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On Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 2 pm, join the Council on Aging and MassAudubon on zoom for a program about birdwatching basics.

Ever wonder what those intriguing birds in your neighborhood, along the roadways, and outside your windows are —and what they are doing? Learn what makes birds unique within the animal kingdom, where and how to locate birds in different settings, and basic bird biology and behavior. Mass Aububon’s Doug Lowry will teach birdwatching basics, including various tools and resources for identifying and supporting local and global bird populations. Birdwatching is one of the fastest growing life-long, recreational activities in North America—here’s your chance to jump on the bandwagon and explore this rewarding hobby.

Weston has an amazing array of birds in backyards, public spaces and the trails. The Owl is a terrible bird-watcher (oh the ironies) but uses Merlin’s wonderful app and recently identified a Hermit Thrush in Ogilvie Town Forest. Not a pretty bird but has a beautiful and distinctive call. You can see/hear it here.

Check out bird-watching as a fun and rewarding hobby on May 3. Call the COA at 781-786-6280 to register. 

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In addition, Gwyn Loud’s Lincoln Land Conservation Trust Wildlife column is out for April 2023 and it is, as always, a fantastic read. Here’s just one paragraph on the spring migration:

“The spring bird migration is well underway, some arriving, some passing through, some winter residents departing. Dark-eyed juncos and white-throated sparrows, busy at our feeders all winter, will head north to breed. A website called BirdCast allows us to see avian migration from above and in real time! As Ty Burr writes in The New York Times Magazine, “Up to 3.5 billion birds and more than 600 species migrate across North America each spring, mostly at night, but usually we can see them only looking up from the ground. BirdCast lets us look down from above, and that changes everything. A joint project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University and U. Mass Amherst, it’s a website that lets us see them from a vantage point hundreds of miles above Earth, capturing each night’s continental migration as collected by over 140 radar stations across the country. “ Birders can check maps on the site to see if a specific night will be a big night over any given location. It is well known that thousands of migrating birds die by crashing into brightly lit tall buildings in cities. Happily, some cities have agreed to join the Lights Out program on nights when a big migration is forecast.”

You can find the whole newsletter here.