Bird Watching Fun at Any Level
by Don Alan Hall
It’s bird-watching time.
When you’re at parks or public forest areas this time of year, you’ll no doubt notice people with binoculars and bird guides looking for interesting things in the trees and bushes. It seems that more and more people are getting interested in birds.
If your friends know you’re interested in birds, it is likely that one or more will ask you what is the best way to identify the birds that become more visible in spring and summer. There’s no simple answer, of course. There are books, recording, classes, organizations, and friendly “experts” of varying expertise. I hate to give advice.
But I do envy persons who’re just beginning to get interested in birds. And I’m pleased to learn that more and more people are taking active interest in our more common and visible types of wildlife. I clearly remember when I first became a bird watcher.
When I was quite young, my sister, a Girl Scout, pointed out a black-capped chickadee to me, explaining that it looked like it was wearing a black cap and it said “chick-a-dee-dee-dee.” I saw she was right. I started poring over her bird books.
While convalescing from childhood illnesses, I spent days paging through a two-volume National Geographic bird book. I haven’t seen the edition for years, but I still recall the paintings by Allen Brooks. And at school there was the big old “Birds of America” to page through and admire the paintings of Louis Agassiz Fuertes. As a Cub Scout, I bult bird houses for wrens and bluebirds and I made feeders and stocked them with home-grown sunflower seeds. I kept lists of the birds that came to my feeders.
It was a towhee that really made a bird watcher of me, however. For it was with a sense of wonder and excitement that I spotted a brightly colored male towhee in a hawthorn shrub one April day. I’d never seen a bird like it, but I found the picture of one in a borrowed bird guide and, looking through binoculars that belonged to a relative, I could see that the pattern of the live bird matched the patterns of white, russet and black of the paintings in the guide.
Because I remember that towhee, and because I’ve read naturalists’ accounts of similar experiences, I tend to think of bird watching as a relatively solitary and personal sport or pastime.
Although you may go afield with friends, relatives, or an organization of bird watchers, it’s still your ears that hear the bird calls and your eyes that see a bird’s shape, pattern, and color.
More importantly, each bird watcher has his or her own level of interest. One may be fascinated by a towhee while another may want to get on through the towhee bushes and find some more interesting birds. Another might find hummers of little more interest than bumblebees. Some bird watchers have a hard time getting excited about any bird smaller than a teal.
One bird watcher can take a short walk through April woods and identify 40 species of birds. Another, at the same time and place, might recognize only eight or nine kinds.
So if you want to take up the gentle sport of bird watching, get yourself a good guide book (there are three good ones available at most book stores, take your pick) and do a little bedtime reading. Then borrow or buy some binoculars and go outside. This is the season for bird watching and there’s plenty of room in the world for more amateur naturalists of all levels of interest.
When I can, I try to discourage persons from taking up mountain climbing or wilderness hiking. Oregon’s highest mountains and popular trails are, at times, badly overused. We seem to be loving our most beautiful and precious wilderness areas to death.
But I have no intention of trying to discourage people from bird watching; that is, as long as they’re responsible and don’t interrupt the birds’ urgent business of survival with their prying.
It wouldn’t bother me if everybody became a bird watcher. The earth can stand several billion humans who have true respect for nature.
