Birdwatching 101

Lesson 1

How to start: eyes, ears, and a notebook

Blanchan begins with a gentle reproach that still lands today. Many people, she says, do not have so much as a bowing acquaintance with the birds that nest in their gardens, haunt their woodpiles, clear their fruit trees of slugs, and wake them with songs. Birdwatching fixes that, and it asks for almost nothing: your eyes, your ears, a pencil, and a notebook. Binoculars help and a field guide helps more, but neither comes first. Attention comes first, and attention can be practiced on the walk to the mailbox.

Keep the notebook like a diary of meetings. For each outing write the date, the place, and the weather, then for each bird three quick lines: what it looked like, what it was doing, and what it sounded like. Blanchan and Burroughs worked exactly this way, describing live birds afield rather than specimens on a tray, and their books are full of behavior because they watched behavior: where the bird fed, how it flew, whether it traveled alone or in a flock. A note that says small brown bird, hopping under the hedge, sharp chip call, will identify the bird at your kitchen table later. A note that just says brown bird will not.

Go out early, when birds sing and feed most actively, and go slowly. The great secret of the nature study writers is that sitting still beats walking far. Find a seat at the edge of a garden or meadow, stay quiet for ten minutes, and the neighborhood resumes its life around you. Birds that fled at your footsteps return, call, quarrel, and feed, and your list for the morning grows longer from a bench than from a mile of hurrying. One honest modern note: watch and record, but leave nests, eggs, and young birds strictly alone, and enjoy them from a respectful distance.

Lesson 2

Size, shape, and color

When a strange bird appears, Blanchan teaches you to ask three questions in a set order: how big, what shape, what color. Size comes first because it narrows the field at once, and she gives you living measuring sticks instead of inches alone. Her books group birds as smaller than a sparrow, about sparrow size, larger than a sparrow and smaller than a robin, about the length of a robin, and longer than a robin. Learn those five benchmarks cold. A bird clearly smaller than a sparrow cannot be a small robin, and half of all beginner mistakes die right there.

Shape comes next, and shape is honest when color is not. The bill alone tells a life story: finches and sparrows carry short, stout, conical bills for cracking seeds, thrushes carry longer, slender bills for worms and soft food, and flycatchers carry flatter bills for snapping insects from the air. Look at the tail, long or short, notched or square; at how the bird holds itself, upright or crouching; and at how it flies, for flight is a signature. Blanchan notes the waving, dipping flight of the goldfinch above the garden and the white band across the tip of the kingbird tail that names him the instant sharp eyes catch it.

Color comes last in the method, even though it is what beginners trust first, because color shifts with light, season, and sex. Blanchan warns that plumage changes through the year and that females are often far duller than males; the scarlet male bobolink of May wears the buff dress of his mate by autumn. So use color as she used it, as a sorting shelf once size and shape agree: a mostly blue bird of robin size in the orchard is one short list, a mostly black bird in the marsh is another. Write down the pattern, not just the hue: a black crescent on a yellow breast, white outer tail feathers flashing in flight, a black cap above white cheeks. Patterns survive bad light. Hues often do not.

Lesson 3

Backyard birds

Start where the birds already trust you: your own yard. The American robin is likely the first bird you ever named, and Blanchan calls him, quoting Burroughs, the most native and democratic of our birds. He is about ten inches long, dull brownish olive gray above with a black head, and his whole breast is bright rusty red, the brick red vest of the childrens book. Watch him run across the lawn, stop, tilt his head, and pull: he is hunting worms by sight and sound. His nest is a grassy cup walled with mud, often in an apple tree or under a porch roof, and the eggs inside are a famous turquoise blue.

The bluebird is the robins smaller cousin, about seven inches long, and a piece of the sky come down to the orchard. The male is bright blue above on his back, wings, and tail, with a cinnamon red throat and breast and a white belly; the female wears the same pattern washed in gray. Blanchan says there is no sign of spring quite so welcome as the first glint of bluebird and his softly whistled song. Bluebirds nest in holes: an old woodpecker cavity, a hollow fence rail, or a simple wooden box on a post, where a pair may raise two or even three broods in a season if sparrows are kept from stealing the house.

The third backyard friend stays all winter. The black capped chickadee is only five to five and a half inches long, with a black crown and throat, a broad white space wrapping his cheeks, soft gray upper parts, and a whitish belly washed faintly rusty at the sides. He is, in Blanchan words, no fair weather friend: through snow and storm he swings around the cones of the evergreens by the house, cheering the whole yard, and repaying winter feeding handsomely by destroying cankerworm eggs and moths in enormous numbers. Add a suet feeder and you will likely meet him at close range, upside down, fearless, and scolding you gently for being slow with breakfast.

