Photo by Patty Cheek
Whidbey Audubon Society is excited to offer an online birding course, Common Spring and Summer Birds of Washington, taught by Dr. Thomas Bancroft. This course is perfect for helping you bird in Washington this spring and summer, especially if you are a beginning birder and want to become familiar with local birds. He will also provide tips for becoming a more expert birder if you already have some birding skills. Tom plans to discuss key characteristics including shape, size, color patterns, behaviors, habitat, and sounds. He will cover about 120 common species found in Western Washington during the spring and summer, their identification, where they live, and a little about their songs and calls. He provides all materials for the course through PDF files, PowerPoint files and uses Google Classroom. The presentations will be recorded and can be viewed by all class participants.
Plan now for this exciting course. Five 90–100-minute sessions on Tuesday evening, 7 pm, March 14, 21, 28 and April 4 and 11. Many of you have taken courses with Tom before and as usual, this promises to be a very special course. DON’T MISS IT. Tom’s teaching is wonderful. See below registration for more details.
Register here!
THE GOALS OF THIS COURSE
To help you learn to identify by sight birds that summer in your Washington neighborhood and learn a little about their ecology and breeding.
To learn to identify by sight the most common spring and summer birds likely to be found in terrestrial and wetland habitats across Western Washington. We will focus on many challenging to tell apart species, looking at the best characteristics to consider in separating them. In addition, we will cover some calls and songs that may be helpful during the spring and summer.
We will look at various online resources that can help you find birding places in Washington. Often local parks, national wildlife refuges, and waterfront areas can be outstanding birding. The nice thing about birding is you can do it from your home, on neighborhood walks, or by taking day trips or longer. This course will help you have fun doing all these things.
REQUIREMENTS
Participants will need a good internet connection and either a computer or tablet. All lectures will be done using Zoom video conferencing software, which is free to download, and we will use all the protocols for security. To learn more about Zoom, click here or to download the application to your computer or tablet, click here.
Google Classroom, which is also free, will allow us to provide the PowerPoints before and after each class, recordings of the presentations, and lots of other supplemental material, including practice exercises. Participants will need to register their email with Google or have a Gmail account to access Google Classroom. Google registration and Gmail accounts are also free. Much of the material on Google Classroom will remain available following the class. NOTE: If you choose not to register your email or have a Gmail account, you will not be able to access the content on Google Classroom, but you will be able to attend the Zoom lectures.
We will go over the use of the Merlin App that the Cornel Laboratory of Ornithology has produced. This app is free and available for smartphones and tablets. Allaboutbirds.org has a link to an online version. If you do not have a smartphone or tablet, you can use a bird book for those exercises. Information on the app and links to download are found here https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org. After downloading it, load the West Coast Bird Pack to have local birds on the app.