The Brilliance of BirdCam

Over the last few months, I’ve grown convinced that the single most effective tool for the conversion of new birders is the board game Wingspan. This winter some friends and I became obsessed with Elizabeth Hargrave’s invention, a gorgeously designed and illustrated engine-building game that basically requires its players to assemble an aviary of western tanagers and yellow-rumped warblers and belted kingfishers, et al. Aside from its aesthetic loveliness, Wingspan’s appeal is that it turns even common birds into something like superheroes, replete with their own unique powers, weaknesses, and aptitudes; over time those attributes have a way of colonizing your brain such that they then impute themselves onto flesh-and-feather birds when you see them in the wild. If you’ve played Wingspan, you probably know what I mean: the inability to see, say, a white-breasted nuthatch without thinking, Cache one wheat from the supply.

Anyway, this to say that Wingspan has probably radicalized more birders than any resource this side of Sibley’s. I quickly went from a casual to a devotee once we started to playing, and a couple of fellow gamers signed up to volunteer for a bluebird nest-box monitoring project after just a few sessions. Most astonishing was the transformation of a friend we’ll call Charlie, who only played once, and frankly seemed pretty bored. I figured he was immune to Wingspan’s charms, but, a week later, a mutual friend reported that “he only talks about birds now.” A week after that, a package arrived on our door — a gift from Charlie. Our birding life would never be the same.

The package contained an Osoeri Bird Feeder with a built-in motion-activated camera, which records videos of visiting birds and uploads them to the cloud. (The clips are deleted after a day unless you pay for storage, but you can download your faves in the meantime.) I have to admit that my initial reaction was exhaustion — here was yet another piece of technology to integrate into my life, to check, to fix, to lure me screenward. But that skepticism was dispelled the moment I first checked the app and found the glittering head of a lazuli bunting, the flawless blue of a Colorado summer sky, bobbing in the frame. I was hooked.

In the weeks since our BirdCam arrived (thanks Charlie!), watching its uploaded contents has become my most cherished ritual. Because I’m a flip phone user, I have to use my wife’s iPhone to view the files; as soon as she returns from work, I snatch her phone away and begin to scroll. I recognize this is somewhat nuts: After all, I’m home with our feeders all day. If I wanted to see a chipping sparrow or a black-headed chickadee, I could just, y’know, sit in the backyard. 

And I do! Yet the intimacy afforded by BirdCam supplies delights that looking out the window doesn’t. I most love being able to examine birds’ facial detailing: the iconic red mustache of the northern flicker, the jet eyeliner that adorns the Bullock’s oriole. Even subtle birds are breathtaking up close. The female black-headed grosbeak, for one, isn’t as conspicuously gaudy as the burnt-orange male — yet the delicate white stripes that encircle her head lend her an elegance and panache that make her mate look almost gauche by comparison. 

BirdCam also reveals personality and social hierarchy. Pine siskin are feisty and quarrelsome, driven into feathery kerfuffles every few minutes by invisible provocations; one friend compares them to Mean Girls. Grosbeaks, both black-headed and evening, are among our yard’s largest birds, and land with placid, regal certitude, displacing any tiny songbird in their path. Tanagers tend to be shier, and seem only to alight on the feeder when it’s unoccupied. Male lazuli buntings have an “aggro-guy-at-the-bar” vibe, chasing each other off with rivalrous nips.  Truly, it’s a thrill a minute.

Alas, the excitement of BirdCam will soon come to a temporary end. The tanagers, buntings, and other bejeweled migrants will decamp for higher altitudes and latitudes any day now, and our yard will be colonized almost entirely by house sparrows and collared doves. No doubt I’ll still pry my wife’s phone from her hands once in a while, but my BirdCam fixation is likely to subside. Good thing I have Wingspan to tide me over until fall.