Essential Bird Watching Gear

Series Summary

Observing birds and studying their behavior is what birding and bird watching is all about. The best way to get started in birding is to begin in your own backyard. Backyard birding is an excellent way to learn about various types of bird species and their behavior. Planting particular plants and setting up bird boxes, and complexes to attract bird species are a couple of the many ways you can attract birds to your backyard to observe and study. If you would like to learn more about bird watching and how you can get involved in birding, learn from our birding expert from the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

In this free online video series, learn about birding and bird watching from Wayne R. Petersen, Director of the Massachusetts Important Bird Areas Program at the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Learn from Wayne as he teaches general bird watching tips for backyard birding and bird conservation, and teaches about various types of bird feeders and bird nesting boxes, how to identify certain birds, how to landscape to attract birds.

Video Transcript

"Hello, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society Important Bird Areas Program and we’re here this afternoon at the Daniel Webster Wildlife Sanctuary in Marshville, Massachusetts. Next we’re going to talk about backyard birding, a place where everybody has an opportunity to get involved and where many peoples interest in birding first begins. In this segment we’re going to be talking about birding in the backyard, needless to say for many people the backyard is the place where they first make a connection with wild birds and eventually they get hooked and really drawn into birding on a broader scale. Some of the things that are important as a start up situation for the backyard birding would be your binoculars obviously, a field guide, a notebook where you can record some of the things that you see at your feeder and ultimately you may want to make your yard more user friendly. That can involve putting up bird boxes or erecting feeders like this or in some cases making water baths and birdbaths available for birds to take advantage of and on a larger scale it’s possible to landscape for birds where trees and shrubs can be planted that will have appropriate fruits and berry at season that will attract them. So there’s lots of different ways that you can actually make your backyard bird friendly and also obviously birder friendly."