Level 1 – Beginning Birding

Your two most important senses for birding are your sight and hearing. While both are important, it can be argued that your ears will prove to be the most effective at detecting and identifying many bird species; our identifications on campus are exclusively by hearing 60-70% of the time. The sooner your appreciation and wonder of birds includes both vision and hearing, the more you will be amazed!

To begin birding, go outside, be silent, move very little. Close your eyes and let the sounds of birds enter your mind. After hearing, open your eyes and move your head towards the sounds you hear and keep listening. Be curious, guess, make patient and attentive. You Are Birding! Head to page XXX for identification guidance.

Level 2 – Sensory Training Birding

Like any tools, the use of your eyes and ears can improve with practice, discipline, and attention to detail. Our instinctual talents can be adequate, but guided knowledge of the use of these tools is what turns talent into skill. No matter what level you strive to achieve, your birding abilities will be maximized with both instinct, and guided knowledge, both talents and skills.

Sometimes this means removing one of your senses by limiting the eye or the ear. Focus your attention by listening with your eyes closed or looking while plugging your ears. Be sure to try both and switch off; look around for movement and attempt to clear out sound.

The next important skill to work on for your brain is patience. Some birds are very common, while others are infrequent or rare ***********check with checklist******. Patience can help us in two important ways. The obvious way is when you find a good habitat, it’s only a matter of time before birds show up, especially the rare ones; you must be patient (time allowing) to see them. Your presence will be enough to make some birds run away; patience can calm them enough to return after being frightened. The other way patience is useful is by combining it with being opportunistic. Sometimes you can be in the right place at the right time and the bird may not show up, or it may not perform the behaviors you are looking for. Be patient and recognize that it will happen, but be opportunistic to not miss what IS happening. Often we get jaded by the 1000th American Robin we have seen, or the 100th mixed flock of chickadees we are hearing, but even these we often times deem as “normality’s” can have rare morphs and calls. In addition, they are often giving you cues of rarer birds nearby. You must be patient enough to attend to and wade through the common and frequent occurrences to see the rare.

Keep reminding yourself, you have two tools you can use, your eyes and ears. Sometimes you need to use them in isolation but prepare to be patient and opportunistic with your experiences. Use your instinctual talents, but never forget to train your skills.

SIGHT

Your brain’s interpretation of light, as detected by your eye.

Your naked eyes are likely to be the most familiar to you and easiest to use instinctively. Here, we seek to guide your instincts to learn how to see birds, from stimulus, to eye, to sight. Mechanistically, light must be detected by the eye (this is what we call reception), so that the associated nerves and brain can interpret it (AKA, bring it to your attention). In time, you can be confident in some bird identifications by just a simple motion or set of colors. Knowledge of the components of your sight will help you understand what you see and how to look.

Light has 3 distinct properties to detect and turn into your attention.

• Amount of light your eye detects → Brightness (Light vs Dark)
• Specific type of light (wavelength) your eye detects → Hue (Colors)
• Combination of wavelengths detected by your eye → Saturation (Richness of Color)

Your Brain integrates those properties in creative ways.

• Visual Resolution – Number of “pixels” used in your vision’s detail.
• Foreground detection – Edges, Object Configurations, and Constellations of objects.
• Background detection – Substrate, habitat, and positions of objects.
• Motion detection – Tracking and prediction of spatial changes in objects over time: motion, speed, acceleration and momentum.
• Brightness Contrast – Distinguishes objects of similar hue and saturation.
• Color patterns – Spatial distributions of hues/saturations.

HEARING

Your brain’s interpretation of sound, as detected by your ear.

Your ears have likely long served you to communicate with other humans. You can express emotions and exchange thoughts effortlessly. Here we seek to guide your instincts so that you may learn how to hear birds: from stimulus, to ear, and finally, hearing itself. Just like learning a new word or language, get ready to learn the languages of birds! Sound must be detected by the inner ear (reception), so that the brain and associated nerves can interpret it (bring to your attention). In time, you can be confident in some bird identifications by the slightest sound of a single syllable. Knowledge of the components of your hearing will help you understand what you hear and how to listen. This may be the most important aspect to work on to increase your birding skills.

