Birds are everywhere, right?

That’s totally true, except when you’re armed with your field guide, a pair of binoculars, a packed lunch, and a camera. Then they’re nowhere to be found.

Birds really like Murphy’s Law. Or maybe it’s similar to the old saying, a watched pot never boils? But nothing is more frustrating than wanting to find birds and having absolutely no luck.

Fortunately, help is on the way! There are tons of places to look for birds, so let’s start with some areas to consider.

Your Yard

I can almost guarantee there are birds in your yard…if you have one! Even if you live in an apartment complex, there are still likely birds in the parking lot, the landscaping, or simply out your window. (Here’s my own yard list if you’re interested!)

Now, they may not be the species of birds you were hoping to see, and you may have to look for them. The best two places are up (up, up!) in the branches of trees, and on the ground, especially in protected areas, like under cars or bushes. These two locations will usually have different types of birds, depending on the birds’ feeding preferences and other habits.

The Local Park

Birds are often attracted to green spaces, and parks are an easy place to look This is true whether your closest park is nothing more than a swing set, or if you live near Central Park in New York City!

So head to the nearest park and look in the same kinds of areas: up in trees and down at the ground. If your park has a pond or lake, check there too, particularly along the shoreline and within vegetation that grows near the water. Also watch the actual water itself; birds like cormorants and anhingas dive for fish to eat, and can be completely submerged while they hunt.

Cemeteries

Cemeteries are amazing places for birds! They are generally quiet and many have trees and bushes that birds like to use for cover and protection. One of my favorites is Evergreen Cemetery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, which even has a small creek beside the property.

When you visit, keep in mind that birding isn’t the primary activity here. People are burying loved ones or visiting their graves, so make sure you remain quiet and respectful. Try not to walk on grave markers, either. This good behavior also keeps you from scaring away the very birds you’re looking for, so it’s a win-win situation.

Schools and Churches

Schools often have play yards and other green spaces, making them a good spot, too. Just make sure to read or learn any rules and don’t trespass, regardless of whether you’re there when school is in session, or not.

The same is true of churches and other religious grounds., particularly if they have some green spaces around them, which many do.

Fast Food Joints and Restaurants with Patios

Some birds love to forage for the food we leave behind! In fact, there are several species that people commonly call “drive-thru birds”, because they like to hang around fast food restaurants. Herring gulls, great-tailed grackles, and house sparrows are commonly seen nearby.

Sit-down restaurants with patios are another good option. Birds love to watch for a fallen French fry, or they may head straight for an unsecured garbage can. My local Panera Bread has tons of birds! In most cases, these may not be birds you’re particularly interested in, but it’s a good consistent place if you just want to work on photography skills or practice your identification.

Farms / Agricultural Fields

Agricultural fields around farming areas are also great places for birds. In Florida, you might see meadowlarks sitting on fenceposts, or swallow-tailed kites swooping over fields with ripe watermelons, scooping up the insects that feed on the rotting fruit.

Think about it: What do farmers often put in fields? Scarecrows! And what are scarecrows supposed to do? Yep! Scare away crows!

Local Ponds and Lakes

Ponds and lakes support many kinds of birds, from shorebirds like herons, to diving birds like cormorants. And birds don’t just like large lakes, even small ponds attract them. I live on a retention pond (in Florida, that’s the term for usually-manmade ponds found beside roads, shopping centers, and in suburban neighborhoods). My pond isn’t very big at all, but I’ve seen more than 15 species there, including popular ones like white pelicans and roseate spoonbills.

The Beach

If you live close enough to the ocean, then a beach is a great place to find birds. Shorebirds are often plentiful on the sand, and gulls, pelicans, and perhaps osprey fly overhead. Also use your binoculars to look way out over the ocean and you may spot some pelagic species. (“Pelagic” refers to birds that spend most of their time out to sea.)

The “beach” can also refer to the sandy shores of lakes, too, and they also attract shorebirds.

Power Lines

You can often see birds perched on power lines and utility poles. Even raptors are down to them; here in central Florida it’s common to see red-shouldered hawks on power lines, and osprey perched on poles. Just be careful and don’t “bird while driving”…it can be dangerous!

Thanks to my friend Heather E. for this tip!

