How did this started for all of you? (And my little story of how I got into this amazing hobby) (2 Viewers)

[JRP01]

Recently I've been reflecting a lot about the fact that most of my free time now is birding. It really wasn't like that some years ago. I'm one species short from 250 lifer's and yesterday I found myself asking how did I end up here. So I decided to write this post.



Around February 2019 I was in my last year of highscool and had the entry exams for university. I was going through a lot of stress, I quit my handball team because I needed more time to study. I needed time to cool off so I choose to start taking walks in my local oak forest. I started noticing birds, at first the Iberian green woodpecker really struck me, and I found some great spotted woodpecker that I really enjoyed watching. I also once saw a Eurasian hoopoe and I really loved. At the time I had no bird guide, binoculars or camera and didn’t know how to id any bird. I was also really intrigued by all the little birds that I couldn’t properly see. Then the exams season came in, I took my exams and I managed to get into biology in university and forgot about birding, I didn’t even know that that word existed.


In 2020 I started uni and we had a field trip to some wetland, I feel like if I was in a documentary, I always loved watching them but I never realize I could go out there and enjoy wildlife. Then covid came and it was not a nice experience, I lost a lot of weight and had a lot of stress and when the lockdown finally ended I did what worked last time. I went to my local forest and started walking, on my first day doing this I founded again a Eurasian hoopoe, managed to snap a photo of it with my phone and send it to one of my new friends in uni that liked birds. He id’d it for me and I asked my cousin to lend me a camera he didn’t use. It was a 2006 Panasonic DMC FZ-28. I started photographing birds in my walks and sending them to my friend for ids. For my next birthday I got some binoculars and a bird guide and started taking them everywhere I went with my family and birding on my own. I upgraded my camera to a Panasonic FZ-82 that I really like and took birding more and more seriously, but always on my own. On 2022 I took a trip from my university local birding club to Santoña marsh, and it was one of the best trips I had in my life, birding with other people was really amazing. I met some people there that later become great friends and fell and fell straight into the rabbit hole. Taking trips, chasing vagrants, reading and studying about birds, feeling euphoric after a good day with some lifers… .



Nowadays birding is my main hobby, I went from playing videogames all the time to almost never spending a weekend at home if I can and it has been amazing. Now I am curious to learn how others started this hobby. Almost all my friends started the same way, their parents where birders and they also liked it an picked it up. How did you all picked it up?
PD. English is not my first language sorry for any mistakes.

 

[hookem2010]

I was always interested in nature. I lost some of that passion I'm college and graduate school, but regained my life for the outdoors after settling into my adult life.
Initially, this manifested in weekend camping trips, or long hikes through the piney woods and along the coast of Texas. I loved seeing wildlife, but in Texas, we do not have the megafauna of the American west. However, I quickly realized that Texas has no shortage of bird life to enjoy.
I bought a field guide and binoculars, and started to actually pay close attention to the birds I saw on my hikes. Then things really took off when I signed up for eBird. I'm now 7 years into the hobby.

 

[Euan Buchan]

I have been Birding since 2002. My first encounter of birds & birdwatching came at an early age of 13 when I saw a programme called Birding With Bill Oddie in 1997. Bill Oddie’s expertise made me interested in birdwatching my Grandpa built me a nestbox and I hoped birds would use it and thought I will take it up if birds used it they didn’t and I didn’t take up the hobby unfortunately but it wasn’t until 2002 when I got into it properly after watching Bill Oddie Goes Wild and ive been doing it ever since. Last year I celebrated 20 years of Birding it will always be my greatest passion.

 

[JRP01]

I have been Birding since 2002. My first encounter of birds & birdwatching came at an early age of 13 when I saw a programme called Birding With Bill Oddie in 1997. Bill Oddie’s expertise made me interested in birdwatching my Grandpa built me a nestbox and I hoped birds would use it and thought I will take it up if birds used it they didn’t and I didn’t take up the hobby unfortunately but it wasn’t until 2002 when I got into it properly after watching Bill Oddie Goes Wild and ive been doing it ever since. Last year I celebrated 20 years of Birding it will always be my greatest passion.

Thats a lot of time. I wasnt aware of those tv shows, I will check them out.