Lesson 4

Birds of field and meadow

Walk out past the garden into open grass and the cast changes. The eastern meadowlark is a big, ground loving bird, ten to eleven inches long, a little larger than a robin, built for walking with long, strong legs. From behind he disappears into the meadow: brown upper parts varied with chestnut and black, streaked like dry grass. Then he turns, and the disguise fails gloriously, for his throat and underparts are clear yellow with a large, conspicuous black crescent across the breast. Flush a flock at the roadside and watch for the white outer tail feathers flashing as they rise with a whirring, quail like flight toward the treetops.

The bobolink owns the same meadows in May and June, and you will hear him before you see him. He is a small bird, about seven inches, and the spring male wears a costume no other meadow bird attempts: black, with a light yellow patch on the back of the neck and white splashed across the rump and wings. Shy and hidden in the grass, he sings on the wing, flying level thirty or forty feet above the meadow in a bubbling, rollicking outpouring that poets kept trying to spell. By late summer the show ends: after two complete molts he wears the dull yellow brown dress of his mate, and the whole family gathers for the long flight south, for bobolinks winter as far away as South America.

Where the meadow runs wet, into marshy pasture and bog grass, look for the red-winged blackbird, the bobolinks cousin and the meadows other herald. The male is coal black from bill to tail except for his shoulders, which are scarlet edged with yellow, a badge that flashes when he spreads his wings to sing. The female is a different puzzle entirely: finely speckled brown and rusty, more like a big sparrow, until you know the marsh address and the company she keeps. Their nest is woven low in bog grass or in a bush at the ponds edge, holding three to five pale blue eggs curiously scrawled with black and purple. Together, meadowlark, bobolink, and redwing divide the open country between them: grass, high meadow, and marsh, and learning their three addresses will sort most field birds you meet.

Lesson 5

Woodland and water birds

In the woods, the prize singer hides. The wood thrush is about two inches shorter than his cousin the robin, rich cinnamon brown above, brightest on the head and shoulders, with a white throat and breast heavily marked with heart shaped spots of dark brown and a clear white eye ring. You will usually meet him as a voice first, in shady woods and wooded parks near homes, which is fitting, because his song is the woodland standard by which other songs are judged. Blanchan calls him one of the finest songsters in America and tells you to wait until evening, when he sings at his best.

The woods floor holds a second teacher. The ovenbird, a small ground warbler of dry woodland, builds a covered nest among the leaves and is heard far more than seen, calling in pairs of notes that grow louder and louder, a crescendo that seems to move toward you as it swells. Learn to look low in the woods: thrushes, ovenbirds, and towhees work the leaf litter, while warblers and vireos work the canopy overhead. As in the meadow, every woodland bird keeps its storey of the building, and noting the storey is half the identification.

At the pond and creek, the cast grows legs and bills. The little green heron, smallest and most abundant of his tribe, wades the edge with slow, calculated steps hunting supper, so dark and still by day among the sedges that he can be mistaken for a stump, until he startles into the air with a loud squawk, trailing greenish yellow legs. His big blue cousin, the great blue heron, fishes the same shallows with even greater patience. The belted kingfisher watches from a perch over the water, slate blue and crested, and announces himself with a rattling call like a policemans rattle. And if your pond has woods beside it, watch for the wood duck, which Blanchan calls the most beautiful member of its family, choicely colored like a mandarin duck, and unlike all its relatives a nester in hollow trees, whose ducklings must be carried or guided down to the water.

Lesson 6

Learning birds by song

Half of birdwatching is listening, and Blanchan generation had a charming tool for it: they wrote songs down as words. The chickadee names himself outright, calling chickadee dee dee dee, and also a cheerful day day day in winter woods. The ovenbird, as Burroughs heard him, calls Teacher, Teacher, TEACHER, TEACHER, TEACHER, each pair of notes louder than the last, until the bird you thought was far away seems to be shouting in your ear. Word pictures feel silly for one afternoon and then prove unforgettable for a lifetime, which is exactly why the nature study writers filled their pages with them.

