Birding is fun!! I feel like it is like Pokémon hunting for adults. Gotta Catch them All!! But each new continent and country opens up more Pokémon to find. What a perfect hobby for world travelers.
I have always had bird feeders and enjoyed identifying the birds with our small collection of bird books. I have good memories of watching our feeders growing up and learning the basic birds with my grandma and even my great grandmother. When we traveled, we did see a lot of new birds but never really made that a priority and we often couldn’t name what birds we were seeing. During the pandemic, that changed. I discovered the apps that make it so much easier identify birds, and keep an electronic “life list” right on your phone. Birdwatchers before the internet kept paper checklists, and had to rely on pictures from bird books for identification. I had always found this difficult because some birds can look very different depending on their age and the season. It can be very frustrating seeing a bird all day and not being able to tell for sure what it is. That changed when I discovered apps like Merlin from TheCornellLab. Technology has created a surge in people interested in bird watching (like me).
With this app, you can answer 5 questions to narrow down what you have been seeing to a few pictures to choose from. OR you can take a picture and it uses technology similar to Google Lens to come up with a really good guess to what it is. OR you can take an audio recording of the bird sounds and it can analyze the chirps for an even easier notification. Merlin sound identification is fantastic but it isn’t perfect. The old school birders believe it has led to a rise in mis-identifications by amateur birders and are hesitant to use it too much. I use it all the time but I don’t claim a sighting unless I have seen the bird with my own eyes.
Merlin has taken a lot of the frustration out of bird watching for me. It isn’t perfect so I won’t feel confident in identification until I also get a visual match by comparing the appearance to the Merlin’s bird pictures. In Thailand recently, it kept telling me I was hearing a “Purple Sunbird” when it reality I was seeing an “Olive-backed Sunbird” after realizing that the bird I was seeing wasn’t really purple. But at least it got me looking at all the sunbird pictures online. Most of the time is works great and it is fun analyzing a sound in a tree when you don’t even see a bird. It is still like solving a puzzle to identify a rare bird, but there are just so many great tools now.
When I am confident of a bird identification, I record it in a checklist on the E-bird App.
They would like you to document every bird you see which helps naturalists and scientists understand the populations of each bird in the world. They can know which bird populations are declining or increasing or changing location. It is so easy to get trends when you have so many people using the same app all over the world. But for me… I just like tracking what I have seen. I like looking at the explore map for a specific bird that I have just identified just become more confident in my decision after seeing other people have seen it in the same general area. I just saw (and heard) a yellow-rumped warbler on Stretch Island. It is something we don’t often see here so I was glad to see others have seen it in Southern Puget Sound recently.
But the best part of using checklists is seeing my data from my personal life list that it compiles. After seeing 3 new birds on our recent stay in Holbox Mexico, my personal World Life List is now over 600. There are over 10,000 birds in the world so I have a long way to go :>)
One of the first things I do when I get to another country is check the explore map on E-bird to see what kind of new birds I might see here that I can add to my life list. It is possible to see all the recent checklists from everyone that uses E-bird. I wish I had been using this app on our trips to South Africa in 2016 and Peru in 2013. I want to return to those places just to document all those birds that we saw but never identified.
I am relatively new at this game and I am still learning a lot. I have been to one meeting of our local Audubon society in South Seattle but we have been traveling so much that I haven’t been able to really make connections yet. I have learned almost everything by myself and I am sure that experienced birders will teach me a lot more. Many birders graduate to bird photography and buy those super huge telephoto lens cameras. I don’t see myself getting into that because of our current traveling lifestyle doesn’t allow me to carry big stuff. Right now, my bird photography using my phone could use a lot of improvement.
Seattle is a great place for birdwatching and I can often see over 25 different species on a couple hour wetland hike. But I have seen all of the common birds here so it is fun to find new birds when traveling. Costa Rica, Guatemala and Colombia we amazing. I saw a lot in South Africa in 2016 and Peru in 2013 but that was before I was keeping a list… We are planning another trip to Asia this year which is one of jackpots of the birdwatching business. There are so many varieties only live a few hotspots in the world but there are new birds in every country. My goal is to increase my life list to over 700 by the end of 2025. Gotta Catch them All!!!!