Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Many people mark New Year’s Day with resolutions that we forget within weeks. My sister once made a New Year’s resolution to be perfect. When I commented that she wasn’t likely to achieve perfection, she said she was getting tired of failing at mundane little resolutions, and for once she was going to fail at something magnificent.

Birders set goals similar to New Year’s resolutions. Most of us decide we want to see more birds than we did last year, and we spend the dark days of winter plotting strategies for being in the right places at the right times as often as possible during the coming year. One great resource for planning birding trips throughout the US is Birdfinder : A Birder’s Guide to Planning North American Trips, by Jerry A. Cooper and Paul J. Baicich, published by the American Birding Association. This book lists most of the hottest birding spots on the continent, and provides a detailed strategy for seeing over 600 species in a single year.

Two books provide information about locating a wide variety of birds here in Minnesota. The better is A Birder’s Guide to Minnesota, by Kim Eckert, which has detailed maps for every county in the state, precise directions to the locations of a huge variety of birds, and authoritative tips for finding them. More general is Birding Minnesota, a Falcon Guide by Jay Michael Strangis. This is a useful book for beginners, but lacks the depth and breadth of Eckert’s book.

A lot of us resolve to keep our birding lists more conscientiously. Bird stores carry a variety of listing books which are a convenient repository for life lists and sometimes year and state lists. But compulsive listers often enjoy putting all their lists on computer with one of several listing programs available. Some birding CD-rom software provides bird identification, song, and life­ history information as well as simple listing programs, but to offset the wealth of information that these provide, their listing programs are very minimal. One of the finest listing programs available is Avisys, by Jerry Blinn of Perceptive Systems. After a day of birding or watching a backyard feeder, you can enter the date and location., click off each bird seen, and let Avisys organize all the data. It’s a simple matter to compose a list of every bird seen in a particular year, every sighting of any species, or, for reporting seasonal data to a state birding joumal, the first and last dates that every species is seen in a particular location during a particular season. Programs like Avisys allow you to easily call up your yard list, life list, year list, or any other list you can think of. I can even call up a list of all the species I’ve seen while birding with my dog Photon.

Of course, if all the Y2K business has made you reluctant to· deal with computers, or if you find it too ironic to use high-tech equipment to enjoy such low-tech creatures as birds, you can always keep your lists the old fashioned way, on paper. This will reduce your chances of one kind of Windows crash, and as long as you’re at that, you might as well resolve to reduce your backyard birds’ chances of the other kind of window crash. Building feeders right against the window is the best way to protect your birds. While they’re eating inches from the glass, they have a better chance of noticing it, and if a sudden shrike or hawk frightens them into bewildered flight, they won’t have reached break-neck speed if they do hit the window. Birds feeding five or ten feet from a window are far more likely to crash fatally than birds feeding five or ten inches from the window.

Another resolution that will keep backyard birds alive and healthy is to reduce the use of lawn chemicals, especially pesticides. Most lawn-care companies use a mixture of fertilizer, weed­ killers and insect-killers in their applications, and both the herbicide and the insecticide can be harmful to birds. Most Minnesota lawns don’t require insecticides, and spot-spraying weeds requires far less herbicide than spraying every inch of grass. Of course it’s even safer to pull the weeds by hand, and in January it’s easy to resolve to do just that. By the time weeds start growing in spring, that resolution may well be forgotten, but there is probably more than one Cub Scout or Brownie willing to do this chore for less than a lawn company would charge.

The most important resolution we can make to keep our backyard birds safe is to keep cats indoors. This protects kitty from toxoplasmosis, feline leukemia, and injuries from cars and cat fights, and saves many birds as well. It seems only right as long as we’re resolving to see more birds in 2000 to do our best to keep those birds we so enjoy safe and well.