I saw a huge bird, it was too big to be an eagle, what was it?”

“Should I stop feeding birds in winter?”

“How can I take part in the Great Backyard Bird Count?” 

These are some of the questions I get asked frequently, so I wanted to let folks know that, each winter, I host an online session, over Zoom, called “Birding Basics.” It runs every Tuesday night for 17 weeks and the presentations are recorded and shared to registrants, so even if you can’t watch live, you can still get the material. Week one begins with “how to identify a bird,” and we quickly move on to learning about binoculars, bird feeding, and finding birds, and even recently spent a whole program learning about identifying gulls. As we head into the second month, I wanted to share some of the more important lessons, answer some of the most common questions, and perhaps even entice you to join us.

The first lesson I’ll share is from our first course: “Identifying Birds.” We spend a lot of time talking about the importance of size and shape of a bird, but one thing often overlooked is the optical illusions that can throw off our interpretation of those physical traits. A very common phone call we get at Maine Audubon is someone seeing a bird, like a bald eagle, but this time it was “HUGE! Way too big to be a regular eagle.”

Unfortunately, there isn’t often a better explanation than your brain has tricked you into thinking the bird was bigger than you expected. A similar phenomenon can be seen with a full moon rising on the horizon, also known as the “moon illusion,” where it looks massive, but a couple hours later, once it has risen in the sky, it looks like a “normal” moon again. As you probably know, the moon didn’t change size at all. This is often explained, or at least enforced by, Emmert’s Law, which states: “the perceived linear size of an object is directly proportional to its perceived distance from the observer.” So that huge eagle you saw flying over the tree tops is almost always the same size as the eagle soaring in the sky. Of course we have been known to get huge eagles, like the Steller’s sea eagle, but we know that bird is happily hunting the bays of eastern Newfoundland right now.

The next most important lesson I’ll mention here is from our “Finding and Attracting Birds” session. Feeding birds is an easy hobby to get into, especially with bird feeders and seeds available in many hardware and grocery stores now (at varying degrees of quality). You don’t even need to know how to identify the birds to hang a feeder and enjoy their visitations. But you should know there are some responsibilities that come with feeding birds.

I’ve written about feeder maintenance here many times. Keeping feeders clean and preventing the spread of disease is critically important so that we are not actually harming birds by attracting them to our yards. Regularly cleaning bird feeders with a diluted bleach (or vinegar) solution, and changing out seeds if they spoil (often from getting wet, especially if feeders don’t have good drainage) is a must.

Also, if you are attracting birds to your yard, make sure your windows are properly treated so that birds don’t accidentally strike them—window strikes are the second-highest anthropogenic cause of mortality in birds (after outdoor cats).

The last lesson I’ll mention here is how to count birds. We’ve spent multiple sessions talking about using eBird and how to contribute sightings during the Great Backyard Bird Count (which started on Friday and runs through Monday this year, visit birdcount.org for info). People get caught up on counting and how to count, so I’ve got a few recommendations. First, as a “community scientist” no one is expecting you to be 100 percent accurate so don’t worry about it. Counting birds coming to a feeder can be tricky, especially if birds are coming and going quickly, but taking the highest single count or near to that will be good enough. 

Let’s say you are counting goldfinches at your feeder and five birds visit, then fly off. Then six visit, then fly off. Then two visit, then fly off. You can just go with a maximum count of six, unless you have some reason to believe they really were different birds. In large flocks, try to get estimates by counting off groups of five or 10 at a time. And honestly, at least get the order of magnitude right: was it 1, 10 or 100? If it was more like 10, then could it have been 20? But not 30? For nearly all of these community science projects, an estimate of 25 is perfect. Most people tend to underestimate their counts of large groups, in all settings, but as long as you are consistent with how you estimate, you can still identify trends.

Intrigued in learning more? We are not even halfway through our Birding Basics series, and we’ll send you recordings to all the past sessions when you sign up (at maineaudubon.org/events). And these are all free. Thanks to the support of our members, Maine Audubon is able to offer 17 weeks of free programming to teach you about the importance of birds and the joys of birding, so consider joining these sessions. And hopefully one question will lead to another!  

Have you got a nature or wildlife question of your own? It doesn’t have to be about birds! Email questions to [email protected] visitmaineaudubon.orgto learn more about birding, native plants, and programs and events focusing on Maine wildlife and habitat. Maine Audubon Staff Naturalist Doug Hitchcox and other naturalists lead free bird walks on Thursday mornings starting at 8 am, at Maine Audubon’s Gilsland Farm Audubon Sanctuary in Falmouth.