When you’re learning wildlife photography or brushing up on techniques, birds are an excellent and accessible subject.
Most wildlife photographers will photograph a lot of birds. Especially when we’re learning new skills and techniques. Photographing birds can help improve our photography skills, they teach us to be patient and to anticipate.
Red-winged Blackbird – Breeding Male
Finding Birds to Photograph
Birding opportunities exist in all sorts of environments. Whether you live in the city or the country, you’ll be able to find birds to photograph. If you can put up a bird feeder that is visible from your window, you can bring your subject to you. Local parks, especially ones that contain a pond or lake, are also a great place for bird photography.
Check with your local conservation agency, fish and game department or Audobon Society for birding talk or walks in your area. These are usually free and can provide you with some insight on common species in your area.
Dickcissel – Breeding Male
When photographing any wildlife, it’s extremely helpful to know your subject. You learn when and where to look for them. You learn what behaviors to expect at certain times of the day or year. Unless you’re lucky enough to partner with a wildlife biologist, birding enthusiast or other specialist, it can be overwhelming when you get started – especially with wild bird photography.
White-throated Sparrow
using the Merlin BirdID app
Merlin BirdID is my secret weapon for identifying and learning about birds. Merlin BirdID is a free app that returns a list of possible birds – including images, call recordings, descriptions, and commonality. In the field (if you have service), you can enter some simple information – size, color, date, and location. Merlin BirdID returns a list of possible matches, complete with images, descriptions, and call recordings.
If you can’t make a successful field ID, you’ve got another chance to figure it out. With Merlin BirdID, you can upload a photo and get a short list of birds.
What’s really cool about Merlin BirdID, is that it is using citizen science, relying on over 500 million observations from the e-Bird citizen science project. As you get more comfortable identifying birds, consider contributing to e-Bird by submitting your observations. e-Bird encourages all levels of birders to submit data. Data is reviewed by local experts before being posted to the e-bird site.
When I started using the Merlin BirdID app, I found that I started seeing birds differently. I started “seeing” more birds and I’m able to pick up more details while observing them. So even when I don’t have my camera, I’ll use the app to ID a bird. I love that learning birds with the help of this app, helps spark my interest to learn more birds.
11 Comments
I am not a birdwatcher at all, but I do like this app. Seems pretty efficient, and since I am always playing in the woods sounds like its worth a test run. Thanks for the info.
I’d love to hear how your test run goes. I’ve even learned to ID a few birds by song/call – which is something I never thought I’d be able to do!
I’ve never tried one of these apps, great to see they offer the upload photo option to try and eliminate the issue of a beginner not knowing if it was right or not.
It is a really nice feature! They also have great photos in their results – males, females, juveniles, color morphs etc.
This is really cool! I’m downloading this now.
I have a friend that’s REALLY into birding. Now I’ll be able to sound a little bit less ignorant.
Lol! It’s kind of addicting.
What a cool app. I am definitely going to check it out. I saw so many birds on my backpacking trip and didn’t know what the majority of them were so this is perfect. Thank you.
You can also view a list of common birds for your area. I’ll do this before a new trip so I have an idea of what to look for.
This is really cool. Im going to check out this app, I used to bring bird books when the kids were little but this is great. Thanks for the tip!
How cool! I usually have to drag a birder friend along with me on my hikes to help me identify birds. I think it is true that when you can identify birds, the more you will see them everywhere.
It probably doesn’t replace a birding friend, but I’ve been really impressed with how well the app works.