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Notes of a novice birdwatcher
by Phil Soreide

For most of my life, my skill of identifying various species of birds has lain dormant. I could pick out a robin, a crow, a Canada goose and an ostrich fairly reliably, but most of the rest of the avian world I classified as “LBBs” meaning alternately “little brown birds” or “little black birds”.

That all began to change about a year ago when I was asked to write for a new Web site being developed to promote bird watching in south central and southwestern Nebraska.

Called the Chicken Dance Trail, the new site was to highlight the best birding habitat in the region, which means some of the best birding habitat in the country. Nebraska is right at the narrowest point of an hourglass-shaped avian migratory pattern called the Central Flyway, so millions – maybe billions – of migratory birds pass through here every year. In all, ornithologists say some 257 different species live in or visit the state.

Keeping up with the flock

In order to write the “adventures” planned for the site, it was arranged that I should accompany birding experts along the path of the Chicken Dance Trail. These are people who had done this for years and could tell a Clark’s grebe from a Western grebe at a hundred paces. I stepped out of the truck with one of them and he identified three species in 10 seconds just by their song. I could see that if I was going to fly with this flock I’d need to learn a little something before I stretched my wings.

Not being one for a lot of tedious research, I typed the words “bird watching” into the Google bar. I learned that more people claim bird watching as a hobby than any other single activity, and that there are millions of Web sites, thousands of ornithological organizations and hundreds of magazines devoted to every feathered nuance of the topic.

One of the reasons the sport is so popular is that it’s pretty straightforward to get started, although – like everything else – it takes years of devoted effort to get good

Birding basics

The basic technique is this: once you get close enough to a bird who’s sitting relatively still, start by observing size and color. You look first to see if it’s, say, sparrow-sized, robin-sized or crow-sized. Then look for what the cognoscenti call “field marks” such as a cap on the head or colored bars on the wings. You’re going to have to learn to be quick, because I can tell you from personal experience there won’t be enough time to flip through a field guide before it flies away.

I didn’t have that problem with my first bird ID after taking on this project. I found an LBB floating in my horses’ stock tank, as I sometimes do. As he was deceased, I had ample opportunity to commit his field marks to memory: black and about robin-sized, with a hood of iridescent green spreading down over his shoulders. Armed with that mental picture I later consulted the bird charts piling up on my desk, and it didn’t take long to identify my late companion as a common grackle. Which brings up an interesting phenomenon about birding: I had never seen a grackle before that day, and now I see them all the time. They really are common.

Since my birthday was coming up, I asked for a pair of binoculars. Serious birders can and do spend thousands upon thousands on their optics, but I got everything I figured I’d need for less than $150.

Flying solo

My first outing with my new binoculars was to the farm where I keep my horses. This is great birding habitat – big deciduous trees surrounded by open fields, some pasture, grain bins with spilled grain, and a barn filled with – well, I’ll be darned, barn swallows. No mistaking their little blue bodies, golden breasts and forked tail. That made two checks on my bird list.

I sat down on the tailgate of my truck and scanned the trees with my binoculars. How frustrating! I could hear that the trees were alive with birds; I could catch the flicker of movement in the branches, but I couldn’t see anything. Around by the grain bins, I could see grackles and other LBBs, but for the most part they were all too similar for me to distinguish.

Suddenly there was a streak of red across the yard, a low swoop, right in front of me. It arced diagonally, ignoring the trees and landed instead clinging vertically to the side of a light pole about 20 yards away. I sighted him in my binoculars as quickly as I could, but I needn’t have worried – he clung there for a long time, as if posing for me. I made mental note of his mottled black and white wings, and the bright red spot on the back of his head, his longish beak and, of course, the fact that he was clinging, not perching. Later, sitting in my office, I found I’d seen and identified my first red-bellied woodpecker, and the accomplishment gave me something of a thrill.

Over the next few days, I added the black-capped chickadee, junco, killdeer, blue jay and a few others to my list of positive IDs. Now every time I’m able to positively identify a new bird, I have that same feeling. It’s like I “get” one somehow that I can put in a mental cage along with the other birds I know. It’s a little game I can play all by myself whenever I’m outside.

If you read my adventures on the Chicken Dance Trail, which I hope you do (www.chickendancetrail.com), you will find I have adopted the tone of a confident and competent birder. Of course, I am neither. But I’ve made a start. And I’m getting better.

Phil Soreide is a freelance writer living in Holdrege, NE.

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