 

[Atropos]

I started birding back in the mid 70s, my late Aunt took me to what became my local patch a place called Pett Levels on the East Sussex coast and that was it I never looked back. Over the years my interest has changed and although I am still a birder (having had an enjoyable career in wildlife conservation) nowadays I am far more of an entomologist specialising in the moths of Far North Queensland

 

[vergan]

I joined the local bird banding club around the age of 8. Few decades afterward I still go out birding every day for at least an hour.

 

[Farnboro John]

At eighteen I still didn't know what I wanted to do as an adult but had to start choosing university courses for post-A-Level study (family expectation/imperative rather than desire for academia). I ended up reading the UCCA course book cover to cover and settled on Zoology after thinking: "I used to watch animal programmes: could I stand three years of that? - Yes, probably."

So I ended up going to Manchester. In freshers week I visited various biology connected societies, thinking I'd better show willing, and the MU Bird Club made the best pitch: we like to get out of the city, we go on long weekend walks and sometimes weekends away, we do look at birds but we always end up at the pub.

Count me in....

I failed the course but the birding stuck, sticks, will stick. A lifetime (well, 42 years so far) of sheer delight. Thank you University of Manchester!

As a subset of this our tutors all warned us against getting mixed up with twitchers, advising us instead to find a local patch and study it relentlessly, do WeBS counts, get into ringing or other aspects of proper ornithology.... guess what!

John

 

[donut.]

Awesome post, I enjoyed that read.
Like you, I had no idea this was a hobby.
I'm an avid fly fisher and a horrible deer hunter.
I've never harvested a deer, so my wife calls it deer watching. I'm more of a deer critic.
I live in the rural mountains, so I've got nature all around me.
All the hours I spend knee deep in a river, or sitting in a tree stand I've noticed the birds around me. Wasn't till recently I decided I wanted to know more about what I was looking at or listening too. Bought a guide, I always have binoculars on me or near me, downloaded a few apps - started recording some sounds and matching it to the guides. I'm only at 13 on the life list. I've seen a ton more than that - but after reading a few of Shibley's books - I'm waiting to get that "for sure" identification before it counts.
My professional trade is far from nature, so it's nice to escape - I too feel the enjoyment of spending all day looking for certain species.
I regret I didn't start sooner, but I don't regret starting.

V/r -- Donut.

 

[vergan]

At eighteen I still didn't know what I wanted to do as an adult but had to start choosing university courses for post-A-Level study (family expectation/imperative rather than desire for academia). I ended up reading the UCCA course book cover to cover and settled on Zoology after thinking: "I used to watch animal programmes: could I stand three years of that? - Yes, probably."

So I ended up going to Manchester. In freshers week I visited various biology connected societies, thinking I'd better show willing, and the MU Bird Club made the best pitch: we like to get out of the city, we go on long weekend walks and sometimes weekends away, we do look at birds but we always end up at the pub.

Count me in....

I failed the course but the birding stuck, sticks, will stick. A lifetime (well, 42 years so far) of sheer delight. Thank you University of Manchester!

As a subset of this our tutors all warned us against getting mixed up with twitchers, advising us instead to find a local patch and study it relentlessly, do WeBS counts, get into ringing or other aspects of proper ornithology.... guess what!

John

Top of the world!
And that is why they failed in many aspects of creating large scale monitoring programs, something that eBird and other platforms are finally fixing (of course, with all the caveats, but are much better and worth)

 

[Mysticete]

I've always been interested in wildlife...some of my oldest memories involve browsing books on animals or going to the zoo.

I didn't really get started birding until I had came back from a study abroad on the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya. SO MANY BIRDS, but at that time I wasn't good enough to identify anything beyond the most obvious species. That made me become more interested in birding, and I also found that birding could be a good escape from stress. I had a bit of a mental health crisis in my early 20s and I don't know if I would have gotten through it without the hobby.

At this point, I've probably been birding for...25 years? I don't get out as much as I would like due to work, but I still try to regularly go.

 

[davercox]

I started in 1958, on our first family holiday to the Highlands of Scotland.
We had a little brown book called 'The Observer's Guide to Birds', and my Dad said 'Let's take the bird book, we might see something'.
How right he was. On our first day, he stopped the car for a while, and there on a nearby fence was a little bird with a broad stripe over its eye. I got out the book, flicked through it, and there it was - Whinchat. I was hooked, and never stopped.

