A First-of-Its-Kind Event Helps Blind Birders Build Community

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Tracy Carcione knows there’s a Fish Crow across the street—she heard it earlier today—but for now it’s keeping its beak shut. So, she demonstrates the difference between the rough, drawn-out caw of the American Crow, and then the more staccato squawk of the Fish Crow, which to me, a birding novice, sounds like a crow making fun of a gull. “They’re like snarky crows,” she says.

I’m walking with Carcione along the narrow, tree-lined sidewalks of her neighborhood in Teaneck, New Jersey. It’s a bright and windy spring morning. I’ve joined her because today she’s participating in a first-of-its-kind birding event. The format is a common one: Right now, birders all over the country are logging as many species as they can in a 24-hour window. But like Carcione, and like me, every registered participant is blind or visually impaired.   

The organizers of the Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon—held on May 18, at the peak of spring migration—aimed to celebrate legally blind birders and to help them build community with each other. They also wanted to show blind people who’d never birded before that the activity is for everyone, including them. “Just because you can’t see or you can’t see well doesn’t mean you can’t bird,” says co-organizer Martha Steele. “I think that’s a misconception all the way around.” 

Steele has been deaf since childhood, due to a condition called Usher syndrome that causes hearing and vision loss, and first learned to bird by sight as a young adult. When her vision started degrading rapidly in her 50s, she worried about losing her ability to read lips, so she got a cochlear implant. “It did indeed dramatically improve speech understanding,” Steele says, “but totally surprisingly and unexpectedly, I heard birds.”  

She learned to bird again from scratch, this time by studying songs. Steele only knew two other blind birders, so when a friend sent her an article in late 2024 about Donna Posont, a blind birder who teaches birding by ear, she got curious about how many other blind birders are out there. Steele called up her friend and fellow blind birder, Jerry Berrier, and proposed creating an event to find out. Berrier happened to know Posont, as well as Cat Fribley, executive director of Birdability, an organization that works to ensure birding is inclusive and accessible for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses.  

And so, through the group’s conversations, the first Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon was born. Blindness- and birding-related organizations helped spread the word, and in total 155  participants submitted checklists across 34 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico—and even a few from Canada and Venezuela.

In Bloomington, Minnesota, Michael Hurben tallied 66 species, including a personal favorite, the Bobolink: “The more drawn-out song that the males do sounds like a video game from the 1980s.” The idea of a bird-a-thon for blind birders had never occurred to him, he says. “And then in retrospect it’s like kicking yourself, why didn’t we think of this earlier?”    

Hurben, a physicist by training who writes about birds and physics, started birding at 26. He had only been at it for a couple of years before he lost most of his vision due to retinitis pigmentosa. Today he has a small central visual field, only about 2 percent of what most people can see. He used to be fixated on seeing birds to add them to his mental collection. “And I made myself absolutely miserable doing that,” he says. It took him a long time to let go of seeing birds, he says. “The way I accepted it was eventually learning to get serious about birding by ear.”  Now, as long as he gets a recording of its song, Hurben counts the species towards his life list.

For California birder Susan Glass, who’s been blind her entire life, the inaugural Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon was also a personal milestone: “ I’ve gone birding with sighted people, I’ve gone birding alone a lot, but this is the first time I’ve ever birded with another blind person,” she says. “I had a blast. We’re already planning some other trips.”  

Glass spent the day at McClellan Ranch Preserve in Cupertino with a group that included two other blind birders and two sighted friends. One of her sighted companions had never birded before and could describe the birds they saw but not identify the species, asking questions like, “What is that bird with the orange on it?” It was exciting for Glass to get to correctly ID the mystery bird for the group as the Orange-crowned Warbler, one of 38 species they logged together. “I could see my friend going, ‘Oh, she does know this stuff,’” Glass says.  

Birding has been a joy in Glass’s life since she was four years old, but it hasn’t always been easy. Transportation, for example, is a near-universal problem for blind birders. Great birding spots are often hard to reach on foot or by public transit, and rideshare apps can pose various issues for blind people. It can be difficult to locate a car; I avoid rideshares because I’ve been yelled at over the phone by many drivers who are frustrated that I can’t find them. In some cases, blind birders are even denied service because of their guide dogs—in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Your dog is you, so when someone rejects your dog, they’re rejecting you,” Glass says. When that happens she has to remind herself: “I have every right to be here.”  

The constant need to advocate for oneself can get exhausting, Glass says, which has made her hesitate before reaching out to local birding groups. “I’m shy about approaching other people, because I don’t want to impose or be a burden,” she says. “You sometimes forget that people really want to be with you, and they really want to work with you.”  

Carcione, who has been blind since childhood due to a kind of eye cancer called retinoblastoma, tells me she doesn’t often join her local birding group because she can’t easily get to where they meet. Sometimes the meetup instructions are too vague for a rideshare app, like “‘behind Bob’s Furniture.’ This is not an address,” she says. “I don’t want the Uber to be dropping me along Route 17 where I have to walk along the highway. That is not happening.”  

Birding apps also pose many challenges for blind and low-vision people. Carcione has tried using apps that her sighted friends recommended, only to find them totally inaccessible for her. Carcione and Glass both use Merlin, which works well, except that the text-to-speech volume level is very quiet when the app is listening for birds.

Despite the obstacles, every blind birder I spoke to emphasized the mental health benefits of the activity. “The prevalence of depression and social isolation among the blind and visually impaired is quite high,” Steele says. “Birding is a wonderful avocation that gets you outdoors, connected to other people, but more importantly, connected to nature and the earth.”   

The day after the event, co-organizer Posont was still reeling from how “amazingly awesome and fantastic” the event was. She spent the day at a wildlife park in Dearborn, Michigan, with a mixed group of blind and sighted people, and recorded two species she’d never heard before: a Bay-breasted Warbler and a Yellow-throated Vireo. “It was just really gratifying to see so many people signed up,” she says. “ Birding by ear is really a technique that sighted, blind, everybody can use.”   

Posont and her co-organizers plan to make the Blind Birder Bird-a-Thon an annual happening. This year’s event was a proof of concept; next year the organizers want to coordinate groups in more places to bird together, to help blind birders build connections with each other. But Posont says blind folks who are curious about birding don’t need to wait for a big event. Just get outside—right now, if possible—and listen. “This time of year,” she says, “you can’t go anywhere that you don’t hear a bird.”