Animal Lovers
There is a red-tailed hawk who hunts from the top of a water tower three blocks from my building. I have watched him — and I am fairly certain it is a him, based on size — take off and return to that perch at least fifty times. I have never once grown tired of it. This is the essential promise of bird watching: you never really run out of things to see, and you can do all of it from a folding chair near a window.
People have a tendency to picture bird watchers as retired professors tramping through marshes in rubber boots, binoculars around their necks, life list in hand. This image is not entirely inaccurate, but it describes only one variety of the hobby. The other variety — which is equally valid and requires considerably less rubber footwear — involves sitting somewhere comfortable and paying attention.
Cities are, despite what you might expect, excellent places to watch birds. Pigeons get a bad reputation, but they are genuinely fascinating creatures with complex social behavior and remarkable navigational abilities. House sparrows are everywhere and worth studying closely. And then there are the surprises: the peregrine falcons that nest on skyscrapers in dozens of American cities, the herons who fish from urban drainage channels, the warblers and vireos who pour through during migration every spring and fall, resting in whatever green spaces they can find.
Almost nothing. This is the great secret of bird watching that the equipment industry has not exactly rushed to publicize. You need eyes. You need to direct those eyes toward a window, a park, a rooftop, or a tree. Congratulations — you are now bird watching.
A pair of binoculars helps eventually, but for urban bird watching, it is often less essential than in wilderness settings because city birds are accustomed to human presence and frequently allow close approach. A decent pair of 8x42 binoculars — the standard recommendation for beginning birders — will cost somewhere between sixty and two hundred dollars, and you will use them for decades.
A field guide to the birds of your region is the next useful investment. The Peterson Field Guides and Sibley's guides are both well-regarded. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds website is free and extraordinarily comprehensive, with photographs, range maps, and audio recordings of every bird call — which turns out to be more useful than photographs for identifying birds you can hear but not see.
If you have a window that faces any kind of vegetation — a tree, a rooftop planter, a neighboring garden — you already have a bird watching station. The birds will be closer than you expect. Put a chair near the window. Sit in it. Give it twenty minutes without looking at your phone. You will be surprised what comes to you.
Window feeders — small suction-cup platforms that hold seed or suet — can dramatically increase the number and variety of birds that visit. They are inexpensive, require no tools to install, and can be used even in apartments where window boxes are prohibited, since they sit inside the glass rather than outside. A window feeder filled with black oil sunflower seeds is the single fastest route to having birds at arm's length.
Even small urban parks can be remarkable during migration season, which runs roughly April through May in spring and August through October in fall. Migrating birds need to rest and refuel, and a small stand of trees in an urban park can attract dozens of species in a single morning. These concentrations — called "fall-outs" when they're particularly dramatic — are one of bird watching's genuine spectacles.
The Audubon Society maintains a searchable database of birding hotspots that includes urban parks, waterfront areas, and cemetery grounds (cemeteries, with their old trees and low foot traffic, are often excellent birding locations) near virtually every American city.
Rivers, lakes, harbors, reservoirs, sewage treatment ponds — water attracts birds with a reliability that nothing else quite matches. Waterfowl are often easier to identify than small songbirds because they are larger, slower, and less likely to disappear into a thicket before you've had a good look. Ducks, geese, herons, egrets, cormorants, and gulls will all use urban waterways, and in the right season, sandpipers and other shorebirds will work the muddy edges.
eBird, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is perhaps the best birding tool ever created. It is free, comprehensive, and community-powered: birders around the world submit their sightings, and the app aggregates this data into real-time maps showing what birds have been seen in any location, when. Before you visit a park, you can check eBird to see what species have been reported there in the past two weeks. During a walk, you can log your own sightings and contribute to a global database that scientists actually use for conservation research.
Merlin Bird ID, also free from Cornell, lets you identify birds by photograph or by answering three simple questions about size, color, and behavior. Between eBird and Merlin, a beginning birder has access to identification and location tools that would have seemed miraculous twenty years ago — and both fit in your pocket.
Many birders keep a "life list" — a record of every species they have ever seen and identified. This can be enormously satisfying, and the competitive version (people have seen over eight thousand species, which is more than half of all known bird species) is a legitimate if eccentric sport. But you are under no obligation to count anything. Some of the most contented bird watchers I have encountered have no interest in life lists whatsoever. They simply enjoy watching birds the way other people enjoy watching sunsets — without feeling any need to catalog them.