The pandemic changed us. COVID-19 stripped away basic social facets of humanity, and as we coped we each rewrote a chunk of source code within ourselves. I have a friend who started painting wine bottles. My wife became an expert in caring for houseplants. Lotta folks bought Pelotons; others tried overthrowing the government. We all needed a new thing. I started birding.
In the summer of 2020, I found emotional refuge in the parabolic flight of goldfinches, and by autumn—following an agonizing decision to send our kids back to school—I started walking in the woods for an hour after dropping them off each morning. If you have never needed to get two young children ready for school, please continue living your life well. If you have, then you already know that it is like drinking poison for the first hour you’re awake, a bitter taste that will stay with you all day unless you find a way to purge it.
Being outside and quietly focusing my attention on something unrelated to the stressors in my life releases the knot in my shoulders. Research by King’s College London suggests that seeing birds or just hearing birdsong can lead to improvement in mental well-being for up to eight hours, but you don’t have to take the scientists’ word for it—all they did is study 1,300 people for three and a half years. Instead, take it from me, one guy who’s been birding for two years. I am mostly not depressed. It works!
“Oh but winter is a bad time to see birds,” you may be mew-mewing. Wrong! Winter is a very good time to see birds. And for mental well-being purposes, you need to see birds in the winter more than any other time of the year. That is why I have prepared this three-tiered guide to winter birds. Whether you are a cold-averse shut-in or a Vermont maple baron, I have you covered. (NOTE: Though I live in the Northeast, I have tried to stay regionally neutral. However, if you live in Florida or California or someplace that doesn’t experience “winter,” then you can just go outside and look at the birds that have left the places I’m writing about here.)
TIER 1: SCREW YOU PAL, I AIN’T GOING OUTSIDE
If you’re not the kind of person who likes to go outside during winter, that’s OK! It needn’t stop you from seeing birds.You can make the birds come to you. Defector has helpfully already provided excellent guides to bird feeders and how to stock them (one type of seed per feeder, not a mix). Chris Thompson also blogged about how to carve a pumpkin into a feeder, but that feels like more of an autumnal task. For a crazy person.
I don’t have much to add to the bird feeder discourse. I stock a small feeder with nyjer seed that brings me a steady stream of house finches, goldfinches, chickadees, titmice, and juncos throughout the winter, and I’ve recently added a block of suet in an attempt to draw woodpeckers to my small yard. Our suburban neighborhood has too few old-growth trees too far removed from nature for me to invest more effort than that, but I’ll support whatever feathered pals I can get.
However, if you want to make your yard a truly bird-friendly winter habitat, you shouldn’t stop at bird feeders. You are not officially a housebound bird sicko until you have bird-safe windows and stock your yard with a heated bird bath (or get a submersible heater for your existing one). When temperatures dip below freezing, water sources become scarce: The shallow puddles and ditches favored by many small birds are the first to freeze, while larger streams and ponds are hot spots for predators. Birds have the ability to eat snow if they need to, but they don’t have the body mass to make it a good option; the energy expended to melt the snow is more than most birds can afford. So give ’em a little hot tub!
Got more money to burn? Spend $400 for a lifetime membership of Haikubox, a device that records bird sounds and sends identifications to an app on your phone. (Alternatively, you can buy the hardware for $190 and access the data for $70/year.) This, to me, feels slightly ridiculous because the amazing Merlin Bird ID app is free, and it has a sound ID feature that uses the same neural net to identify birds by sound. But I won’t judge. Indulge in this peaceful hobby how you like.
The birds that flock to an inviting backyard habitat will delight you. Chickadees and titmice are gregarious and noisy, and when they’re together they sound like a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. The northern cardinal may not be among my favorite birds—I don’t care for its doofy one-note song—but the male’s iconic red is so handsome and eye-catching, especially in winter, that I have no business finding fault with its singing; it’s like saying Steph Curry is bad at dunking. The dark-eyed junco is a common winter sight across North America, but I never tire of its rotund body hopping below my feeder, like a scoop of charcoal ice cream was granted a wish and turned into a bird.
All of this and more can be right outside your window, providing relief from Zoom calls, bills, dishes, babies—whatever real-world drudgery looms inside your home. Birds will brighten the darkest days, literally. Make them feel welcome.
TIER 2: THE CASUAL WINTER WALKER
I am not a morning person. If I’d never had kids, I would spend each night drinking cocktails and watching movies until 2 a.m. And yet here I am, 44 years old and waking up at dawn, taking my kids to school then crunching around in dead leaves in wan December apricity like one of those ruddy-cheeked New Englanders who brags about enjoying winter. I hate it!
But I’m not going to live a better life whining about it. “I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “and, taking up a hymn-book, remarked: ‘We had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.’ So, I say, ‘Let us sing winter.’ What else can we sing, and our voices be in harmony with the season?”
Who am I to ignore the advice of the long-dead misanthropic outdoorsman quoting a mentally ill guy from church? I sing winter, too. I step into the cold knowing that the wind will bite my face and my toes will lose feeling; I know too that it is the most discomfort I will feel that day, and that when night falls I will not feel the scrabbling sensation of cabin fever.
And most of all, I know that my spirits will be lifted by the presence of birds. I know birders who rarely go out during winter because there aren’t enough new birds to see; they wait for the excitement of spring migration. I can’t abide that; there is too much beauty in each stage of nature’s cycle. An ebb tide can reveal life unseen at high water.
There is something charming about the familiarity of winter birds. During migration, you may only see a given species a handful of times, or just once, or never. In winter, you will have the comfort of the same friends every day: nuthatches, finches, woodpeckers, sparrows, chickadees and robins and jays.
Unburdened from the rigors of identification, you get to know these birds’ habits: the subtleties of their movements, their shape in flight, the variety of sounds they make—not just the songs, but the cheeps and tinks that round out each species’ language. I’ve become innately familiar with the cardinal’s chip, the blue jay’s steady flight at treetop level, the angle of a robin’s wings in silhouetted flight. Any small detail can give me ballast on a cold day: the white outer tail feathers of the dark-eyed junco, the yellow eyebrow of a white-throated sparrow, a cardinal in a snowy tree, the incomprehensible exoticism of a cedar waxwing. And when winter is at its worst—in the gunmetal half-light of February, when weeks of unrelenting cold have leeched all color from the landscape—an eastern bluebird as bright as the last day of school will alight on a naked branch and carry me to spring.
TIER 3: WINTER BIRD SICKO MODE
I have been underselling winter birding. It doesn’t need to be a cold lonely walk looking at common birds you can see from inside your house. Winter provides an opportunity to see incredible cold-weather visitors, as well as the best chance to see elusive year-round predators. Here are some of the cool guys out there, just waiting for you.
DUCKS. Many duck species spend their summers in the far north, nesting and raising young on the subarctic tundra or in boreal wetlands. In the winter, these colorful ducks—diving mergansers with thin serrated bills, large-billed seaducks called scoters, and hunters’ favorites like pintails and teals and shovelers—find our frigid latitudes perfectly temperate. Winter is, as the cartoonist Rosemary Mosco christened it, Weird Duck Time.