Birdwatching Is The *Best.* Here’s How To Get Started

Seeing certain kinds of birds, for me, provokes a rare emotion: awe. Out for a bike ride the other morning, I saw a Baltimore oriole singing by Lake Ontario. If you only know orioles as a cartoon baseball team logo, the actual birds are a gorgeous surprise: incandescently hued, with a “rich, whistling song” that made me jump off my bike and beckon excitedly to the runners on the trail behind me. I couldn’t believe it when they ran past without stopping—it was this tiny shiver of beauty, just...there, in a tree, for anyone to look at. For free!

The lockdown has meant I've had more time for my long-neglected, extremely unskilled love of birdwatching. My makeshift desk looks out on my tiny east-end Toronto backyard, where I’ve seen black-throated blue warblers, hermit thrushes, rose-breasted grosbeaks, ruby-crowned kinglets, and many other avian friends. (And, dear neighbours—I swear, the binoculars are for the birds.)

And I’m not the only one: anecdotally, there’s been a surge of interest in birdwatching. I’m not surprised, and I can’t recommend birding enough—it’s a great way to get outside and close to nature, and the closest my racing brain gets to mindfulness.

Plus, spring is an excellent time to start birdwatching. According to Emily Rondel, the president of the Toronto Ornithological Club, spring migration is "prime time" for birds in Canada—when you can see the highest diversity of species. Birds are decked out in their breeding plumages, looking their best—and singing their brains out.

So, if you’d like to take up birdwatching, or get better at it, Rondel gave me some tips.

Where—and how—should you look for birds?

“People often think they need to go to pristine places to see birds, or, say, go to Point Pelee, which is kind of the mecca of birding in Ontario. But they can see almost as many birds just by staying close to home. For example, your backyard would have a surprising diversity of bird species. And even if you don't have a yard or you live in an urban centre, just taking a walk around your block can yield a lot more sightings than people think. Start by looking for movement, in places like the canopies of trees. I think a lot of people don't realize how small [some] birds are, so calibrating your brain and your eyes to look up high and for small movements. Birding by ear, [or] is also a great place to start.”

What’s the easiest way to identify birds?

“If you don't know what you're looking at and need guidance, the first place that I would recommend is Merlin, a free app that's put out by the The Cornell Lab of Ornithology—obviously, Merlin is a wizard, but it’s also a type of bird. Merlin guides people through a really simple series of five questions—where and when you saw the bird, its size and colour, and what it was doing when you saw it. (Was it in a tree? At a feeder?). It then generates a list of what you likely saw. Merlin is based on citizen science data, too. So they have millions of birdwatchers' records for a given area at that date, and use it to put a list of the usual suspects together. It’s really, shockingly accurate.”