Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Gardening and birds

As our lawns have been transformed to habitats, one of the aspects I've most enjoyed is observing the birds that have 'moved in.'

There wasn't much diversity in our landscape when we started (flocks of robins in the spring?), but with the created and developing natural gardens that now surround us, we have most all of the regular 'backyard birds' as well as others dropping by.

I've had fun recently looking at BirdsEye (an app for locating birds in real time) and signing up for eBird, which is a Cornell/Audubon cooperative site supporting by a number of organizations, which, I think, is related to the BirdsEye data in some way.

I'm not really interested in creating a life list, or keeping detailed track of the birds that I see, simply for numbers, as my focus and interest is on their ecology and behavior in my garden and in places that I'm visiting.  So it's fun to see what's been reported nearby.  Check it out!