Virtual Birding: Bird the World from the Comfort of Home - Maine Audubon

Birds · November 4, 2024

This Thursday, November 7, from 6:30 to 8 pm, we restart our Virtual Birding program online (over Zoom). Virtual Birding is a guided birdwatching session where, in each session, we’ll watch segments from bird feeder cameras together, identify the birds that we see, and discuss their behavior, much like our regular in-person bird walks. Virtual Birding will take place every other Thursday from November through February.

The huge advantage of Virtual Birding is that we can watch bird feeders all over the world and learn about species we would never encounter in Maine. We can also pause and rewind, taking as much time as we need to watch and rewatch birds and their behaviors.

In a typical evening of Virtual Birding, we will usually view feeders in three or four different locations. For example, we often start at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology headquarters in Ithaca, New York, known as Sapsucker Woods. This feeder hosts pretty much the same species that we regularly see in Maine: Hairy Woodpeckers, Tufted Titmice, and American Goldfinches. From Ithaca, we might jump to another Cornell feeder camera in the boreal forest of Manitouwadge, Ontario. This location gives us a chance to observe typical boreal species, including the “winter finches”, like Evening and Pine Grosbeaks, Pine Siskins, and Redpolls.

From the boreal forest, we may hop across the pond to one of many European feeder cameras. One of the favorites is at the Makov Animal Rescue Center in central Czechia, where wild birds like Eurasian Tree Sparrows and Eurasian Blue Tits intermingle with injured and non-releasable birds that live at the center, like Mute Swans, White Storks, and Common Cranes, in addition to a number of deer and squirrels.

Another favorite, and frequent fourth feeder, is in the Central Highlands of Arizona. At this western location, we regularly see Acorn Woodpeckers, Lesser Goldfinches, and Yellow-rumped Warblers (from the western ‘Audubon’s’ subspecies), and sometimes even a few Collared Peccaries stop for some corn.

If this isn’t already clear, the really cool thing about this format is that it allows us to see different members of the same genus or family in quick succession, members that don’t normally coexist but fill the same niche in their home ecosystem. We may see Hairy Woodpeckers in New York, Great Spotted Woodpeckers in Czechia, and Acorn Woodpeckers in Arizona in the span of an hour, not to mention related species of finches, nuthatches, and jays.

Join us for Virtual Birding this Thursday and bird around the world from the comfort of home!