Nature Preserves

Thankfully there are lots of nature preserves, where mankind has set aside land not to be developed. These may include state and national parks, but there are plenty of others as well. Head over to Google and do a search for “nature preserve near me” and you’re very likely to get a list.

A nature preserve may be large or small, but it often exceeds community parks and has less recreation that might disturb the birds and other residents. You won’t generally find playgrounds and tennis courts there!

Nature preserves often have very specific rules, so do as much research as you can before you go. Many do not allow animals other than registered service animals. Parking may be limited. And there may be other rules you need to follow as well. So check out the place you want to go online first, as best you can. And make sure to take water with you if you’ll be going any distance from your vehicle.

Wildlife Management Areas

WMAs are similar to nature preserves, but they “manage” the wildlife by allowing hunting and other recreational activities that nature preserves often do not. Again, find out the rules for the area you want to visit. Make sure to take any seasonal advice or rules to heart, as well. For example, you may need to wear bright clothing or stay clear of certain areas during hunting seasons.

However, like nature preserves. wildlife management areas have usually large areas of undeveloped land, perfect for attracting birds.

I’m not sure whether all states have WMAs or not, but many do.

The Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail

This only applies to Florida, but lots of birders live here, or travel to destinations within our sunny state to look for birds. One of our best natural resources is the Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail.

The name is a slight misnomer as this isn’t a trail you can hike from one end to another. Instead, it’s a series of more than 530 sites that are known for offering great views of birds and other wildlife. Here in Brevard County, there are 38 sites alone.

If you go to their website, you can click Trip Planner in the menu to really map out your visits and make the most of your time birding in Florida.

If you’re so inclined, you might also want to participate in their Wings Over Florida program, where you can earn beautiful paper certificates based on how many species you have seen. They have a program for butterflies too, so make sure to look for smaller flying creatures while you’re out birding!

Thanks to my friend Bert A. for suggesting this section.

Use eBird

eBird is a website and smart phone app created by Cornell University. Birders use it to record sightings and keep lists, especially their life lists. If you go to their homepage, near the bottom, there’s a form labelled “Explore Regions”. Use that to search for areas near you, to the county level.

For example, if I search for Brevard County, Florida, I’m taken to this page. There I can see a table of recent bird sightings. The location column lists where each was seen. Some of them are clickable “hot spots”, which are known locations for birding – as opposed to someone’s house, or the side of the road where someone pulled over to write an incidental sighting. Click the hot spot name to learn more about the area.

The great part about eBird is you can see what species was seen there. The table lists all recent species, with its most recently-recorded location. You can skip over the ones that don’t interest you and keep scrolling until you see something that does.

Those are my thoughts on where to look for birds when you don’t know where to find them. Please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions in the comments below. I’m sure there are TONS more ideas than what I came up with here.

For beginning birders, the easiest way to identify a bird is by color. Northern Cardinals are red, American Goldfinches are yellow, Eastern Bluebirds are blue. (After all, that’s why they’re called bluebirds!) Identifying birds by color is common, easy, and useful.

In fact, perhaps I shouldn’t have put “beginning” in my introduction, because color reigns supreme as an identification tool for birders at any level.

However, you can’t assume that, just because a bird is blue, it’s a bluebird. And you can’t assume that just because a bird isn’t (mostly) blue, that it’s NOT a bluebird!

In this post, I want to talk about using color as a field identification mark, and when it works versus when it doesn’t. Because you absolutely should identify birds by color, you just shouldn’t rely on it 100%.

Color is Easy to See (For Most of Us)

The reason that color is so useful, is that it’s easy for most of us to see. Unless you have some form of colorblindness, or you’re birding in near-dark conditions, it’s generally a sure-fire identification field mark.

No one looks at a male cardinal and says it’s black. Nor do people look at blue jays and think they’re orange. (Well, some creative Photoshopper decided to fool about fifty percent of Pinterest users into thinking that there are rainbow blue jays, but that’s another story!)

Sure, there are other field marks, like shape, size, and markings. These are harder for various reasons, however:

• Shape takes some experience. I think many people know the difference between the shape of a songbird and an eagle. But it’s much harder to differentiate an eagle from a hawk. And within the songbird (aka passerine) group, how many people can distinguish a sparrow from a thrush, or a warbler from a bunting? Those are much harder and take time to learn.
• Size is too subjective. I mean, a bird is the size it is, but our perception of it depends on a lot of things, like distance, movement, and relations to known objects that may be close to the bird (or not so close)
• Field marks are hard to learn, and also sometimes hard to see without a scope or binoculars. Words like “eyerings” and “wingbars” can make a new birder’s head spin!

