Birding up

This year I did a lot of birdwatching.

I haven’t done it much since moving to New Jersey nine years ago. By that time I had seen almost all regularly occurring birds of the continent, and the handful I was missing never show up in New Jersey anyway. I am not particularly into chasing rare vagrants because for me it’s more interesting to see each species in its natural habitat. So there wasn’t much to do, even though the state has a few really nice birding locations. There is Cape May, a triangle of land pointing south so that fall migrants are funneled to the tip and gather there in impressive numbers; the Cape is also famous for spring gatherings of shorebirds feasting on horseshoe crab eggs. There is Barnegat Inlet, where you can watch wintering eiders, harlequin and long-tailed ducks, and other colorful waterbirds at very close range. And closer to my home there is a chain of small nature reserves along the double crest of Watchung Mountains, good for wood-warblers and other songbirds during spring migration. I checked these places out a few times, but didn’t get serious.

This year I realized that I could do it on a new level. Online record databases (eBird and iNaturalist for North America) made finding rarities much easier. I got a copy of A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey by William Boyle. Also, I installed a new free app called Merlin that identifies birds by sound. It has certain limitations (cell phone microphones aren’t designed for that), and makes some funny errors (for example, it mistakes green frogs for yellow-billed cuckoos, which explains numerous eBird records of the latter from open wetlands where they are very unlikely to occur). But it is fantastic for small birds with complex songs that are difficult to remember and tell apart, for untangling multi-species choruses, and for noticing some species that are easy to miss when birding by ear. Merlin allowed me to find and watch a few species that I had seen only briefly before, showed me that some birds such as cedar waxwings are more common than I realized, and helped learn difficult groups such as Empidonax flycatchers much better. (Unfortunately, at this stage it has complete coverage only in North America – in Hawaii it doesn’t recognize any native songbirds, only introduced ones, and in Japan it can’t identify even some of the most common species and keeps mistaking those t doesn’t know for those it does. It’s probably going to be at least a few years before you can use it in the tropics where it’s most needed.)

So I spent some delightful mornings in forests, meadows and saltmarshes, pretty much extinguished my “better view desired” list of local species, and… ran out of birds to look for again, so I had to move on to freshwater fishes, and those aren’t going to last long, either.

P. S. I recently read a book called The Birds that Audubon Missed by Ken Kaufman. Highly recommended for everyone interested in birding, the history of zoology, and nature’s never-ending mysteries.