Bird Watching Tips (Birding)

if you are a beginning birder and looking to improve your birding skills I have 15 tips to improve your birding skills coming up right after this [Music] hi guys my name is Eddie I'm a wildlife biologist and a dedicated birder and on this channel I not only teach you about nature but also teach you how to enjoy nature I focused a lot on birding but I do a lot of other things like herping snorkeling I do app and gear reviews eco tours and travel guides if you're interested hit the subscribe button and click the bell for notifications so this video is really for a lot of people who are brand new to the hobby of birding but also if you've been burning for a while I'm also going to give some tips that you might have never heard of before so let's get into it so the first tip I have is you need to make sure that you have good enough binoculars it's really the one piece of equipment that you absolutely need my high school biology teacher once told me that binoculars for terrestrial biologists are kind of like a snorkel mask for a marine biologist and it's not only birds too but for the observation and identification of wildlife in general good pair of binoculars is pretty crucial and the thing that I like about Bernie is it doesn't have to be that expensive if you don't want it to but you do have to spend enough money right off the bat just to buy yourself a good enough pair of binoculars so unfortunately with binoculars you basically pay for what you get depending on where you live in the world if you've spent about two to three hundred dollars you should get a good enough pair of binoculars and I'm gonna make another video on how to pick your binoculars I'll put the tag right here but just remember binoculars with stronger magnification are not necessarily the best because they can have a smaller field of view and before I move on to my next step also just make sure that they're cleaned I will show you a great example of some dirty binoculars as you can see look at that you see how dirty those are so so yeah just make sure you clean your binoculars now onto my second tip do not spot birds with your binoculars but spot them with your naked eye first and then put your binoculars on them and you know obviously I know if you're an experienced birder you already know that but I've just seen this with too many people who have gone birding the first time in the forest if you're looking with their binoculars first and they can't find anything and it's because your field of view is way too narrow through your binoculars now this isn't always the case it depends which kind of birding you're doing if you're scanning the horizon for shorebirds or water birds that are really far away where you can't even see them with your naked eye then yeah of course you want to use your binoculars first by the way check out the mallards hey guys [Music] now on to my third tip which is to know all of the pieces of information all of the clues that you can use to potentially identify a birth visual field marks geography where in the world what specific region are you at the time so what time of day is that bird most active is it in the morning or at night because in general the best time for birding is early in the morning or in the evening but there are birds that are active at all times a day also time of year birds are migratory some birds are more active certain times a year the habitat doesn't live in water doesn't live in the forest does it prefer edge habitat is it a habitat specialist where it only lives where like one type of tree lives or something the sounds that it makes its behavior you know for example is it like hopping around the ground in a weird way or is it sitting on a perch and flying up catching an insect going back to its perch doing that behavior repeatedly for some species there are other clues as well these are all clues that you can use to identify a bird you know you'll get that from reading field guides which I'll get to later [Music] my fourth tip for beginner birders is to really focus as much on the sounds as you do visually with the birds because birds obviously in general are very vocal they're a great way to identify birds when you can't see them of course and when you get to be a really advanced birder depending on what type of habitat you're in most of your identification can be done just by sounds there are different ways you can learn the cause of birds can be in the field there's mnemonics there's different apps that you can use on your phone which we'll talk about more later so my fifth tip for beginning birders which might be sort of obvious is to stay quiet and stay still when you see a bird because you might scare it away what you wear could potentially have an effect too I can't confirm this by science I've done no research into this but a lot of people say that if you wear white that is more likely to scare birds away I would guess that if you wore drab or colors that looked like the environments around you just like what a hunter might wear like the camouflage I think that'd probably be the best choice but again I don't know post in comments below your thoughts on that actually and you should know that the more people who you go birding with the more likely you are to scare birds away and my experience I really think that the ideal size of a group should be two to four people because if you have too much more than that delicious more people to scare the birds away but I think that's an optimum because if you do go birding in a group then you have more people to help you out birding which brings me to my fifth tip which is to go birding with other people but not only other people but the experts because of course with anything you do you learn best from the experts in ways that you never thought you would before but to be honest you should not always go birding with experts because you're never gonna get your confidence birdie on your own if you don't go on your own my next tip which is something that I think a lot of experienced birders don't realize either is it's really important to practice pointing out birds to other people when you find a bird that other people don't see you need to speak clearly and succinctly and be as descriptive as you can and describe the location of that bird as accurately as you can so other people can see it if other people can see the bird that you see it just makes the birding experience so much better it's so annoying when you see a bird other people can't see it and they're trying to see it you're having trouble explaining it to them then all the sudden the bird flies away before anyone can see it that gets really annoying not only when you see it but also when someone's trying to point out a bird to you and you can't find it either being distracted by an osprey right here I wish on my better camera [Music] saying hi to my buddy over here a male Mallard my next step is pretty general and that is to use your phone maximize all the benefits that you can get from this amazing piece of technology that we are so lucky to have at this point in human history I know that a lot of people have negative opinions on phones and technology and they think that it's all destroying us as human beings because we're on our phones the whole time but the cool thing about birding just like many other things is the phone can do amazing things for you that can really enhance your birding experience for example there's apps that help you learn bird calls there's apps that will actually help you pinpoint individual birds that have been seen from citizen science data on eBird that you can just pull up on your phone and find a bird