For that reason, color is one of the first ways we learn to identify birds.

When is a Blue Bird not a Bluebird?

There are lots of blue birds. In Florida, where I live, you have three blue bird species year round: the eastern bluebird, the blue jay, and the Florida scrub jay. If you add in wintering birds, you’ll have to include the indigo bunting, the blue grosbeak, and the purple martin in certain light. Outside of Florida, that list gets even bigger.

Expand your pool of candidates to include other birds that aren’t songbirds, and you will find even more blue birds. Examples are the great blue heron, little blue heron, tri-colored heron, gray-headed swamphen, and the purple gallinule, all of which are wading birds you’ll find near water.

Even the belted kingfisher is mostly blue, and it’s small enough to look a bit like a songbird! (It’s in the order Coraciiformes, however, and songbirds generally refers to anything in the order Passeriformes, aka passerines.)

Each and every one of those species is a blue bird.

But only one is a bluebird.

When is a Non-Blue Bird Actually a Bluebird?

It also might surprise you to know that eastern bluebirds aren’t always blue! Granted, they generally have some blue on them at any stage. But a juvenile bluebird is gray with white spots, with only a bit of blue on its wings. An immature or female bluebird (difficult to tell apart) is more orange and brown than blue. In fact, even the adult male looks more orange and brown if you look at it directly from the front!

Give Me More Examples!

OK, no problem! Here’s one example:

Often, in this part of the world, an almost-all red bird is a cardinal. Why? Because they are common, they’re relatively large, and they readily come to feeders so they’re easy to see.

Are all red birds cardinals? Certainly not!

Consider the summer tanager:

Or the scarlet tanager:

Or the vermillion flycatcher:

All of these are bright, mostly-red birds, but they aren’t Northern cardinals!

Another example is the bald eagle. Sure, it’s the symbol of America, and really big, but is a big bird with a white head always a bald eagle? Certainly not. Ospreys have a white head and similar habits of catching fish, and people mistake the two birds quite often. And a swallow-tailed kite has bluish-black wings with a white head, and is also a raptor (bird of prey), so it can be mistaken too. In my opinion, these are a little more of a stretch, but by no means uncommon.

So Can I Identify Birds by Color or Not?

Yes…but also, no.

Your best bet when identifying a bird is to use multiple field marks…the more, the better.

Some of these I mentioned above: shape, size, and markings that include feather patterns, eye-rings, and wing-bars. You should also consider the habitat, behavior, food sources, and anything else that may be different between two species that have the same color.

That said, because color is an easy way to help identify birds, you should definitely use it whenever you can. Just don’t rely on it 100% alone.

I find it fascinating how resources are reused by nature in many ways. One example of how nature reuses things is a basic hole in a pine tree. I have really enjoyed watching the transformation of this pine tree cavity I’m about to show you.

In February of 2018, a fellow photographer found a pileated woodpecker nest in a preserve that’s not far from my home. He was kind enough to show me exactly where it was. You may recognize these birds as the inspiration for the cartoon Woody Woodpecker. They are large and loud.

I visited off and on for a couple of months, then one day in April I finally saw the nestlings.

By this time they were close to being ready to leave the nest, and sure enough, they were gone soon after. Many species of birds don’t continue to use the nest once their babies can fly.

I kept visiting, though, because it’s an awesome spot to find all kinds of birds (bobwhite quail, scrub jays, and lots of woodpecker species). So imagine my surprise when I checked the next in mid-July and discovered that it had been commandeered by a bunch of honeybees! I’d guess there are at least 100 honeybees visible in the photo below, and who knows how many inside.

Then two months later, in late September, check out what it looks like now!

That’s a beautiful honeycomb! There are still lots of bees around, indicating an active nest. What an awesome way for nature to reuse this nest cavity!

I also did some research online and found that pileated woodpeckers don’t tend to reuse the same nest from year to year, so hopefully these parents won’t be upset next year when they find they’ve been evicted.

Also: I half expect I’ll show up in a few weeks and find a brown bear going after the honey. (That’s a joke. But it does seem like the next step!) What other examples have you found where nature reuses something in a similar manner?