Sound has 3 distinct properties to detect and turn into your attention.

• Intensity of sound vibrations your ear detects è Loudness (loud vs soft).
• Frequency of sound vibrations your ear detects è Pitch (treble vs bass).
• Set of pitches detected at the same time è Timbre (richness).

Your Brain integrates those properties in creative ways.

• Background habituation – Removing the constant ambiguous sound to focus on bird sounds.
• Pitch and Timbre analysis – Pure tones, harmonics, keys, and dissonance.
• Syllable isolation – Beginning and ending of distinct sounds.
• Acoustic progressions – Changes in tone for a single syllable.
• Motifs – Sequences of syllables, repeated patterns.
• Penetration – Loudness and softness analysis, how a sound carries.
• Attenuation – Frequency shifts due to distance and obstruction.

Level 3 – Enhanced Perception Birding

There are ways to enhance both your eyes and ears. You might get to a point where your own senses can limit you. Such enhancements can make your identifications more reliable and give you more access to the harder to find species. At first you will need to learn them so that you use these tools as if they were your eyes or your ears. Enjoy the fresh perspectives that these tools give. This section is not for taking pictures or recording sounds, that is something else.

Enhancing your eyes – Binoculars

If someone sees you looking into bushes 5 feet in front of you with binoculars, they will likely make many assumptions; one of them will be that you are birding. Binoculars enhance reception of light and deliver it to your eyes in one shot.

Before using the binoculars

Clean your lenses – Our eyes are constantly cleaning themselves with fluid, don’t hesitate to clean your lenses! Everything is better with clean lenses.

Invest at the level you need, protect the investment as needed. Care, cases, maintenance. Brush to remove debris, clean lens wipes, both help prevent scratches to lenses.

Over time, try as many binoculars as possible. Anti-glare, humidity resistance, durability, zoom vs non-zoom. You will find what works best with you. It can be pricey, so make friends that have some you can try!

Enhancing your ears – Microphones and Speakers

Enhancing reception and delivering that enhanced reception to your ears requires two steps for sound. The microphone needs to be better than your ears in some way to receive sound you are not able to hear with your ears (this could be in pitch or loudness). This signal then needs to be given to your ears by speakers. This can get complicated, but we will keep it relatively simple.

Microphones – Enhancing Sound Reception

Mobile phone systems – Most mobile phones will require you to record the sound with the microphone, then replay it using the speakers. The microphones can pick out softer higher pitch sounds, but do relatively little, overall, to enhancing the overall sound.

Parabolic Microphones – larger increase of loudness of faint sounds, some frequency issues, can miss lower pitch, over emphasize higher pitch, highly directional, usually monaural (one microphone), great for isolating individual birds, particularly songbirds, minimal background noise.

Shotgun microphone – smaller increase of loudness of faint sounds, less frequency issues, directional, usually monaural (one microphone), great for isolating specific directions, low background noise.

Ambisonic microphones– increases in loudness and pitch detection, binaural for immersion of an entire environment (with more than one microphone), not good for isolation of specific birds or directions, good for contextual sounds.

Speakers – Enhancing sound delivery to your ears

Given the microphone reception, speakers on the mobile phone do not typically deliver an enhanced sound. In addition, the sound produced doesn’t travel straight to your head only, it travels in all directions and can be heard by other birds. We recommend not playing recordings that might influence other birds negatively (refer back to the ethics section). Record with your cell phone as a great tool, but playback using head speakers!

Head speakers – With a microphone that is more sensitive than your ear, you will need a delivery system for the enhanced sound. We definitely recommend headphones, of which there are many types. High quality speakers should be paired with high quality microphones to make the most of them.

