How I Became A Bird Spy
Don’t read too much into this, but I have become an obsessive bird spy. I blame LaWONian Ben Goldfarb. He wrote a post about his birdcam (and the board game Wingspan, which I still intend to try), and it made me think that a birdcam would be a great Mother’s Day gift. I consulted with Ben and selected one for Mom.
Mom liked the gift well enough (she would never tell me otherwise), but it has attracted mostly rodents and she can’t keep it up all of the year due least she attract the bears in her neighborhood among the foothills of Sandia Peak. Still, it got me so excited about the device that Mom gifted me one in return.
I’ve always loved birds, but now I can watch them close up. It’s like hanging out on the branch with them. For the first months after I installed the camera (it’s a bird feeder with a camera that connects to the internet so I can watch the live feed on my phone), I had only juncos and scrub jays. Both are lovely birds, but they’re very common and they hang around our front porch and other places where I frequently get a good look at them, so it didn’t feel that special.
At the same time, I found myself watching these familiar birds and getting to know them better in the process — the cute sounds they make, the way they interact with their friends and other birds. Before long, I had fallen in love with their endearing little gestures, the way they hold the various seeds in their beaks and hop around on the feeder.
I loved my juncos and scrub jays, but I was a little baffled at why they seemed to be the only birds coming to the feeder. I have always loved mountain bluebirds, and when they arrived this spring I saw them everywhere but the birdcam. I also noticed that the Stellar’s Jays also didn’t frequent the birdcam feeder.
I started to think that I was running a restaurant that only admitted scrub jays and juncos, and then the black-headed grosbeaks arrived. They are colorful and cute and look sort of funny stuffing their beaks with food.
Other pretty birds are coming too. My favorite is the pair of Lazuli Buntings that have been frequenting the birdcam. The male is a gorgeous blue, while the female is more like a middle-aged woman, beautiful if you truly look at her, but invisible if you’re not paying attention.
I guess the moral of this story is that the closer attention you pay to your surroundings, the more delights you might discover.
Like Helen, I consider the The Merlin Bird ID app the best feature on my phone, and I’ve been learning to better identify birds by their songs. Spying on my neighborhood birds on the birdcam is not just about looking at them, but also learning the noises they make and their patterns of behavior. They’ve taught me to slow down a little bit and do more observing. It’s really just a way of practicing paying attention.