The Grand Prairie Bird Alliance has a new way to learn about the birds of Bloomington-Normal.
The Central Illinois chapter of the National Audubon Society has offered nature walks for decades. They run weekly during the spring and fall migration periods. Now, the organization is planning a multi-week educational course -- Birds of BloNo -- to teach people to identify about 70 common species of birds found in the community.
The alliance said it's a great way to get away from your screens. Illinois State University biologist Pirmin Nietlisbach said the course has five indoor classroom sessions and five corresponding outdoor excursions to look for birds of the seasons.
"We start in late February and early March with water birds," he said. "Early March is a great time to see water birds around here. And then we move on to some of the common winter residents, and then some of the forest birds. We will probably go to the Merwin preserve to look for woodpeckers and other forest birds. Then in April, we'll cover some of the earlier migrants. In May it will be great to cover the Warblers, which are my favorite group of birds. You can see around 30 species of warbler. We will probably see around 15 to 20 during the course."
The classroom portion allows Nietlisbach to go deeper into strategies to identify birds using bird guides and apps, and pitch a little biology to the participants.
"We'll be doing this event on the campus of Illinois State University, so we'll also have access to a nice bird collection. We can look at some specimens. That gives a different perspective on the birds than one can get outside. And I think it's a nice complement to the excursion, where we then apply what we learn in indoors," said Nietlisbach.
About 250 species of birds live in or come through McLean County in any given year. It can be tough to tell which species they are. The classroom setting lets Nietlisbach go over more of the identifying characteristics of birds than is possible outdoors.
"It depends a bit on the group of birds you look at, but usually the first thing you want to start with is identifying what group you are talking about. What family of bird? For that especially, shape is important and often the shape of the beak. That tells us something about what the bird is eating," he said.
After you know whether the bird is, say a thrush or a warbler, you can look for other markers.
"For the smaller birds, what do they have on their wings? Do they have wing stripes or not? Is their belly streaked or not? Maybe some characteristics and stripes they have or do not have on their heads," said Nietlisbach.
Nietlisbach, who grew up in Switzerland, was always interested in animals, but began to concentrate on birds as a teenager. He met two friends in a youth ornithology group, which further hooked him. Now he's an evolutionary biologist at ISU. Bird species are different in Switzerland, he said, but many fill the same ecological niches they do here, such as warblers and chickadees.
"Both, especially the Warblers, eat a lot of insects. They can occur together. Even though they look similar, they kind of specialize on different areas of the tree. Some tend to forage more along smaller branches, others along trunks and bigger branches," said Nietlisbach.
Nietlisbach's love of birds dates from an early age. He said there are many different reasons people become birders -- love of the outdoors, fascination with birds themselves, the thrill of the hunt for new species to add to a lifetime count, and the sighting of rare birds.
"It is a bit of a thrill in that you never know what you will see. Especially during migration season, there are so many birds that can turn up. Some of them are pretty rare. And then it's really exciting," said Nietlisbach. "I think my main motivation is I really like to be outside. I love watching what the birds do, how they move around."
Nietlisbach started keeping track of birds before the proliferation of online platforms, though he now reports his excursions on E-bird, a citizen science platform that makes observations available to scientists, a crowd sourcing approach that informs some scholarship.
"It's really valuable because there's so many people that watch birds, and it generates so much data that can then be used to, for example, look at trends in when birds occur in a certain area over the course of the year, potentially also how relative abundances change if certain species are declining or increasing," said Nietlisbach.
There are challenges in analyzing the data. It depends on how easy it is to notice and identify a bird and how many people are out watching. He said changes over time do pop out of the data.
Climate change is affecting the migratory patterns of birds. Nietlisbach said the time when birds leave a winter territory can affect the breeding cycle because the food supplies of seeds and insects might be different.
"Birds tend to arrive earlier in spring and stay longer in fall in a certain area," he said. "It's especially pronounced for birds that don't migrate very far, those that winter in the southern United States."
For birds that migrate from south America, Nietlisbach said the trend is less pronounced because they tend to use the length of the day as a guard to start a migration, rather than weather conditions.
"There are some concerns for especially long-distance migrants that might come back later and then start breeding and the need to feed their offspring might be past the peak abundance of their food source," said Nietlisbach.
The Birds of BloNo course is limited to about 18 people. He said more than that can inhibit sightings of birds during field trips. You can register for the classes at the web site of the Grand Prairie Bird Alliance.