My friends on social media have noticed that I have started posting a lot of pictures of birds over the past year or so. This is for them, in case they are wondering what the bird thing is all about.
I have been a novice birdwatcher since the early eighties. I want to say that it was "Mrs Pat", our Sunday-school teacher from church, who first exposed my brother and I to the concept of birdwatching, but my memory is fleeting from that long ago, and my brain may have invented that. I just know at some point, a copy or Roger Tory Peterson's "Field Guide to the Eastern Birds" appeared at the house and I found it fascinating as a young budding amateur naturalist.
I remember looking out the back sliding door and watching birds in the snow in 1982 or 1983. I remember going through the guide finding birds I wanted to see one day. I desperately wanted to see an indigo bunting back then, but I wasn't old enough to fully grasp that different birds had different dietary or habitat preferences. In my mind, birds could fly ANYWHERE, so why wouldn't they show up in my back yard if I threw some bread out in the winter?
As I got older, my brother and I would occasionally let each other know if we saw a new bird, and we went out birdwatching a handful of times over the years, but it was never anything super-serious. If I saw a new bird I would make a note in the checklist at the back of my guide, but it was a rare thing.
In October of 2017, my traveling buddy and I took a trip to South Africa, and I had booked us three days/four nights at a camp in Kruger National Park. Africa had always been my dream so I knew I needed to take a decent camera for the game drives, so I broke in and finally joined the 21st century by outfitting myself with a Nikon D750 and the 200-500mm f5.6 zoom lens.
The plan worked perfectly and after getting up to speed on the workings of the camera, I took it to Africa and put it to use exactly as planned.
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| Lilac-Breasted Roller (Coracias caudatus) |
After returning home, I now owned a camera and a large lens. I had loved the excitement of trying to get decent wildlife shots in Kruger from the back of the safari truck, but I had no rhinos or leopards here at home to chase, and Whitetail Deer are, frankly, kind of boring (...unless they have a large rack of antlers, and if they have a large rack around here, it is usually because they are good at avoiding people... with guns OR cameras.)
Enter my old friends the birds. I enjoy the hunt for decent pictures of any wildlife, from bug to beast, but birds were a logical place to start, so that is what I did. I went out to the England (Arkansas) fishing pond to take some pics of Black-bellied Whistling ducks on November 30th of 2017 and my hobby of chasing birds with my camera was begun.
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| Black-Bellied Whistling Duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis) |
eBird
Somewhere along the line, I must have heard, or read, about setting up "Rare Birds Alerts" on the "eBird" website, because I set up an account a few months later (on May 31, 2018 to be exact) and configured it to send me an email whenever a rare bird was sighted. I can enjoy taking pictures of a Blue Jay in my yard if the light is good, but a rare bird is more of a challenge.
There are a few applications/websites around that allow birdwatchers to track their sightings, but none of them compare to ebird. It is free to join and is a huge database of millions of bird sightings that are used by ornithologists for tracking population dispersal and trends on almost every bird species on the planet.
For the user, it is an easy way to keep track of what species you have seen while also helping to provide the scientific community with data. For photographers like me, who shoot pics only for myself, it also allows a central repository for my best pics that will likely outlive me, and give those images a small purpose beyond gathering facebook likes. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)
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| Northern Parula (Setophaga americana) |
eBird is one of the best examples of "Citizen Science" around, and even if you are just a backyard feeder watcher, I would recommend setting up an account and tracking some of your better sightings via the app. Some old school birders who have years and years of written records look that the work involved in data input and decide it isnt worth the time to manually type all of those old sightings in... I understand where they are coming from. But I only had a handful of field guide notes and no bird journal.
(NOTE: You set your account up at the website, there is an app that will connect to it via your phone, but it is more for making lists in the field and is very limited for anything other than that.)
If you ever notice birds, you should go set up and ebird account. Just do it. It is 100% free and will take you like eight minutes to set up. Simple stuff.
