Christmas counters can sharpen their skills this week as local bird watchers hold three talks on how to identify backyard birds.
The Edmonton Nature Club has teamed up with the Wildbird General Store, Wild Birds Unlimited and the John Janzen Nature Centre to hold three talks this Tuesday, Thursday, and coming Saturday. The talks are meant to teach people how to recognize winter birds in preparation for the 2013 Christmas Bird Count.
The club has held similar talks before but those were aimed at experts, said Lu Carbyn, club member and co-owner of the Wildbird General Store.
“Now there’s more emphasis on beginners.”
These talks will also focus specifically on winter bird identification.
The event is meant to get more people to participate in the annual Christmas count, said Dave Cleary, co-owner of Wild Birds Unlimited. Information from these counts is used to track trends in wild bird populations, such as the recent invasion of house finches.
Veteran birders Gerald Romanchuk, Janice Hurlburt and Ann Carter will use slides and stuffed birds to share some common identification tips, Cleary said.
The first step in bird identification is to learn the basic bird families in your area, Carter said.
“Is it perhaps a woodpecker or more likely a finch?” she said.
Bird books and websites (such as allaboutbirds.org) are a good place to start.
Next, you want to compare the shape and size of the bird to a bird you recognize (is it more robin or sparrow-like?), Carter said, and note its colouration (stripes? Colour patches?). Its habits can also be important.
“Is it travelling alone or in a group? Does it poke along tree trunks?”
Binoculars really help, added Hurlburt.
“Without binoculars, the smaller birds can all look like ‘LBJs,”” she said, or “little brown jobs.”
With binoculars, you can distinguish them into house sparrows, dark-eyed juncos, finches and redpolls.
These talks are great for anyone who’s interested in backyard birds or anyone who wants to draw more of them to their backyard, said Alan Hingston, co-ordinator of the St. Albert Christmas Bird Count.
St. Albert will start gearing up for its count around the start of December, Hingston said.
“There are certainly a lot of juncos around this year,” he said, but it’s too soon to say if redpolls and other winter birds will show up or not.
Talk one runs from 7 to 8 p.m. this Nov. 26 at Edmonton’s Wild Birds Unlimited. The second is from 7 to 9 p.m. on Nov. 28 at the Wildbird General Store. The last talk is on Nov. 30 from 2 to 3 p.m. at the John Janzen Nature Centre.
All talks are $10, which goes to the Edmonton Nature Club. Call Cleary at 587-521-2473 or Carbyn at 780-439-7333 for details.
The St. Albert Christmas Bird Count is Dec. 28.
