Preparing for Birding the Oregon Coast

The first week of August, my extended family is having a family reunion at Cape Lookout State Park along the Oregon Coast. Family reunions are great, especially when some new birding habitat is involved! I'm pretty pumped about my birding opportunities in Oregon. I'll likely get to see birds that I normally flip past in my field guide because I'm not normally in the right habitat. To channel my excitement productively I systematically prepare to see these birds. Let me share with you how I go about this.

We're going to be camping at Cape Lookout State Park and visiting locations all the way up to Seaside (see the stars on the map)

First, I find out which counties I'll be visiting and then I create an eBird bar chart of all the birds seen in those counties.

Then I download the histogram data into Microsoft Excel and remove all of the columns except for the weeks surrounding my planned visit. Then I delete all the birds that show no sighting data during those weeks. This gives me a good list of what I can reasonably expect to see. I convert the data to percentages rather than long decimal numbers for my own convenience. Often, I will delete from the list all the birds that I am already familiar with to create my study list and my potential "life bird" list. 

Here is my potential "life bird" list for Tillamook County, Oregon for the last week of July and the first two weeks of August - sorted by probability as per submitted eBird data for birders like you:

Once I have this list I can start studying the birds so that I "know" them as much as possible and I am prepared to recognize or identify them when I am there in person. Many times I will go to the websites of my online birding friends to see what they are seeing. Greg Gillson, one of our fantastic contributors here at "Birding is Fun!" is the perfect resource for this Oregon Coast trip. I browse through his Photo Checklist of Oregon Birds and peruse the images of my potential life birds and my excitement just builds and builds.

Check out Greg's photography below that helps me get an idea of what these birds look like, what habitat I might see them in, and a glimpse of how they might be behaving when I see them:

Black Oystercatcher

Black Turnstone

Brandt's Cormorant

Chestnut-backed Chickadee

Common Murre

Fork-tailed Storm Petrel

Glaucous-winged Gull

Heermann's Gull

Marbled Murrelet

Pelagic Cormorant

Pigeon Guillemot

Rhinoceros Auklet

Semipalmated Plover

Sooty Shearwater

Tufted Puffin

Wrentit

After seeing these images, I'm all sorts of giddy inside! Wahoo!!! Bring on the Oregon birds!!!

Next, I read about each of these species at AllAboutBirds.org. I particularly like the descriptions of habitat and feeding as well as the "cool facts" with which I will delight (or bore) my family members.

Finally, I spend some time in my arsenal of field guides both paper and digital, studying the illustrations and photos, and reading the text for each. May I recommend the Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America by our own Lillian Stokes? Another cool thing I like to do is find online video and sound clips for any of the species I can. Video really helps get an idea of general shape and size, habitat and behavior, and often sound. When will they start incorporating video into the digital field guides for smartphones and tablets?!

Speaking of apps, I can also use the apps like Audubon Birds with "Find Birds with eBird" to zero in on locations where each of these species has recently been seen.

By following this pattern of study and preparation, I feel ready to identify, if not recognize, and enjoy these birds and add them to my life list. I'll check back in after the trip and tell you how I did!