NOT A BIRDER
Even though I joined eBird on May 31, 2018.. I only did it to get the "rare birds alerts". I was more interested in photography than in keeping a list of bird species I had seen. I wasn't a hardcore birder, after all... I was a photographer chasing birds. So I never uploaded a list for the first 8 months that I had an eBird account.
In late January of 2019 I got an alert that said that a Rock Wren was seen on top of Pinnacle Mountain. A day or two later, on the 26th, I threw my camera in my backpack and decided to head to the top to look for the bird. As I got there, I sat on the rocks at the summit breathing hard and reconsidering my cardio regimen, I had just started to think "I wonder where this bird is" when I looked down and he dashed by my legs a couple of feet away. My camera was still in my bag but the bird was friendly enough that I had time to get it out and shoot some shots. Success! I got my first "rare" bird and I got some decent documentary shots.
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| Rock Wren (Salpinctes obsoletus) |
One of my friends told me that I needed to upload the pics and the sighting to eBird since it was rare. I had never done that but figured it out.
OK I'M A BIRDER
That is when it really all started. My OCD kicked in and I starting adding my older sightings to my eBird account. Because of the rare wren sighting, I was contacted by the local editor of ebird, who then sent me info on the local chapter of the Audubon society and told me about a state wide LISTSERV for birders. I joined the local Audubon society chapter and went on a couple of field trips starting in the winter of 2019.
When I would be out and about looking for birds, I would also stop and talk to any birders I might stumble across and have made a number of important contacts that way. They taught me how and where to look for birds of different types in their respective habitats.
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| Purple Gallinule (Porphyrio martinicus) |
As of this writing, it has been a few months short of two years since I got my pic of the Rock Wren on Pinnacle Mountain. My current list stands at 283 species in the state, , which is a solid number for a couple of years of chasing. It starts getting tough around 290, and few people get above 300. Almost everything left is rare and incidental at that point, (though there are a few more I should be able to knock out this winter.) [UPDATE: 307 on 8/14/21]
In Arkansas, there have been a total of 417 species ever reported in the state, but some of those are now extinct, (such as the Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet and Bachman's Warbler,) and some others have only been recorded once or twice, having been blown in on a storm or something. I don't know of anyone who has ever reached 400, though a couple are close.
I have a decent number, but I am a mediocre birder (at best). I have somehow managed to get to know some of the best birders in the state, and without their help, my list would be nowhere near where it is. I have a lot to learn.
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| Prothonotary Warbler (Protonotaria citrea) |
If I am BIRDING, I am usually with other people, learning about species and their habits and trying to add to my list. I might have the camera with me, but it is only there to document if we see something good we need proof for. (There is a high standard on ebird for "rare bird" sightings. A photo might be the only way to get it accepted.)
If I am out SHOOTING PICTURES... I am almost always alone. I wake up as early as I need to. I will often google the sunrise time at the destination and estimate my travel time so I can get there 30 min before sunrise. It is nothing for me to wake up at 4am and brew a thermos of coffee and be on the road by 4:30 AM... or earlier. Many days I spend half the day (or more) and don't get a single decent shot. I don't need to deal with anyone else's needs or preferences. A wary creature, which can be approached to within photo range by one silent, attentive and focused person, will remain unseen if I have a bored fidgety copilot.
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| Horned Grebe (Podiceps auritus) |
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| Least Bittern (Ixobrychus exilis) |
So this is what I do now in my free time. I go hunting for birds with my camera. The COVID-19 pandemic hasn't affected this hobby in the least, thankfully.
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| Blue Grosbeak (Passerina caerulea) |
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| Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea) |
I also want to go larger. I want to work on my landscapes. I want to shoot waterfalls and even mess around with astrophotography a bit. There are always new skills to learn.
But for now... it's the birds.
I am improving as a birder and as a bird photographer. Perhaps I will do a couple more posts about the photography end and get in to the details.
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Black-and-White Warbler (Mniotilta varia) |
