Illustration by The Globe and Mail
For me, it was the chimney swifts. In the spring of 2020, I had recently moved into an apartment whose main selling feature was a large roof deck with a view of Toronto treetops to the west. Having recently acquired my first set of binoculars and a copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, I was amazed by the incredible variety of avian life that suddenly appeared outside my windows.
As the seasons changed, the usual cast of winter blue jays and chickadees gave way to a dazzling variety of summer migrants, from hulking red-tailed hawks to fluorescent Baltimore orioles, to a flock of cigar-shaped chimney swifts.
Chimney swifts’ resemblance to supersonic fighter jets, I would discover, isn’t a coincidence: These highly specialized insect-eating machines live most of their lives in sustained flight, migrating thousands of kilometres each year and only touching down long enough to build nests on the vertical surfaces inside hollow trees and chimneys. Equipped with short beaks and big, dark eyes, they swoop and dive above the rooftops, eating upward of 1,000 flying insects each per day.
I had been casually interested in birds before the pandemic, but those chimney swifts made a birder out of me for life.
“There isn’t much positive that came out of the pandemic,” says Jody Allair, a lifelong birder and the director of community engagement at Birds Canada. “But if there was one thing, it was that people did discover birds.” As the pandemic shifts into its next phase and the world continues to reopen, however, birding has become much more than a way to pass the time during lockdown, or a hobby for early-rising retirees. Thanks to its ease and affordability – birds, after all, are everywhere, and looking at them is free – and apps that make it easy to identify species and share your findings, birding is attracting a new fan base.
“The birding community has a lot of growing to do still, but I’ve seen a huge shift in birders, especially during COVID, with so many younger people and people of colour feeling included,” says Alyssa Couroux, an avid birder from Burlington, Ont. Couroux, 32, is among a growing number of millennial birders who are helping to diversify the hobby. She praises its mental-health benefits, as well as its potential to bring diverse groups of people together. Indeed, a study conducted at the University of Exeter in 2017 – one of many that praises the effects of time in nature on everything from asthma to depression – found lower levels of anxiety and stress associated with daily exposure to birds, shrubs and trees.
“The nice thing about birding is you meet people of all ages,” Couroux says. “I have a birding buddy who’s 11, and she comes out with me all the time.”
Unlike during the lockdowns, when birding was mostly a solitary activity, birders in 2022 have access to a plethora of in-person programming from birding events such as the Toronto Bird Celebration and the Wings Over the Rockies Nature Festival, to excursions with local naturalist groups to birding clubs like Flock Together, a group with chapters in Toronto, New York and London that organizes birding outings among the BIPOC community. There’s also the Feminist Bird Club, with chapters across North America, and Birdability, a group that helps to make birding safe and inclusive for people with disabilities by maintaining a crowdsourced map detailing the accessibility of birding sites around the world.
“I firmly believe that birding is for everyone,” Allair says. “The amazing efforts of groups like the Feminist Bird Club, Birdability and Flock Together help remove barriers and ensure a safe and welcoming place for bird lovers who have felt excluded elsewhere. When more people are interested in birds, there is greater support for conservation, and everyone wins.”
Growing numbers of Canadians are also taking their hobby farther afield. At Eagle-Eye Tours, a B.C.-based operator specializing in guided birding trips, owner Cam Gillies estimates business is up 70 per cent this year over 2019, with unprecedented demand for trips to the Canadian Arctic, the southwestern United States and Point Pelee National Park on the shores of Lake Erie.
With songbirds arriving by the day and trees not yet in leaf, Point Pelee is among the best places in North America to witness the once-a-year spectacle each May, he says. “All these migrants are funnelling north at this time of year,” Gillies says. ”When you get south winds and especially south winds with rain overnight, there are beautiful, colourful warblers and other gems all over the place. It’s a big attraction.”
In addition to their binoculars (I use the Celestron Nature DX 8x42, a popular choice for beginners), field guides and cameras, most of these birders will be equipped with a new addition to the birder’s toolkit: smartphone apps. The most in demand by far are Merlin Bird ID and eBird, both of which are the work of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University.
“Merlin Bird ID is a particularly fantastic tool for beginning birders,” says Jenna Curtis, eBird’s project co-leader. A free digital birding guide with photos, sounds and identification information for more than 8,000 bird species, Merlin uses GPS to create custom lists of probable species for any location and date, so users can explore the birds that are most likely to be found nearby. Much of this data come from eBird, Cornell’s other free app, which provides convenient digital tools to track your birding activity and share it with others.
“More people are using eBird and Merlin now than ever before,” says Curtis, who reports more than 1.4 million eBird submissions by 98,000 users in March, 2022, alone, an increase of more than 30 per cent since 2020. “The more people – and a greater diversity of people – we have in the birding community, the more power we have to protect bird populations,” she adds. The myriad threats facing their populations include habitat loss, climate change and pesticides.
While we’ve been successful so far in bringing bald eagles back from the brink of extinction and preserving wetlands for migratory waterfowl, a landmark 2019 report found that Canada has lost more than 40 per cent of its shorebird and grassland bird populations over the past 50 years. Aerial insectivores, which include chimney swifts, are down nearly 60 per cent. “If people start paying attention to birds, and they start caring about the birds that they’ve come to enjoy watching, eventually people are going to want to help those birds,” Allair says.
I can only assume “my” swifts, meanwhile, continue to return each year to roost in the same derelict century-old chimney and hoover up insects against the evening sky. I’m no longer there to greet them, however, having undertaken a pandemic migration of my own. The feathered neighbours at my new home in Nova Scotia include a choir of song sparrows, several species of woodpeckers and a large flock of crows, but sadly no chimney swifts.
This winter, however, I began looking at plans to build a chimney swift tower – a giant birdhouse specifically designed for swifts, and an important part of their conservation strategy – in my new backyard. After everything that these birds have given me so far, it feels like the least I can do.
Interested in finding out more? Visit birdscanada.org to find resources and birding events in your area and allaboutbirds.org to peruse the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s extensive archive of photos, audio and data.
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