Some songs reward spelling more than others. The wood thrush introduces himself, Blanchan writes, with three clear, bell like notes that seem to say, Here am I, and his evening song rolls out in rich, harp like phrases she spells as Nolee a e o lee. The bluebird asserts spring with a softly whistled tru al ly, tru al ly. The red-winged blackbird song is liquid, matching his wet home, heard as h wa ker ee or con quer ee on a rising scale. The bobolink defeats spelling altogether and is proud of it: one listener hears Spink, spank, spink, and the poets answer with Bobolincon, listen to me Bobolincon. Even the killdeer of the shore meadows simply shouts his own name, killdee, killdee, whenever he is alarmed.

Build your ear the way you built your eye: a few voices at a time, tied to place and season. Start with the birds of your yard, robin, chickadee, and song sparrow if you have one, and do not move on until you can name them from indoors with the window open. Then add one new voice a week, writing its word picture in your notebook beside the date you first truly heard it. Modern recordings and phone apps can check your guesses, and used that way they are fine tutors. But the final exam is always the same one Blanchan set: stand in a June wood, eyes closed, and name the singers one by one as they enter, the way you would name friends talking in the next room.

Lesson 7

Migration and the seasons

Bird Neighbors devotes a whole chapter to the seasons of birds, because a bird list is really a calendar. Around New York, at roughly the latitude Blanchan used, she sorts the year into permanent residents, winter residents and visitors, and summer residents, with dates for each arrival and departure. Your own latitude will shift her dates, as she herself warns, but the pattern holds everywhere: the cast of your neighborhood changes with the months, and the watcher who learns the schedule is never surprised by an empty February woods or a crowded May one.

Meet the year in order. The chickadee, the downy woodpecker, the crow, and often the robin and bluebird stay through winter, joined by visitors from the far north such as the junco, the tree sparrow, and the white throated sparrow. In March the procession turns: bluebirds and robins arrive in force, red-winged blackbirds return to the marshes, and phoebes take up their posts under bridges and barn eaves. April and May bring the great wave, warblers, thrushes, orioles, and the bobolink in early May, until the woods hold more singers than any beginner can name, which is the correct and happy problem to have.

Then the tide goes out as quietly as it came. Bobolinks fade from song after midsummer, gather, and leave from August to October for the far south. Swallows stage on wires in late summer. The wood thrush sings his last evenings and slips away, and by November the bluebird boxes stand empty, the marshes hold only the hardiest redwings, and the winter crew retakes the yard. Knowing this rhythm turns identification into expectation: a spotted thrush in January is a puzzle to solve twice over, because the calendar itself is a field mark, and Blanchan season lists teach you to use it as one.

Lesson 8

Keep a year-long bird list

Finish the course by starting the real one: a list that runs a full year. Give your notebook, or a simple document you will actually keep, one page per month, and set a few kind rules. Count only birds you identified with confidence, by sight, by song, or by both, and never count a guess to make the page look better. Blanchan whole method stands behind that rule: her descriptions came from watching live birds carefully, and a list built on honest sightings will still be teaching you in ten years, while a padded one teaches nothing by March.

Record more than names. For each species, note the date and place of your first sighting of the year, the best field mark you actually saw, and one line of behavior: the robin pulling a worm after rain, the chickadee hanging upside down at the suet, the heron frozen mid step at the pond. Note arrivals and departures too, the first bluebird of March, the last bobolink heard in July. These first and last dates are the gold of a bird list. Kept faithfully, they let you compare springs across years and notice, with your own evidence, whether the procession is early, late, or changing.

Close the year the way the nature study writers would want: by going out more, not by tallying more. Set small, joyful goals: ten species in your yard, twenty on your regular walk, one new bird a month, one dawn chorus in May when you simply sit and name the singers as they join. Share the list with a friend or a grandchild if you can, because Blanchan wrote for children on purpose, and birdwatching passes hand to hand better than almost any other hobby. Then turn the page to January, write the date, and begin again. The treasure flies, the hunt renews itself every morning, and the list, like the friendship it records, only gets richer with keeping.

Sources

The Books Behind This Course

This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every description, field mark, and song in the lessons traces back to one of these books.

• Bird Neighbors, Neltje Blanchan (1897), with an introduction by John Burroughs, Project Gutenberg
• Birds Every Child Should Know, Neltje Blanchan (1907), Project Gutenberg

Graduation

The treasure is still flying

You began with a bowing acquaintance and you finish with neighbors: the robins red vest on the lawn, the bluebird at the box, the chickadee scolding winter, the meadowlark crescent flashing over grass, and the wood thrush ringing his evening bells in the woods. Keep the notebook going, keep the list honest, and keep going outside. Congratulations, and happy watching.

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