So I have been birding for almost two years now. I came into this hobby with a love of birds and nature but with very little intimate knowledge of the specifics of birds aside from your common East Coast US neighborhood birds and pelicans. After my first pair of binoculars, a foldable pocket guide to the birds of Washington DC, and a road trip to Galveston, Texas – I was hooked. While that first trip mostly revolved around searching for Brown Pelicans (hence the name of this blog) I could not have been happier.
The subsequent weeks and months relied on a heavy guess and check process learning the apps, borrowing guide books from the library, and taking notes about the general shape, size, and impression of the birds I saw around North East Washington DC. The biggest learning curve in those few months was how you are ‘supposed’ to ID a bird and how to document those sightings properly. Of course, I used Merlin but at that time eBird seemed a little too ‘scary’ as a way to document the birds I had seen. I do wish in retrospect that I started using eBird mobile right away to help keep all my notes and sightings in a central place. Since I was using the step-by-step ID on Merlin and confirming the “This is My Bird!” directly on the app, it caused the first four months of my birding data to be wildly inconsistent and led to a completely new checklist for each bird, which added up pretty fast over four months. While this is not a huge issue, it does look pretty ugly on the backend in eBird when I look back at my first few checklists. So my advice is to use eBird from the getgo and upload the data mobile-ly; you can always go back and update a list if there is an addition or a need to make a change.
To this day, I find it quite hard to explain exactly what I didn’t know or the exact ideas of what I didn’t know then. I hope that this blog is a way that I can share the ways I learned specific ID tips and tricks. For example, how the Greater Scaup has a rounded head and the Lesser Scaup has a peaked head and what exactly that would look like. I hope to be able to put into words when I finally can distinguish a Canada Goose from a Cackling Goose in real-time. There is a whole lot that I still need to learn and I find writing it down in an educational manner is not only helpful for me but hopefully for those just starting as well.
The biggest thing that has helped me in the past 22 months has been allowing myself access to birds as much as I could. Whether that means going out to a park daily, looking at a feeder in the yard, watching educational birding YouTube videos when it is raining, or skimming a guidebook, the consistent practice (and the very consistent failure to correctly ID sparrows and shorebirds) has helped dramatically. I know it will be a long road to even get close to calling myself proficient and confident but it will be a fun trip to get there.
