Boost Your Birding Skills by Seeing a New Bird Every Day This Year

A bird a day keeps the doldrums away—and your birding senses sharp.

That's the idea behind the “bird-a-day” challenge, a daunting goal that some birders take on every January. There are two ways to do it: You can enter an online competition, such as birdaday.net, and log your daily observations in a public forum, or you can make it a personal mission and self referee. Most individuals don't make it past a month or two; a rare few will keep the trend alive for longer than six months. Even so, just the challenge of seeing how many days in a row you can find a new bird is fun and worthwhile, mainly because of the knowledge and skills you pick up along the way. It gets you in the habit of constantly scanning your surroundings and gives you an excuse to check out new birding haunts. More importantly, it helps you perfect your timing and learn how birds choose their habitats, which are key to birding. 

Getting 365 species in a year is one thing; spreading them out evenly over 365 days is another. There are more than 700 species that can be found regularly in the United States and Canada (see birds coded 1, 2, or 3 on this list from the American Birding Association). If you’re hoping to log more than half—and do it at a steady pace—you have to come up with a plan.

One of the hardest parts of the challenge is burning through the common birds. The turnover in seasons might help you: Winter is great for fowl, spring brings thrilling songbirds, summer is best for shorebirds, and fall sends streams of raptors downwind. But even with these waves, there are rough patches. Birds don't stick around for long, so banking on 30 newcomers over the course of any one month is dangerous. The best strategy here is to always note the most unusual species you see. That way, you can save the regulars for a day when you’re too busy or stressed to do some real birding.

If you’re truly invested, make a calendar. Use eBird maps to figure out what species visit your area at various times of the year, and make hit lists for each month. (You might want to study their habitat preferences and calls in advance; birding by ear counts!) In January, for instance, a lot of people are on the lookout for Barn Owls. These birds exist almost everywhere in the world . . . except in Minnesota, where they’re a rarity. In the Gopher State, you have a much better chance of seeing a Snowy Owl on an airport tarmac on the way home from work.

A little change of scenery can give you a boost, too. Have you always wanted to visit northern Ohio in spring or the Rio Grande Valley in Texas in fall or winter? Use the “bird-a-day” challenge to pick and time your vacations. Once there, max out on local specialties and stick to the schedule. You can get a whole week’s worth of warblers or waterfowl.

By the way, there’s no such thing as the “bird-a-day” police, so feel free to set your own goals and add twists. You can make the challenge even harder by aiming for a set roster of species. This calendar by University of Connecticut professor Morgan Tingley riffs off a Sibley desk calendar; it organizes the birds by season and assigns them points based on their rarity levels. Rather than committing to see an avian a day, Tingley’s game has you aim for 365 points.

Another way to change the game up is to broaden its scope. For more common birds, use this as a chance to get to know them better. "If it’s the same species as one you’ve seen before, find something new to observe about it,” says Jason “the Bird Nerd” St. Sauver, community education director at Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center in Nebraska. “I did this with magpies in Utah when I lived there. Many times they’d be all that I would see, but man did I get to know some amazing behaviors by watching them for two to five minutes.”

You can also make a daily effort to bird in a different place—a new window, lake, row of bushes—Melanie Furr, director of education at Atlanta Audubon, says. Another option is to photograph or digiscope a bird every day. 

Just remember, this is a marathon. Enjoy the challenge, and even if you don't make it to the very end, at least you'll be in great birding shape.