It’s time to spread your wings and expand your bird watching skills. Hopefully by now you’ve been experimenting with the Merlin app and have met some of the birds in your own backyard. The Beginner’s Guide to Birding was designed to spark your curiosity. Did it work? Ready to spread your wings and learn a few more bird watching tips and tricks?
No Picture? No Problem
If you’re bird watching but can’t get a good enough photo of your bird for the app, you can try the Step by Step ID feature on the Merlin app.
This handy feature let’s you put in some basics about a bird starting with where you are, the date, the size, the color and where you saw the bird (on the ground, wading in the water, etc).
Make sure you go to the setting on your Merlin app and download the “bird pack” for your geography or the tool may not work properly.
Plug in those simple details and the most likely suspects pop up.
Did you find your bird?
From Merlin, you can click the tabs at the top to listen to the sound your bird makes (learning to recognize a bird by sound is an ultra-pro skill) as well as a map of where they are likely to be found during different times of year.
Bird Watching Tool: eBird
Time to add another fabulous bird watching app! Once you identify your bird with Merlin’s Step by Step ID, click “This is my bird”. You can save that sighting with Merlin and log where you were, but it’s more fun to start a list! Click “Take me to e Bird” and you’ll be prompted to download that app (also free).
Create a Bird Watching Life List
Now that you are a pro at bird watching, you can create your Life List. This is a place to keep a list of every bird you see in your lifetime.
As you become more of a bird geek like me, you’ll start reading about exotic or rare birds that you may want to track down at some point so that you can add them to your Life List.
For a long time, the #1 bird on my “hope to see” list was the Blue Footed Booby. This duck-like bird lives in the Galapagos Islands and is known for its funny mating dance. The male booby lifts his foot up and shows it to his prospective love interest. Then he puts it down and picks up the other foot. Sometimes he brings her a stick as a token of love.
It’s a once in a lifetime trip that I hope to make many more times in my lifetime.
Once I crossed this bird off my bird watching life list, I added the Resplendent Quetzal that lives in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and eats avocados. My kind of bird!
I’ve been to Costa Rica three times but haven’t crossed him off my list yet.
Bird Watching: The Old Fashioned Way
If you feel like using an app is cheating, you might want to try bird watching the old fashioned way by using a book. I recommend Stokes’ Beginner Guide to Birding which you can purchase on Amazon for about $10. Just make sure to buy the one for your region of the country.
I love this book because it is organized by the color of the birds. That way, if you see a bird that is clearly blue or red, you can easily flip through the pages to identify it vs. trying to navigate an app.
It’s also a fun way to quickly see the sheer variety of birds near you that are just waiting to be discovered! I remember flipping through my Stokes guide for the first time and finding the painted bunting.
I was like, “NO WAY” as in there is NO WAY that bird is going to show up in my backyard.
About a week later, it did. I didn’t get the photo to prove it of course. And I haven’t seen one since.
Bird Watching Tools
Now that you have decided bird watching is a cool hobby, it’s probably worth investing in a few tools. In our next lesson, we’ll cover the basics of buying binoculars and putting up bird feeders.
