Derek Lovitch wrote How to Be a Better Birder in 2012 to help birders to identify and find more birds. It’s a great book with plenty of good advice and good birding stories. Check out my review here on the Birdchaser blog, or pick up a copy yourself on Amazon.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the better birding principles in How to Be a Better Birder can help anyone become a better backyard birder.
Here are some of the topics covered in How to Be a Better Birder with some notes on how they can apply to a backyard big year, or help anyone find and identify more birds in their yard:
Advanced Field Identification–Lovitch discusses the Cape May “whole bird” school of bird identification, or going beyond mere field marks to learn to recognize the bird by overall clues including size, shape, actions, and habitat. Backyard birders should spend as much time really looking at the birds in their yard, so that they can identify them without binoculars in most circumstances, including great distances. The better you know the local birds, the better chance you will have of spotting something out of the ordinary. He also suggests taking good notes–which is vital for a yard lister. I keep a daily list right now during my Backyard Big Year, including notes on what birds are doing including the first time I hear them singing, etc. The final section of this chapter is dedicated to creating a birding library–every birder should have one. I will be suggesting many good books for backyard birders (this is the first!) as the year unfolds, but the books suggested by Lovitch are good ones to start with.
Birding by Habitat–you might not think this matter so much to a backyard birder, but actually habitat is key. You can improve your habitat in the yard, or just better understand the vegetation in your yard to better predict and find birds as they migrate through your yard. Personally, I’m pretty bad at my eastern U.S. trees, having grown up in Oregon, so I’m still working on this part of better understanding the plants and habitats on my 2.7 acre yard.
Birding with Geography–you can use geography to help you predict bird movements and occurrence. While Lovitch uses this to help find birding locations, you can use these same principles in your yard to better understand how birds are moving through your neighborhood. As I’ve been spending more time in my yard, I’ve been noting how hawks, gulls, and geese are moving across the valley and ridges visible from my yard, and it is helping me find more birds as I scan those important geographic features from my yard. I’ve already blogged about some of how the local geography influences my yard birding at the yard, neighborhood, and wider geographic scales.
Birding and Weather–Lovitch mostly discusses how changes in weather can impact how and when birds move, and when they are forced down in bad weather. This also works in your yard, and backyard birders should learn how their local birds respond to weather events–such as the snows and harsh temperatures I’m experiencing right now in New Jersey, as well as the middle of the night rain storms that will drop migrant songbirds down into my neighborhood during migration.
Birding at Night–here’s one of the biggest frontiers for backyard birders. I’ve got my OldBird 21c microphone running most nights to try and detect owls as well as birds migrating high overhead in the darkness. There’s not much moving now in midwinter, but I am picking up occasional owls and duck wing whistles. I’ll have a lot more to say on this topic this year as I start doing a better job of reviewing my night recordings and posting results here on my blog. Backyard birders who really want to blow their minds with amazing bird observations should get a microphone set up in their yard–they will be able to hear things that they would never be able to find in their yard any other way–such as migrating shorebirds, rails, thrushes, and cuckoos.
Birding with a Purpose–Lovitch suggests participating in citizen science programs to record bird distribution and abundance. Backyard birders can participate by counting their yard birds for the Christmas Bird Count, Great Backyard Bird Count, or even just daily for eBird. I’m recording all my bird sightings for eBird–and last year I had church responsibilities that kept me from going out on my local Christmas Bird Count, but by watching my feeders for a little while, I was able to add a species to the count that nobody else had picked up. There are other backyard citizen science programs that are fun and useful for backyard birders, and I will be highlighting them here in the future. Meanwhile, everyone can add their daily bird sightings to eBird!
Birding in the backyard is not just an activity for casual birdwatchers, or those without transportation or funds for wider birding adventures. There are real frontiers of bird knowledge to be gained by paying more attention to the birds in your yard, and How to Be a Better Birder is one good introduction to some of these opportunities, if you will read it with that in mind. My Backyard Big Year blog can be another source of information and inspiration as we explore all these better birding principles in more detail throughout the year in our quest to bring cutting edge birding to the backyard!
Disclosure: my review of How to Be a Better Birder is based on a review copy provided by the publisher.
