Conservation Guardians of Northwest Illinois

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Backyard Birding
Winter 2005 Newsletter

Two incidents this week reminded me of how important backyard bird feeding is for beginning birders. Two weeks ago I invited two friends out from Chicago. One had never been birding and had never even seen the number of birds that regularly come to the typical backyard feeder. He loved it.

He wanted me to identify the nuthatches, chickadees, and goldfinches. He knew jays and cardinals, but that was it. He was astonished to learn that there was more than one variety of woodpecker and that the red-bellied wasn’t the redhead and that even the little ‘downy’ was a woodpecker. He seemed excited about birds. He spent a long time at the window.

The next day, we joined the Thursday Guardian birders at Spring Lake. It was cold and wet, with a raw wind. Visibility was terrible. The regulars were excited. Through the fog, they were pretty sure, almost positive, that they could distinguish between the pelicans and swans across the River on the Iowa shore.

They spotted the one hooded merganser in a mess of mallards. They could follow a grebe’s path as he dove, surfaced and dove again. My friend was cold; he couldn’t see anything. To him an eagle was an eagle; he didn’t know mature from immature. He liked the Guardians, but he had a miserable time.

Last week, we asked one of the new birders at the Thursday outing why her husband didn’t come along. The woman, with the instincts of a good teacher, said: “He isn’t ready yet. He is still learning the birds at the feeder.”

He had just built his first feeder and was keeping a list — nuthatch, chickadee, goldfinch etc. She said, “When he’s more comfortable identifying birds in the backyard, then he’ll be ready for the River and the Palisades.”

That’s when it dawned on me. My friend had needed more time at the window in a warm comfortable chair. When he was hooked, when he could tell the difference between a nuthatch and a titmouse, then he would put up with the hostile elements and strain to find the markings; to ID a goose and a coot, a gadwall and a mallard. I had rushed the learning process.

—by Chuck Wemstrom, Winter 2005