 

[MohoNobilis]

As a child, I was quite interested in protecting plants and animals, and would always watch documentaries to know more about them. I might have to thank my primary school for introducing me to "birdwatching" - they made a billboard about the local birds that we could easily find around the school, and I would always go outside the classroom during break to see if I could spot any birds, and remembered the names of most of them.

When I first arrived in the UK, I was very lonely as I was isolated from my peers all the time. I could not return to my hometown in December (2021) due to frequent flight cancellations and had to stay at a friend's place. During a winter walk in the woodlands, my friend's mother noticed a "cute little bird" that had perched on a twig that was very close to us. It was a robin. Although it flew away after a few seconds, it made my entire Christmas brighter.

However, it was not until this year that I started to dedicate my life to birding - I only started this hobby in late January. Before that, I randomly thought that researching about recently extinct birds would be a good idea. Very soon, all those memories started to flood my mind when I imagined each extinct bird in their original habitats.

Since then, I've been hooked on learning more about birds. I wanted to protect what we still have in this world while remembering what we had lost in the past, and to regain my childhood passion that once was in me. I have to thank all those past events as well as all those extinct birds for making me the amateur birder that I am today.

 

[Patudo]

My mother, bless her heart, thought books on natural history might be worth me reading when I was a preschooler. And just like lots of kids of the same age are/were into dinosaurs (especially ones with big teeth and claws), I was likewise fascinated - except the T-rexes that really fired my imagination were the modern feathered flying kind. My parents had spent several years living in the UK, so most of the "bird books" I read were about British birds, not the species local to where I was living at the time. Hails and Jarvis's book on birds of Singapore, which I still remember getting not long after its publication in 1990, opened my eyes to many new birds. Some of these (oriental magpie robin, hill myna) were rare at the time, but can now be seen within walking distance of the house I grew up in. I was never a real birder though (still am not, really) and even the raptors, which most fascinated me, I only saw incidentally, never really making a real effort to seek them out.

Fast forward through a misspent youth to around 2006 or so, when, now living in London, a pair of peregrines took up residence on a university accommodation block not far from where I lived. Over the next 10 years or so I saw them at that location and later around the Barbican area where that first central London pair moved to - but my efforts were pretty pathetic really, barely scratching the surface. I'd see the youngsters when they began flying, but as they grew stronger on the wing and flew further I'd lose track of them - I had no mentor, and didn't really have a clue how to broaden my search. Then they went through a poor patch in terms of breeding success and more or less dropped off my radar screen.

There's a saying, attributed to various sages, that "when the student is ready the teacher will appear". I can't honestly say whether I was ready or not; what I do know is that I ordered two books written by one of the foremost watchers of peregrines, and my life changed from that point onwards. I'd had a copy of Ratcliffe's The Peregrine Falcon, and had read it many times, but though that venerable work does indeed have a lot of information between its covers, it's a somewhat academic reference book that doesn't speak much of how to go about watching its subject. Now at last I had some of the answers, and the accounts of spectacular flights and hunts fanned the dormant embers of my motivation into roaring life.

As I started spending more and more time watching peregrines I became more aware of the other birds that one notices during the many hours one must often wait for something to happen; and as I became more interested in identifying and understanding them, my narrow focus began to expand, albeit slowly and stumblingly. I don't twitch or tick, and only recently got interested enough to note down my London "list" - I measure my success and satisfaction in seeing peregrines and hobbies doing cool stuff, or at least in adding to my knowledge and experience of them: something which never stops no matter how unsuccessful you may be in actually seeing them. But I've enjoyed seeing some odd things flying by, especially down the old river - a goosander a couple of years back, a pair of avocets back in June I think it was, a couple of distant white-tailed eagles (and then there was day of the lammergeier...). I've enjoyed looking at new species on work trips abroad, and when I returned to Singapore I was delighted to see the place and its birds through new eyes.

So that's my own personal journey - one that I very much wish I'd started when I was your (OP's) age, but I suspect my younger self never would have had the patience or the desire. If you'd told me twenty years ago that I'd be hauling myself out of bed in time to get into position before sunrise in May or June I'd have said you were crazy; if you told me that I'd be doing my utmost to follow tiny black specks in my binoculars I'd have told you only a nutter would find that worthwhile. But there we are.