Priti Arani has been birdwatching for the last 20 years. For the Niskiyuna resident, watching them flock to her birdfeeder at home is satisfying to watch.
“I love birds. It’s just, if I see a bird in the morning, it just makes me happy,” said Arani. “You know, they, they just seem to be doing their thing.”
Arani often birdwatches alone. However, on the first day of the Great Backyard Bird Count, she decided to take a chance and met with some birders at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve.
“I’ve never done this in a group, so I’m actually learning a lot” noted Arani during the count.
The Great Backyard Bird Count is an annual international event during which birders help ornithology researchers by logging the birds in their neck of the woods. This year, birders logged over 8,000 different species around the world from Zambia to Vietnam. For birders like Arani, it is also a chance to connect with the larger birding community.
At the preserve, Arani sets off on a trail with the group. They trudge through the snow, stopping every so often to listen for birds as Alex Soldo, the Preserve field ecologist, leads the group.
Throughout the trail, Soldo makes time to teach the group about the environment at the Preserve, the different birds they see throughout the year and even shows them different bird-calling techniques.
One such technique is called "pishing." Soldo cups her hands around her mouth, saying the word Pish over and over through her teeth.
“I once had a professor do that for like 30 minutes to try to bring in barn owl,” said Soldo. "And eventually it worked, we were all like, ‘Oh my god.’”
She tells the birders the technique usually brings in curious birds like chickadees who want to investigate the sound.
Beyond just logging and observing birds together, the count also gives birders a chance to help with scientific research. The information collected during the long weekend goes into a single database that is used by ornithologists to learn more about bird migration and other ecological factors.
Based at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Becca Rodomsky-Bish is the project leader for the Great Backyard Bird Count. She says, like a canary in the coalmine, birds can be great indicators.
“Birds can really do that in our landscapes every day too. If we see birds, if we don't see birds, that helps tell us something about the environment and what's going on,” said Bish. “And so, it's really been interesting to see how researchers have expanded their use of this data set to begin to understand even larger ecological and environmental questions.”
Back at the Albany Pine Bush Preserve, the birders are coming to the end of their trail and Soldo makes a log of all the birds they saw in the database. These include a white breasted nuthatch, three red breasted nuthatches, a blue jay, and two black cap chickadees.
Although the birders did not observe that many feathered creatures that day, Arani says she really appreciated the time spent with fellow birders.
“It was fun. It was just, it's just, you learn something in a group how other people do things,” said Arani. “I think that teaches you how you could do things differently.”
