Re: [cobirds] Birders too close to a rare bird--Pella Crossing

Thank you, Ted, for this interesting shift in view on this point. 

I've been thinking lately on my field trips about the disturbance we birders cause to bird activity through our regular everyday birding. Birds flush, or move away, or otherwise interrupt their normal activities as we approach and watch, and point and call out our finds, as we pull up the car to look or get out of the car. At some locations there are multiple and varied sources of human and other disturbance over the course of a day. This is reality, and it is inevitable in the way we do things to find and enjoy birds. Why, I interrupt and flush my feeder birds everytime I go out the front door, but I don't think it harms them much or any. 

I think the key is not to deliberately, unnecessarily and repeatedly press birds so that they move or interrupt their actions. This is most problematic when "rare birds" or others that folks really want to see or "get" are sought after intensely by birders over a period of days. But except for our difficulty in seeing the bird ourselves after it has been disturbed, it is often hard to assess what the actual impact is under normal conditions.  I'm not saying there is no impact, but what exactly is it really? Much birder disturbance goes unappreciated by others in the birding community. Several years ago I helped put a good Ovenbird spot on the map with a hotspot in Deer Creek Canyon in JeffCo. I've since wondered about the birders who go up there to that same stretch of road each May and June and play recordings at the Ovenbirds to try to draw them into view. There are countless occasions like that.

David Suddjian

Ken Caryl Valley

Littleton, CO

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 6:22 PM Ted Floyd <tedfloyd73@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey, all.

Here's a somewhat different perspective on flushing birds:

https://www.aba.org/how-to-know-the-birds-no-53-the-situational-ethics-of-seeing-a-gadwall/

Ted Floyd
Lafayette, Boulder County

On Wed, Nov 2, 2022 at 2:51 PM Kathleen Sullivan <ksull@indra.com> wrote:

This morning at about 9:00 I was headed to Heron Pond to see the Yellow-crowned Night Heron and witnessed another incident of bad birder behavior.   Two birders in the parking lot were just ahead of me and headed to the North shore.  I was going at it from the south shore and I met an experienced birder who had just seen the bird (within the half hour) and gotten a photo and she volunteered to take me right where she had seen it.  Then from across the pond we saw the two birders I had originally seen at the parking lot crawling down the bank almost to the shoreline right where the bird had been seen.

 

We could not find it again with my scope and her good camera plus another man came up who had also seen it from that spot just before.  We stood there for half an hour and the two were there for quite awhile but the heron did not show obviously driven into the reeds.  Amazingly, some other people who did not appear to be birders but had a camera also crawled down the bank. 

 

Folks, we've got to get a handle on this.  Please do not approach birds, play tape, or do anything that will disturb them.  In addition if you see something, say something.  Thank you.  I assure you that if those birders were not on the other side of the pond, they would have gotten some feedback from me!   Sorry for this long post but it's important.

 

Kathleen "Sully" Sullivan, CFO member, former Board member Boulder Audubon Chapter.

Boulder, CO.

 

Sent from Mail for Windows

 

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