I’ve always paid attention to birds. I remember watching the Scrub Jays and hummingbirds in the back yard of the family house in Southern California growing up. I remember a road trip in the 1990s standing on the edge of the harbor in Arcata, California watching Brown Pelicans plunge dive for fish with awe. Tatiana, our umbrella cockatoo is in her mid-20s now and has lived with us since she was fledged as a chick — and over the years we’ve kept budgies, canaries, cockatiels and other birds. So birds have always been an aspect of my life for as long as I remember.

But me as a birder? It was May 16, 2006 was the day I stopped being a person who walked around with binoculars and started being a birder. As I write this, that was over 15 years ago. Since then, I’ve logged 304 species onto my life list (plus and remembered fondly, the no-longer-a-species Northwestern Crow). The difference between these two is purely a personal and semantical one.

I am in fact still someone who walks around with binoculars. To try to define a simple definition I’d say birding is about locating and identifying birds and in some way tracking those identifications, but “birding” is different for everyone. I know many birders who travel widely in search of bird species they’ve never seen before (“lifers”) and keep extensive lists of what they’ve seen, where and when. I am very much more on the casual side of things; I bird because I enjoy birding, and I rarely participate in the more competitive aspects of birding — things like big years or seeing who has the biggest lists.

When I am talking to people and get asked about my birding, I will usually describe myself as a “terminal intermediate” birder. I didn’t make up the term; I borrowed it from a fellow SCVAS volunteer, Peter Hart.

I bird primarily for the enjoyment of going out and exploring and the challenge of figuring out what I’m seeing and hearing. Unlike many birders, though, I’m not motivated to chase a specific species or try to see a rarely seen bird. The thrill of that chase and the size of my life list aren’t big motivators.

I also am pretty poor at birding by ear, which is one reason I love Cornell’s Merlin app, which does some of that for me now. Given my hearing loss, even if I was motivated to improve this, my abilities are somewhat limited.

So when I’m defining myself as “terminal intermediate”, I’m describing myself in a couple of ways. As an intermediate birder, I’m pretty good at many aspects of birding, but I’d describe myself as “top third” rather than higher up the birding org chart. And by describing myself as “terminal”, I’m noting that I’m pretty happy with where I am and what I’m doing, and I’m not really actively trying to make myself a better birder at this point. I will still study a new species if I’m trying to find it — I finally found my first Harlequin Ducks here in Kitsap the other day, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen them I went back into the guide to validate my ID. It’s just that I don’t see birding as a competitive activity and I don’t feel any strong need to keep pushing my skills forward. I’m happy and comfortable, and that should be good enough.

This has sometimes rubbed some of my fellow birders the wrong way, because there are always going to be people who want to gatekeepers to what a “real” something is, but I usually ignore those people and not let them bother me — except when I find them gatekeeping other, new birders.

Who is this book for?

I’ve written this book for the new birders, or those of you who have become interested in birding and birdwatching but aren’t really sure how to get started. My goal is to give you some hints and tips about things I’ve learned about (often the hard way), to help your progression be faster and smoother than mine was. If I can help you avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way, you’ll still find a lot of other mistakes to make as you grow into the kind of birder you want to me.

The basic summary of this book for new birders, though, is simple: birding should be the things about going out and watching birds that make you happy. The parts you don’t enjoy? Don’t do, and don’t let others tell you that you should. You will run into gatekeepers who want to try to define whether or not you’re a “real” birder in their mind, and you should avoid them as much as possible.

Birding is about going out and having fun exploring the birds around you. Everything else only matters if it enhances your enjoyment.

Who is a birder?

To borrow from Mythbuster’s Adam Savage take on makers, you’re a birder if you consider yourself one.

When I’ve taken newer birders out on group trips or big sits in the past, I often find them feeling uncomfortable and often intimidated, worrying more about “being wrong” — so I always tried to discuss with the groups the idea that birding is what you want it to be, and all this other stuff you tend to hear about — chases and twitches and lists and all that stuff — only matters if it’s part of what makes birding fun.

I think in general we as the birding community over-emphasizes the competitive aspects in how we present birding to outsiders. I think we really push big years more than we do the citizen science we do as part of our birding, for instance. I think we often present our “best birders” as the ones with the biggest lists or having gone to the most places, and I think to non-birders, that makes it seem like those activitities are the things that define what being a birder is.

And in all honesty, those big listers are in most cases our best birders, with the most experience, and the competitive aspects they bring to their birding gives them enjoyment and pushes their skills forward — which is awesome.

But it intimidates people possibly interested in birding as an activity, and so when I’ve worked with those newer birders, I’ve always looked for ways to help them past that intimidation and into exploring what aspects of birding makes them happy. One suggestion I always make is to simply not worry about lists, unless and until you find yourself curious about what you’re doing.

I keep a couple of basic lists: I keep an annual list of what I’ve seen this year. I keep a life list of what I’ve seen since I’ve started tracking what I see. I keep a county list, since right now I’m doing 90+% of my birding inside the county, just because of time and trying to manage how much driving I do to see birds. And I keep a list of my home property, since making it a good habitat is important to me.

That may seem like a lot of work, but eBird does almost all of the work for me. All I need to do is remember to note what birds I see when I go somewhere (and since I’m lazy, I almost never bother doing that unless I’m specifically birding a location, and even then, when it was poor birding, I might not bother).

Maybe in some ways I do love the chase, but for me, it’s not the rare species, but learning the area I live in and how best to work within it to do the things I enjoy doing — which is looking at birds, taking pictures of them, and understanding how they fit into the ecology and habitat around us.

