Field Notes
Birding Info
Access, ethics, timing, and gear — the parts of birding that aren't identification.
Birding Info
Your First Pelagic: Twelve Hours, Four Lifers, and Seasickness
There is a set of birds that never come to land in the western hemisphere except to breed on remote islands. Seeing them means getting on a boat before dawn, going thirty miles offshore, and staying there. It is the least comfortable and most rewarding day in birding.
Birding Info
The Binocular Spec That Matters Is the One Nobody Quotes
Every binocular is sold on two numbers: magnification and objective size. Neither is the one that decides whether you enjoy using it. The specs that actually matter are field of view, eye relief, close focus and weight, and three of those are routinely buried or omitted entirely.
Birding Info
Why Hawk Watchers Sit on the Same Hill for Two Months
Every autumn, volunteers occupy specific ridges and headlands from dawn to mid-afternoon for eight or ten weeks, counting raptors passing overhead. It looks like an eccentric endurance sport. It is the longest-running population monitoring dataset for birds of prey in existence.
Birding Info
Shorebirding Is a Tide Problem, Not a Bird Problem
Turn up at a famous shorebird site at the wrong state of tide and you will see mud, or you will see water, and in both cases you will see almost no birds. Get the tide right and the same place holds twenty thousand of them at arm's length for ninety minutes.
Birding Info
What an eBird Hotspot Actually Tells You, and What It Hides
A hotspot with 280 species looks like the best site in the county. It might be. Or it might be a parking lot that forty thousand birders have walked through on their way somewhere else, with a bar chart that reflects human behavior far more accurately than it reflects birds.
Birding Info
Playing a Recording Is Sometimes Harassment and Sometimes Illegal
A phone in your pocket can summon a territorial male out of dense cover in about nine seconds. That is a genuinely useful tool and a damaging one, and the line between them is not where most birders assume it is.
Birding Info
Sharing a Wildlife Area With People Who Are Shooting
The best wetland birding in most states is on land bought with hunting license money, managed for waterfowl, and open to shooting for several months a year. Birders who avoid it in autumn miss the migration. Birders who show up in a gray jacket at dawn on the opener miss something else.
Birding Info
The Beach Closes in March Because the Birds Got There First
From March 15 to September 15, stretches of the Pacific coast are roped off with fiberglass posts and string. The rope stops nothing. It is a sign, aimed at you, protecting a bird that lays four eggs in a scrape in open sand and will abandon them if you walk close enough.
Birding Info
A Wildlife Refuge Is Not a Park, and the Rules Prove It
There are 573 national wildlife refuges and most birders treat them as parks with better birds. They are not. They were created for wildlife first, people second, and it shows in everything: hunting seasons, areas closed half the year, auto tour routes you may not leave, and a duck stamp that gets you in free.
Birding Info
That Bird Is on Private Land. Now What?
A rare bird turns up on a farm pond, in a hedgerow behind a subdivision, on a levee with no sign either way. The bird is federally protected. The ground it is standing on is somebody's. Those two facts have nothing to do with each other, and confusing them is how birders get trespass citations.