Discover Birding

So you want to be a birder?

- John Kinghorn

In the beginning, birding can be confusing and frustrating, but John Kinghorn suggests 10 ways that will help you ease into it.

Contrary to what many people might think, starting birding can be rather stressful if you aren’t too sure where to begin. Paging through a field guide, trying to distinguish between the lookalike warblers and cisticolas, larks and pipits, large brown raptors, not to mention seabirds... It can be daunting for even the most determined among us.

Invest in a field guide or download a mobile app

The most important step is to get a bird book that will serve as your introduction. In South Africa we are privileged to have an array of world-class birdidentification books. Coupled with this, in today’s technologically driven age, a fair number of these publications have easy-to-use mobile/tablet versions in the form of apps, which take no more than a few minutes to download onto your device.

Which is better: book or app? It’s your choice – both have equally good content as the developers and authors incorporate all content in the books directly into the apps. One advantage of having an app is that some are also accompanied by sound recordings of most species; some of the latest print publications also now have downloadable calls.

Use the internet