Earbuds – compact, easy to carry, easy to lose, hard to damage, pay attention to dust/rain protection (IP scale).

Over the ear headphones – can be bulky, hard to carry, hard to lose, easier to damage, pay attention to dust/rain protection (IP scale).

Level 4 – Documentation and Scientific Birding

It might not be immediately obvious why documenting our bird observations is important, but it most definitely can be. Like anything that is documented, it extends our memories and allows us to compare detailed information from place to place, and from one time to another. There are many ways to document, but all can potentially make you a better birder.

Oral Tradition

Like many passionate groups, birders love stories. Everything in the previous pages about “how to bird” will lend itself to the oral tradition. It is important to recognize that the community built by oral stories is fundamental to how we share information, formulate our understandings, and relate to each other. You will likely end up with multiple stories of each bird species you come across, your first encounter, your strangest encounter, and your most memorable. These stories live with us and live on through our mentorship and our community connections. Cherish them, practice them, and embellish them a little on the drama if needed (all birders do). However, like most oral traditions, they are hard to document, and some might say, should not be documented. Oral traditions are living, breathing entities that morph along, the same way the river flows and the wind blows. When documentation is needed, we have the following methods below.

As a way of getting a better view of the birds I record in my journal, I create a hand written table that takes up about 5 pages. Presently I do this after two months have passed. I make a numbered, taxonomically ordered list of all the birds I have seen over those two months. I include some birds of interest reported by others, but not seen by me. Sometimes I include birds I happened not to see as absence of a species can also be of interest. Next I make vertical columns and give them ABC headings. Normally I have enough to make 12 columns! One column can cover a place I bird often, such as the GRC campus. Another might be for a county, such as Pierce or Thurston, where I don’t quite as often. One column might be devoted to a special birding trip, like when I go to Eastern Washington. Yes this is very time consuming, but I made it part of my schedule. I would come to GRC early, have coffee and work on my journals.

In pre-Covid times, I would pop into my favorite coffee shops near my birding trips to work on my journal. The baristas would try to figure out what I was doing. I would pretend that it was very serious and important!

Sharing your data

In this modern world we have the opportunity to make our checklists and field journals more impactful than ever. When we share our data with others, the pooled observations become powerful tools for understanding species phenology (cyclic and seasonal phenomena). There are a few websites and mobile phone apps that make such sharing easy and can even replace the written field guide for the tech savvy. The two most prominent (at the time of this writing) are definitely iNaturalist (California academy of sciences and national geographic) and Ebird (Cornell Lab of Ornithology).

iNaturalist

iNaturalist takes information for more than just birds. It has the ability to set projects and have others join. GPS information is stored automatically where you are.

Additionally, they produced the SEEK app that helps identify pictures of life using the mobile phone.

Ebird

Ebird is better for birds. There are checklists for regions, hotspots of known as good birding places, and a mountain of data and expertise behind it all. Data entry is simpler and more efficient. GPS information can be stored, but it isn’t automatic in the field. Additionally they produced the MERLIN app (picture identification) and BIRDNET app (audio identification) to help identify birds using the mobile phone. Because of the specialization on birds, we use Ebird far more than iNaturalist. However, many birders use both.

We have built a webapp directly through Survey123.

Cameras and photography

A photograph goes a long way in terms of verifying a particular identification. In addition, a photograph can be worth money for a variety of reasons as well. For us, the importance of a photograph would be to document your birding experience. This can be of habitat, signs of birds, or the birds themselves (living or dead). The quality need only be great enough to remind us of the experience and sometimes help us identify the bird. For the purposes of this book, a “good quality” photograph is informative, while the price it might fetch does not add quality for us. One of the grainiest photos Danny ever took had to be blown up far too much, but it shows the Brown Creeper literally running up the side of the tree, completely letting go of the tree (see page 69). This was informative news to many long time birders.

With this in mind, we want to recommend a few camera options that we think can help the beginning birder.

