How tweet it is! Bird-watching soars as folks look to fill long days
When Jenna Curtis was home sick in eighth grade, she saw a squad of small gray sparrows flash through her yard.
With the flap of a darkeyed junco’s wings, her illness offered her a new fascination: bird-watching. “That’s how the hobby begins,” Curtis, 31, said.
Her family added one bird feeder, then countless more, and soon Curtis’ passion grew into a career. Today, she’s project co-leader for EBird, an open bird-sighting database run by Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology.
Over the last two months, during the coronavirus outbreak, the arc of Curtis’ childhood discovery has played out on a grand scale from coast to coast. Schools are padlocked. Offices are dark. Birds are gliding northward.
Cloistered, antsy and lonely, Americans have rediscovered a timeless, if faded, pastime — peering into trees to track winged creatures.
The peak of the pandemic has coincided with the height of the spring migration season.
EBird has recorded a million individual bird observations per day throughout May, an unprecedented total, Curtis said. Download rates for Cornell’s Merlin bird ID app have doubled from previous years.
The National Audubon Society has seen a similar surge, with the conservation group’s bird guide app snaring almost twice as many downloads this March compared with March last year. The number of active users is growing by about a third in a year, the society said.
Across the country, birdwatching groups have enjoyed the influx in interest. Karla Noboa of Feminist Bird Club’s Boston chapter said the Beantown branch experienced a spike in newsletter subscriptions, and the national club’s Instagram follower count rose by about 500 in the first two months of the lockdown.
The Great Wisconsin Birdathon, an annual competiMarkandaiah, tion in support of the state’s Natural Resources Foundation, has extended its finishing date from June to October and encouraged birders in the Badger State go about their quests solo in light of social distancing guidelines.
“We’ve already flown past the number of registered participants from the last few years,” Sarah Cameron, the birdathon’s coordinator, said. “The really neat thing to see is an uptick in new birders.”
With her work grounding her at home, Nisarga a 31-year-old software engineer who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has found herself with more time to take in the avian wonders of Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park.
“What started out as like one or two hours in March,” quickly turned into “an average of six to eight hours” birding each week, Markandaiah said.
She snaps images of colorful tanagers, herons and warblers and shares them on social media. She hopes to spot a peregrine falcon.
At the parks, she nods to other birders carrying binoculars. It gives her a taste of social contact often hard to capture during the long days stuck inside. “I don’t really see anyone on a day-to-day basis,” she said. “Human connection is really important during this.”
Olivia Button, who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has taken a similar path to the hobby. The 27-year-old said many of her most sensational sightings have emerged at Lincoln Terrace Park, a small, leafy oasis abutting Brownsville.
She brings her boyfriend on her expeditions, and the two share binoculars as they scout the skies. The new hobby, she said, has opened the door to a whole new social group.
“There’s this instant community you have if you see binoculars hanging on someone’s neck,” Button said. “Even though we can’t stand near each other, we’ll say, ‘Oh, there are orioles in that tree’ — and then move on.”