#shoutout — Public Fediverse posts

A shout-out to the #Cornell #Lab of #Ornithology (https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/) for meaningfully enhancing my experience of being outside and noticing birds, especially #eBird (https://ebird.org/) and Merlin Bird ID (https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/).

I started using their resources a few weeks ago because I wanted to support my daughter's interest in birds. At first, it was a bit of a slog to go through the effort of identifying the birds I was seeing and hearing, but now I've started being able to recognize a few birds by sound and appearance without having to check and it's a really wonderful experience — the world seems suddenly to have become much more lively and all that has changed is that I've started noticing some of the birds around me.

Two examples from this morning:

- Walking to a place to run an errand, I heard two Eurasian jays making a racket. I'd never knowingly seen them in that street before. It was quite exciting to recognize them by sound and then see them so close.
- Then, on the way back from that errand in the same street, there was a (to me large-seeming, probably at least a dozen) cloud of tits moving together in a sort of flying leapfrog fashion from tree to tree in the same direction I was walking. It was a little bit like being part of the group. The group was composed mostly Eurasian blue tits, but there were also at least a couple of long-tailed tits (which Merlin helped me to identify by sound (and my first conscious encounter with the species)) in the group. It was joyful to see how lively they were and listen to them chatter to each other as I walked.

And all of this is without any specialized equipment, not even binoculars. Just my own senses and memory, plus my smartphone for the identification help and checklist tracking if I'm in the mood & have the capacity.

I'm reminded of this #quote :

> "People protect what they love."
> (to the best of my knowledge said by) Jacques Cousteau

#CornellLabofOrnithology #CornellOrnithologyLab #birds #bird #Merlin #MerlinBirdID #BirdID #shoutout #EurasianJay #BlueTit #EurasianBlueTit #LongTailedTit #LongTailedBushtit #birding #birdwatching