• Cell phone cameras
• Game cams.
  • When you can’t be there, a game cam can. However, you need to lock it down otherwise it could be stolen. Which birds frequent a particular spot? This will tell you. Make sure it is waterproof and the memory and battery are easy to swap out. Be sure to experiment with all the settings.
• Time lapse cameras
  • If you see a bird starting to build a nest, set up a time lapse camera at a distance to capture the process that might take hours or days. We can’t be there every 10 seconds to take a shot of the progress, but a time lapse camera can. Again, go for waterproof options and experiment with the settings, especially the time between pictures.
• Point and shoot cameras
  • Typically, these are small and easy to carry into the field. Often the battery will last more than a single day birding trip. If there is a video function, you might invest in a tripod to make better videos. For us, the most important thing for pictures of informative quality are those with good optical zoom and quick autofocus. Small birds in a bush 5 feet away might need high magnification, but large eagles can still be photographed soaring up in the sky.
• DSLR and similar cameras
  • These cameras are typically heavy and large and often benefit from a tripod. Lenses with 100-300 mm focal lengths seem to be the most fruitful in our experience for birds. Below 100mm for habitat, above 300mm for smaller birds and distance shots. The larger your sensor and diameter of optics typically means you can shoot at faster shutter speeds and lower ISOs. In the dark forest, it is common to shoot at 800 iso or above, which leaves the picture a bit grainy, but it’s better to be grainy than blurry in our experience.
• Lighting Telescopic and not
• Spherical panoramic cameras
• Stereoscopic immersive cameras
• Audio recorders
  • Any of the microphones work with virtually all of the recorders. However, the recorder you choose can be of greater or lesser quality. A high quality microphone with a low quality recorder is not very useful, and vice-versa. You will want to pair your budget with what you feel is appropriate. 96k at 24 bits is probably more than enough for the higher end. Be mindful of your gain settings so you don’t blow out the sound. Typically we cut do a low frequency filter later on the computer and keep the raw sound as best as we can in the original recording. We think it is smart to get a recorder that you will likely use in another context as well.

Bird Feeders

As of this writing, we don’t maintain feeders on campus, but plan to in the future. This is more for information purposes, not to feed the wildlife. In our classes we often have projects that involve attracting animals with food that often attract birds. The type of food and placement (between habitats and within the habitat) will greatly alter what birds you will see. Experiment, but don’t put too much food out.

It is easy to use a cell phone in today’s world to reproduce (very audibly) many bird calls, songs, and other noises. There are also mechanical bird calls that humans can “play..

This can be intriguing, but can have negative effects for many birds. For instance, a bird might hear the calls and leave due to not wanting to fight over territory. We minimize our use of calls mostly for difficult to see or shy birds, and do so sparingly. If you need to hear what the bird is for verification of species to match their call, try and do so with headphones to minimize the disturbance on the birds. Refer back to the ethics section.

Our Primary Equipment for this guide

Photographic

• Canon Powershot SX70HS (20-megapixel resolution, 65x optical zoom, good stabilization) – $600 as of this writing
  • Shoot in burst mode.
  • Always one foot forward for stabilization.
  • Work on being able to point at something and find it at full zoom Work on reducing the time from seeing a bird to getting the picture.

• Canon 5d r
• Theta z1
• Vuze XR
• Insta360 Pro2

Android mobile phone

Ebird App

Bird checklist made easy.

Merlin

To help with field identification (Photo id and explore functions).

Birdnet

To help with field identification (android support in field with cell phone, on website with recordings).

Audio

• Olympus LS-P4 audio recorder
  • To record high fidelity audio from the parabolic microphone
• Parabolic microphone (get model) **************
  • To pinpoint the fainter high pitch calls for clarity
  • Work on holding the recorder and microphone one-handed and silently.
• Zoom H3-VR Ambisonic recorder.
  • To gather contextual information, with a tripod, using the leveling function.

Game cam

Time lapse