Local birdwatching groups support community and green spaces

Jim Capel packs binoculars, a notebook and a laser pointer when he leads a group birdwatching expedition. 

Capel is a current member and former president of Chapel Hill Bird Club, and he leads and attends birding groups through parks across the Triangle, supporting novice and experienced "birders" alike. Some of these parks include Mason Farm Biological Reserve, the George and Julia Brumley Family Nature Preserve and Cane Creek Reservoir. 

In the dead of summer, Capel said it is best to stick with parks with open fields to find birds like indigo buntings and blue grosbeaks. In the fall and winter, forests are great for wood thrushes and certain types of warblers, like the black-throated blue warbler, a personal favorite of Capel’s. 

“There’s always a chance in a flock of geese that there will be something rare, if you look close," Capel said.

Bo Howes, the president of the Chapel Hill Bird Club and former president of the New Hope Bird Alliance, started birding in the 1970s with his grandfather. He said he didn’t start birding seriously until the early 2000s when he moved back to Chapel Hill. 

“There’s a concept people call your ‘spark bird,’ so, what is the bird that sparks your interest,” Howes said. “It tends to be something that’s a little bit different, that’s not really that common, but something that has something interesting about it.” 

Howes said his spark bird is the cedar waxwing, because their tail feathers look as though they are dipped in yellow paint. This bird specifically was a gateway into a passion he has nurtured over the years, he said. 

“Now the other thing that people — nearly everyone — has is a nemesis bird," Howes said. “That’s the bird that you’d like to see that you haven’t seen.” 

Howes said that his nemesis is the snowy owl, because they are rarely seen in North Carolina, but will sometimes visit the Outer Banks.

Not everyone gets into birdwatching early on. Dorothy Hodgson moved down to Chapel Hill last summer after retiring from a career as an anthropology professor and dean at Brandeis University. She decided to start birdwatching to visit the nearby parks and find a community in her new hometown. 

Hodgson is a member of the New Hope Bird Alliance, a local chapter of the Audubon Society that was recently renamed from the New Hope Audubon Society. Hodgson said she recommends new birders try attending an outing with other birders, which the Alliance hosts twice a week.

For those not quite ready to dive into group outings, there are also apps that can help them get into birding, Hodgson said. Merlin Bird ID enables users to listen to the birds around them, and the app shows real-time suggestions for the birds that are singing. Users can also use the app to identify birds in a photo. There is also a digital scrapbook feature for users to save their birds to their “life list” of birds they have identified.

Another app, EBird, is an online database that tracks bird observations logged by users. Scientists, researchers, students, amateur naturalists and birders alike can access the data to see the trends in bird population and migration patterns. Many birders will get alerts if a rare bird was spotted nearby.

EBird and Merlin are run by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology to facilitate citizen science projects. There is continuous tracking through the apps, but also trend data — or bird counts — released annually. The Audubon Society sponsors the Chapel Hill Christmas Bird Count, which takes place the Sunday before Christmas as part of a national program.

“If you extrapolate that over 20 years, and you normalize the lines, you can tell which birds are doing really well and which birds are not doing well,” Howes said.

The New Hope Bird Alliance offers a Bird Friendly Habitat certification for landowners and homeowners in the Triangle. To get the certification, Hodges said that people must meet certain requirements, like removing invasive plant species and supporting native plant growth, such as growing butterfly bushes. Not only will this attract more birds to these yards, but benefit the wildlife in general. 

Audubon North Carolina has identified 4.9 million acres of land as part of 96 Important Bird Areas. Many of these areas are public lands, land trusts or land owned by private citizens. These lands are crucial in bird migration through the state.

“And we actually got the first stage of the certification, which was a bird friendly habitat under construction,” she said. “And so, we have the sign quite proudly outside of our house, but there's still some more work to be done, but it is fun to think about that and to figure out what draws them.”

@dthlifestyle | lifestyle@dailytarheel.com