulted the Cornell Lab Waterfowl ID pamphlet weekly.
Websites
Cornell Lab’s free site All About Birds contains info on all North American birds, including some key comparisons, such as the tricky hairy vs downy woodpecker. They also run Birds of the World, with info about birds worldwide, but this is paywalled.
Cornell Lab has also created some great free video content, like this series called Inside Birding that taught me a lot about how to approach ID.
Finding Other Birders
Birding can be a solitary activity, but it can be more fun to go in a group.
An experienced bird walk leader will give you tips and point out birds you wouldn’t have seen or ID’d on your own, and you can meet other nerds. Locations where organized bird walks occur will also introduce you to new natural areas, and help you get the most out of them by showing you around and introducing you to the wildlife you can find there.
Some resources:
Summary
- Get a pair of binoculars.
- Get the apps: eBird (for checklists) and Merlin (for ID help).
- Get a guidebook or pamphlet.
- Find a good place to bird (e.g., by searching eBird Hotspots), and go there one morning.
- Find your local birding club, and sign up for a guided bird walk.
Affiliate Links
The Binoculars I Use
My main binoculars, Celestron Granite, are no longer made, but this pair is similar and is the pair used by my partner. As of this writing, Cornell Lab lists it as the best-for-budget option, and it’s the Wirecutter runner-up. At $340, they’re not a cheap way to try to a hobby, but they’re budget by binocular standards.
The compact binoculars aren’t cheaper – they are actually fancier, but I went for even better optics in a pocket-sized binocular. I like carrying small binoculars when size/weight is a concern, e.g. backpacking, or when my main activity is not birding but I don’t want to be without binoculars just in case.
A solid entry level pair for $70 which I have used with friends and on trips, as it’s a common “extra pair.” A little chunkier/heavier than the ones I use, and the image is not quite as bright or sharp. But honestly? A very good value for money.
The Camera & Lens I Use
This is a bottom of the line DSLR that is no longer made. You can still get it refurbished.
With this, I use an all-purpose zoom lens that goes from wide angle to 300mm telephoto.
Nikon 18-300mm DX AF-S f/3.5-6.3 ED VR Zoom Lens
Birding photo enthusiasts recommend getting 500mm or higher, but I can’t afford it. If you want to splash out, you might consider going for a mirrorless camera; it’s lighter weight and can zoom out further without becoming as huge as a DSLR, and DSLR’s seem to be kind of on their way out. But I’m an analog purist who prefers glass viewfinder, and mirrorless cameras only have digital, like a phone.
The Guidebooks I Use
I use both of these depending on where I am on the continent. There is also a combined version, but I like having them individually so I can bring the right one to a particular location.
The Pamphlets I Use
I recommend backyard bird pamphlets to newbies; they are less intimidating and can be more immediately useful than a full guidebook. Make sure to get one that is designed for your region. Here are some examples:
Sibley’s Backyard Birds of the Northeast
Cornell Labs Guide to Backyard Birds of Western North America
Pamphlets can also be useful to zero in on specific habitats or tricky bird families, and they’re easy to bring into the field. For example, I use this pamphlet quite a lot:
Cornell Labs Waterfowl ID Series #2: Dabbling & Diving Ducks
The Cornell Labs’ “Where’s the white?” method of duck ID is very helpful. (There is a #1 in this series, which covers geese and some basic concepts, but I don’t find it as useful in pamphlet form. #3, sea birds, is very useful for coastal birding, though.)
Beyond Guidebooks
Here are some great non-guidebook books that I recommend to inspire and improve your birding.
The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling by John Muir Laws
A great book for getting in the mindset and habit of noticing and drawing what you see in nature.
What It’s Like to Be a Bird by David Allen Sibley
The author and illustrator of the guidebooks has also created this wonderful coffee table book that is simply packed with beautiful illustrations and surprisingly wide-ranging and complex concepts in bird biology and life cycle, in plain and approachable language. Great for kids and adults.
Kaufman Guide to Advanced Birding by Kenn Kaufman
Dense but informative, useful information and approaches to tricky ID situations when you’re beyond the basics.
The Big Year by Marc Obmascik
A journalist’s entertaining account of three birders’ attempts to break the record for most birds seen in North America in a year. This was also made into a fun movie with Jack Black, Owen Wilson, and Steve Martin.