Birding Madness: We Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)

These days, the first thing we do after getting out of bed in the morning is to grab our binoculars (handily located on the shelf next to the bedroom window) and look out to see what we've got. Lately our back yard has been lousy with white-crowned and white-throated sparrows as well as goldfinches. (Of course we have our robins, mourning doves, the ubiquitous house sparrows, and the odd blue jay and starling, too.) Looking up into the two silver maples in back sometimes sends us to the Sibley (bedside table) to identify warblers and other assorted things: in the past week, we've had a flock of black and white warblers, a Northern parula, an eastern kingbird, yellow warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, flycatchers, common yellow-throats, a magnolia warbler, a chestnut-sided warbler, a possible Nashville warbler, a black-throated blue warbler, a hermit thrush, and a Canada warbler. The absolute best was a scarlet tanager that landed on the fence just a few feet away from our bedroom window and then flew out front and hopped down the driveway. No time to get a picture of the tanager, alas, but here's a picture of a very pretty eastern towhee that was hanging out in our back yard for a few days:


A little over a year ago, I didn't own a pair of binoculars. I barely knew the difference between a house sparrow and a goldfinch. Then we went to the New River Birding Festival and the scales fell from my eyes. I'm still a beginner, and frustrated with all these sparrows and warblers that still look alike to me, but the listing and classification opportunities make up for the frustration. Saturday was the Tommy Thompson Spring Bird Festival (mentioned by Little Orange Guy in her blog on Sunday); we saw 40 species! On Sunday we had 13 species in our yard, and today we've had 11 so far. Not bad for a tiny yard in the biggest city in Canada!

The Tommy Thompson festival was our first time birding with a guide since New River, and it brought home to me that the two ends of the birder spectrum are very far apart, not in terms of expertise but in terms of attitude. The leaders at New River, and our leader Matt at Tommy Thompson, were teachers - good, approachable, non-judgemental teachers. At the other end of the spectrum there are the snotty birders, like the woman who crashed our Early Bird Hike for Beginners on Saturday. By the Tilley hat, expensive binoculars and vest, she was obviously more an expert than a beginner (oh wait - I've just described Sara!). When someone in our group identified a bird, she quickly (and nastily) corrected them. People like that make birding in groups a very unpleasant experience. However, we met lots of friendly experts on our walk, too, who told us what they'd been spotting in different parts of the park.

Saturday afternoon we went on the Colonial Water Bird Hike (I was very disappointed that I saw no tricorn hats). This was a very mixed crowd: three families of newcomers to Canada (two of them with small children in strollers and one with an older girl in a pink tutu), some young couples, and some older women. I got to be a teacher on this hike, giving the newcomers (most of whom didn't have binoculars - the ones they did have were tiny) a turn with my binoculars and telling them where to look to see the bobolink which was sitting in some tall grass. We couldn't get a picture of the bobolink, but here's an eastern kingbird which was perched next to the water:


On Sunday, after our 13 species, we decided to keep a bird diary in which we write down all the species we see in our yard each day, and anything out of the ordinary we see elsewhere (for example, the kestrel I saw perched on a lamppost on my way home from work one day). It will be neat to look back and see when the different birds come through each year.

This Sunday, we're going back to Taylor Creek Park for some birding. And this is us at 8 o'clock this morning in the pouring rain after being enticed outside by the hermit thrush and the Canada warbler:


It ain't an easy hobby.