How to be a Birder BLOG 1 February 2025 – Starting at Home

In the first of a new series written exclusively for Netvue, our Global Consultant STEPHEN MOSS guides you through the basics of How to be a Birder. We start close to home, in your own garden or backyard.

I’ve been birding so long – over sixty years now – that when I started it was still called ‘birdwatching’ or ‘bird spotting’. You might think that everything has changed since then, but the great thing about birding is that it is one of the simplest and easiest pastimes to enjoy. The pleasure I get from watching birds today, whether in my own garden or in far-flung places around the world, never really changes.

Like most birders, whether you took up your interest as a child or later in life, the various gardens in the homes I have lived in have been incredibly influential. For almost two decades now, my family and I have been in an eighteenth century farmhouse on the edge of a Somerset village, in the south-west of England. We have a long, fairly narrow garden covering about an acre of land, and – as I write this blog in my garden office – I can enjoy the birds visiting my Birdfy Bamboo feeder just a few metres away.

But I was brought up in the West London suburbs, in a compact, 1960s, semi-detached home with a smallish back garden. It was there that, as a young child, my passion for birds really developed. My grandmother, who stayed at home while my single-parent mother went out to work, used to put out kitchen scraps for the birds, as having lived through two world wars she hated wasting food! So the poor birds mainly lived on stale bread, lumps of suet, and occasionally fruit such as apples which had started to go off. My mother, a keen gardener, did provide plenty of natural food in the form of berry-bearing bushes, flowers to provide nectar for insects, and bushes and shrubs where the birds could roost and nest.

I recall Blackbirds nesting in the clematis outside the back window, while House Sparrows, Starlings and Song Thrushes hopped across the lawn, and Blue and Great Tits, along with Greenfinches, Goldfinches and Chaffinches – and Britain’s favourite bird, the European Robin – regularly visited to feed.

The great advantage of starting off birding in your garden or backyard is that you soon get to you know the common birds. At first, it can be hard to identify which species you are looking at, especially when two or more are similar in size, pattern, colour or appearance. But little by little you begin to learn how to tell them apart; and then you can start to observe their behaviour, interactions with the same or other species, and when they visit.

Over time, you build up a picture: discovering which birds turn up all year round, which are commoner at some times of year than others, and which are purely seasonal visitors, only there in autumn and winter or spring and summer. Keeping a bird diary, which I’ll talk about in a later blog, is essential in helping you understand what is going on.

So how do you begin? Well, unlike when I began birding all those years ago, you have one huge advantage: your Birdfy camera feeder! Where I had to rely on food thrown onto the lawn, and later on, plastic bags with peanuts inside, you now have a hi-tech, brilliantly designed product, or series of products, for you to choose the one that works best for you.

Fill it with high-energy foods such as sunflower hearts, and best of all, use the easy access app, which allows you to keep an eye on the birds visiting your backyard or garden at any time of the day or night – wherever you are, even far away from home.

I realised how brilliant the Birdfy is when I visited the Netvue HQ in Shenzhen, China, and checked my app to see what was on the feeder. To my astonishment, although it was the middle of the night back in the UK, a European Robin was happily feeding in the darkness!

Once you have installed one or more Birdfy camera feeders, you can add other products such as the Birdfy Bath Pro or Birdfy Nest, which will in turn attract more and different kinds of birds to your garden or backyard. These are a real asset in helping you monitor which birds visit and when, as you can watch the videos recorded by the cameras each evening and see what you might have missed!

When I started watching birds through the kitchen window all those years ago, I asked my mother to buy me books on how to identify what I was seeing. Later, I also used books on where to watch and find birds elsewhere in Britain, and later abroad. But the one book I didn’t have was one on how to watch birds. Back in 2003 I decided to write one myself – How to Birdwatch was published later that year. Although it is now out of print copies of various editions can easily be found on second-hand book websites such as Abe Books, both in the United States and UK.

In this series, month-by-month over the next year, I’ll be covering all I think you need to know about becoming a birder, including:

·       What equipment you need (including Birdfy products)

·       Identifying birds by appearance

·       Identifying birds by sound

·       Keeping a bird diary

·       Fieldcraft – how to be a better birder

·       Photographing birds

·       Learning more about birds

·       Conservation of birds – how you can help

·       Getting a local patch

·       Spreading your wings – travelling to watch birds

·       Why watch birds?

I hope you will enjoy reading these blogs as much as I love writing them, and over the next year develop your experience and become a fully-fledged birder. Do get in touch to let me know what you have learned, and how it has been useful to you, and share your experiences with other Birdfy users on our Facebook groups in the US and UK.