down the street it's pretty cool I'm actually going to make a separate video about all of my favorite burning apps I'll put the card here once it's done and of course there are a lot of guide books in app form definitely utilize your phone for guide books too I know that a lot of people like to take these thick guide books out into the field with them and they like to flip through the pages and you know they just like books they like holding them and like the old school style but I'm telling you it is so much easier quicker and faster on your phone you can just keep it in your pocket you don't have to worry about holding the guide book you don't have to put on your backpack and unzip the backpack I'm actually gonna make another video on my favorite guide books for North America which will put the card here the best book for identification I think is definitely Sibley that's what pretty much all the experts say you Sibley doesn't hurt to use more guide books than that though so my next tip piggy backs off the last tip and that is to use your phone to record a bird call in the wild that you haven't seen and then you can play it back to yourself and you can even play it back to the bird to which I don't really recommend doing that maybe in some cases I don't know that's a pretty controversial topic I just find that if I am in the and there's a bird in a bush little bird calling I have no idea what it's called as I record its call then I can go back to my Sibley got on my phone and go through some calls and my sibling died and then try to match the call and not only can you do that with sound but you can also take notes which I highly suggest you do you can do it on a notepad but again going back to the theme of it's always easier on your phone no matter what type of smartphone you have there should be a place where you can just write notes down in your phone when you're trying to identify a bird and you don't know what it is write down everything about it right when you see that bird in the field because chances are you're not gonna remember it and also just take notes on like all kinds of stuff what I think everyone should do is really take time to study all of the external anatomy of the bird all the names of the feathers you know the primaries the recipients you know the names of all those feathers and makes it that much easier to identify the bird when you look at your notes and also to communicate the description of that bird to other people especially if it's across the Internet my next tip is to take photos for identification just for the sake of becoming a better birder and better at identifying birds taking shots in the wild even if it's a really junky photo it can help you identify that bird after and can send those photos to other people through the internet through email lists social media but photography is a cool hobby too you get really into the art of photography and taking really good photos with the right light fixing up your photos it's all a lot of fun so my next tip is to come up with a post birding routine review of the birds that you saw in the field the first part of this is you should keep a list of all the birds that you see in the field I think it makes it more fun and also you can submit them to citizen science specifically eBird and in case you don't know a bird is a massive online citizen science database and your sightings are tagged geographically so what I do is I go out into the field go birding come back to my house I enter in all the birds that I saw in tui bird and I think that entering in all the species that you saw the e bird and just keeping track of all the species that you've seen can actually help you memorize species and help you with identification within itself there's other good reasons to enter stuff in an e bird like the good of citizen science for the world and there and then what I do is if I see species that are not super common are not species that I see every day or every other day and what I do is I look at the guidebook I not only look at my Sibley guide which I use the most for bird identification but I look at a few other guys as well because every guidebook has at least slightly different information and slightly different drawings of the birds and then what I'll also do is I'll just go on the internet and just Google some natural history about the birds and just by knowing more about the natural history of these birds number one I think it's more fun to just you know learn the science of what you see in the field but also for example if you know like why a bird would look a certain way or do a certain behavior in the field you know the science behind that then when you do see that behavior it can help you identify that bird my second-to-last tip is really get involved in the social aspect of the Internet there's a lot of email lists out there where you can communicate and connect with other birders but also on social media especially on Facebook there's so many Facebook groups it seems like there's a Facebook group for pretty much every region practically in the world that I can imagine where there's birders interacting with each other posting photos that they've taken and yeah if you've taken a photo of a bird or saw a bird have a description of it and if you are wondering if you could get some help identifying that bird you can post the information to social media it's really cool most of the birding community is really polite and just wants to help out other people and it's just really cool to connect with other birders not only locally but all over the world and my last tip is just to spend as much time in the field as possible I would say consistency is number one if you are really busy and can't get out into the field that much then just try to do like once a week even if it's just like you know after work before the Sun Goes Down just a quick walk down to your local park to identify the birds that is still better than not going out into the field at all and I will also say that time in the field is so much better than just trying to study birds like on these apps on your iPhone apps are really good and again I suggest that you use apps to study calls and to study birds for visual identification but nothing beats actually seeing a bird in the field and spending time observing them in the field with other people who are doing the same thing birding is like anything you know whether it's golf chess fitness the more time you put into it and the more consistent effort you put into it the better you will get the best expert birders in the world have been birding their entire lives so those are all my tips if you have any tips post in the comments below again on my channel I not only teach you Natural History but I also teach you ways that you can enjoy the natural world for example a Pandi reviews ecotourism travel guides and just general tips on how to enjoy nature so please subscribe and hit the bell for notifications because otherwise you won't see when I post a new video thank you very much and I hope you enjoy birding sometime soon

Channel: Adventure Ed

Views: 76,482

Keywords: bird watching, bird watching tips, birdwatching, birdwatching tips, birding, birding tips, binoculars, birdwatching binoculars, birdwatching tips and tricks, bird photography, bird watching photography, birdwatching photography, citizen science, ebird, cornell lab of ornithology, bird guide books, bird field guides, bird, birds, ornithology, ornithologist, wildlife, wildlife photography, adventure ed, birder, birdwatcher, birdwatching apps, nature, wild animals, ecology

Id: XJI4hGM6LQ4

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018