There are quite a few excellent birding areas within the city. We go out of town to visit half a dozen sites. One of them is the Ellis bird Farm.
When I started the only thing people brought with them were binoculars. I carried a bird book in my backpack. We had fun but didn't find a lot of birds.
Tony is checking on his bird app.
As time went on a few people showed up with some high end cameras. They also turned out to be excellent photographers. Now we usually got a few excellent photos of the bird that was hard to see and just a quickly flew away. So there we were with a photo. We could look at the bird as long as we wanted. We had evidence and took as much time as needed to make an identification.
Then people started showing up with an app on their phone which was better than a bird book. One could see several photos, watch the bird fly and listen to a call.
So in ten years bird watching changed a great deal. Bird watching is still fun, maybe more fun, as we get to identify more birds.
Now covid -19 has prevented us from going out as a group. Birders are bad for getting in a close group to look at pictures in order to identify what was seen. So what to do about bird watching. Well, one of our birders suggested that people go out on their own and report their sightings and photos to our facebook page. It was a roaring success. People went to different areas and reported many sightings. It's a good way to watch birds but since birders are such a social group we are just waiting to go back out as a group.
Notice Ariane in the middle looking at photos . Then there's someone behind ariane with a humungous lens.
This is one of my favorites. some wise guy said there's a bird. I wonder what it is. In about a minute Gary told us it's flight # and its going from Germany to LA.