If there’s something I miss since the move to Washington, it’s those group outings where I could sit and talk to the new birders and help them find their path forward. That said, I don’t remotely feel I know Kitsap well enough to consider leading anything; I still have a lot of my own learning to do. Which is, in a way, why I’m working on that Birding 101 book as a way to create something that new birders can use to learn how to start their path into being a birder, too.

But the core lesson is pretty simple: if you find you’re enjoying something, do more of it. If you find you aren’t: stop. Don’t let anyone else define what “should” make you happy of what you “should” do to be a “real” birder (or whatever: this is very analogous to how Adam Savage defines who is and isn’t a maker, and I think it’s an important idea to promote out to everyone).

And if and when you find a comfortable niche in whatever you’re doing, it’s okay to decide to just snuggle into that niche and enjoy things. Some people are driven to always be pushing themselves forward and into the new; many of us aren’t. And when you do find that comfort zone: enjoy it and don’t feel guilty. There’s no shame in defining yourself as a “terminal intermediate” — if that’s what makes you happy.

Why I Bird

I became a birder in a fairly typical but backwards way — I started walking outside for exercise, and started discovering interesting places to walk, took an interest in the birds around me and started wearing binoculars, and after a while, got curious enough to start trying to figure out what they were. This is, I’ve found, a fairly common path into birding for people, especially as they hit middle age and are looking to stay active but not quite as able to do it the way they did when they were 25.

When I realized I was getting more serious about birding, I took a trip specifically to go birding and think through whether or not this was an activity I wanted to commit to investing time in. I decided to drive down to Morro Bay because I wanted to travel out of the area and explore, bird and think over whether this was where I wanted to focus my energies. Morro Bay was an obvious choice: it’s a location that was becoming special to me and it’s an important birding ares with a number of different locations and habitats to explore.

One of those places is Sweet Springs Nature Preserve in Los Osos; a small preserved area with a freshwater spring, a couple of hiking paths and an observation platform, and I spent an afternoon out there exploring — and suddenly, a gorgeous male Western Tanager landed on a branch near me and sat their singing for a minute or so, then flew off. And that was that. I was hooked.

Sweet Springs has always been a special place for me for that moment; beyond that, it’s a quiet, contemplative place and it became one of the escapes I used when I was spending so much of my time commuting to LA to help out my parents as they headed into their later years; Morro Bay was about half way home and a good place to stop, and often my “weekend” was a round trip on highway 101 with a couple of hours unwinding in Sweet Springs and dinner along the waterfront before finishing the trip home back to Silicon Valley — so to a good degree, that was a place I hung my sanity on. And still do.

Over the last decade I’ve been able to explore many new things in my journey; I went on my first and only offshore pelagic (and added 6 lifers), attended my bird birding festival (again in Morro Bay) where I spent an afternoon discussing water consumption problems with central coast vineyards and Kit Fox Poop with senior Audubon officials as we explored Carrizo Plain National Monument. I’ve explored a large area of the Central Valley to visit refuges from Kern NWR in the south to the Sacramento NWR and Colusa NWR near Maxwell. My favorites are the Merced National Wildlife Refuge near Los Banos and a Nature Conservancy property, Staten Island, near Lodi, which is winter home to large flocks of Sandhill Cranes and Cackling geese.

We moved to Washington after a few decades in Silicon Valley, and bought a place on about 4 acres of woodland, in part because we felt it was good bird habitat and wanted to preserve and enhance that. In the 15 years at our place in Santa Clara, we saw 63 species, which for a suburban yard isn’t bad. Here in Kitsap County Washington, we’ve already logged 66 species, and in the 2022 nesting season, confirmed 13 of those to have successfully fledged young — including a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers and a pair of Western Tanagers; it felt especially rewarding to be able to return a safe nesting space to the species that more or less sparked me onto this journey as a birder.

Birding for me has opened doors into other things, though: a much wider and thoughtful interest in bird environments and how bird populations change across seasons and migration; I started going on trips with the local birding group (Silicon Valley Audubon ) and that introduced me to the Wildlife Refuges of the central valley and the geese, and Sandhill Cranes and other winter residents that call those areas home, and fell in love with those lands and the species they protect.And of course my bird photography, which in many ways started all of this; curiosity about what I was photographing led to wanting to know what species I was seeing, and as I started to study that, I started to learn about how each species live — and where, and when — which allowed me to figure out how to plan my photography instead of depend on pure luck; this path of study nudged me towards other areas of study, such as the politics of water in California (because it is so tightly tied up with the central valley refuges and the overall health of many important bird areas in the state such as the Delta) and the ecological impacts of many so-called green or clean alternative energy projects such as solar and wind electrical projects, many of which are very dangerous to birds.

Since my move to Washington, I’ve had to start learning a new region and how to bird it. We’ve put up feeders, and when I’m sitting here in my office, I can stare out the window and see what activity is going on outside. In looking at the last year here in the new place, I’m both a bit surprised that I’ve only added 2 new lifers to my list (Purple Martin and Barred Owl), but in reality, here on the West coast, there is a lot of same birds all along the coast, albeit not necessarily at the same time of year in each place. I think it’s going to take me another year or so before I really start feeling like I know where to look at the different times of year, but we’re getting there.

Reach out and chat!

I love to talk to new birders and listen to their ideas and questions and share in their enthusiasm for this activity. If you ever have a question about birding, I encourage you to reach out to me (email: chuqvr@gmail.com, twitter: @chuq), and I’ll help as best I can. I would love to have this book introduce me to some of the people and hear how this book has helped or where there are gaps I can fill in down the road, so please don’t hesitate.

An e-book by Chuq Von Rospach. Photos and text by Chuq Von Rospach.

Copyright © 2022 by Chuq Von Rospach, All rights reserved.

Hints and Tips for the New Birder