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Dr. Anna Norris

Dr. Anna Norris says birdwatching is a good hobby because "you can literally do it anywhere."

Even Birdwatching Has Gone High-Tech

Published on October 7, 2022 - 9 a.m.

For Southwestern Michigan College anatomy and physiology Professor Dr. Anna Norris, “One of the most fascinating things about birdwatching is that you can literally do it anywhere.”

“Waiting in the Meijer parking lot, oh my gosh, there’s a flock of blue jays! Or, you’re sitting in the Taco Bell drive-through and the bushes are loaded with little brown birds,” she said of her hobby.

“It was a light-bulb moment that you can incorporate birding into your daily life — especially as teaching moments for my kids,” Norris said of her three children. “They’re not birders, but when Valerie was on the high school Quiz Bowl team, she got all the bird questions right.”

When Norris, 2016 Fulltime Faculty Member of the Year, was a birding “newbie,” she relied on a compact field guide, Birds of Michigan. “People these days don’t know how lucky they have it” with online resources such as the free Merlin app and eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s project.

“They have loads of information for researchers in the scientific community and average people,” she said, displaying on her laptop a series of questions which help identify birds. Where was the bird seen? When did you see it?  What size was it? What were its main colors? What was it doing?

Once the bird’s secret identity has been revealed — and black-masked cedar waxwings do resemble superheroes — users can browse photos and listen to calls and songs.

“The updated version of Merlin has sound ID,” Norris noted, “because you hear a lot more birds than you see.” eBird.org collates sightings from across the globe, gathering data useful to environmental conservation strategies, such as migration patterns.

Birders even play their own board game, Wingspan.

“There are different personalities in birding,” Norris said. “Some are competitive. Their goal is to see the most variety, so they keep a tally. I’m not in that camp. I’m more about the journey than the destination. My favorite birding spot is Wolf Lake State Fish Hatchery” near Mattawan. “There are multiple ponds with low shrubs and reeds along the edges — water is a huge magnet for birds — with woods all around.”

With sandhill cranes becoming a frequent sight around SMC’s campus, the Kiwanis Club of Battle Creek, in partnership with Michigan Audubon, Oct. 8-9 hosts CraneFest, as it has since 1994, to celebrate the fall migration of thousands of cranes which touch down in Big Marsh Lake.

“They sound like remnants of dinosaurs,” Norris said. “Of all the birds, they have the most prehistoric sound.”

Seeing a barred owl up close while camping at Wilderness State Park enroute to Mackinac Island ranks as her most memorable birding experience. Norris, who joined SMC in 1999, marvels at cowbirds, which lay their eggs in other species’ nests, and prefers avian mascots — and not just Roadrunners.

“Tigers and Bears? Boring,” Norris said. Give her Cardinals, Falcons,  Orioles, Penguins, Seahawks, Eagles, Ravens, Blue Jays, Hawks, Pelicans, Ducks or Hawkeyes.

While seeing eagles has become more common, birdwatchers lament dwindling whippoorwill, bobwhite and meadowlark sightings.

Partners in Flight, for example, lists whippoorwills as a “common bird in steep decline.” The North American Breeding Bird Survey estimates its population dropped 69 percent between 1966 and 2010.

Discussing Lake Michigan “seagulls” prevalent at Berrien County’s The Orchards Mall, Norris reminds her audience that there are numerous varieties of gulls. Juveniles are speckled and look different from mature birds. “Throw in the plumage on a female versus a male,” Norris said, “and there are additional ways to throw you off. Goldfinches are bright yellow in the summer. They’re here in the winter, too, but transition to dull-colored.”

Monk parakeets first appeared in Chicago in the late 1960s in Hyde Park. In the early ’70s, they nested and started breeding in a park across the street from the home of Mayor Harold Washington, who considered them good luck. The tropical birds’ large nests attracted attention.

No one is sure how a type of small parrot native to South America landed in Chicago, but hundreds of thousands of parakeets were brought to this country for pets in the 1950s and ’60s, so someone either released them or they escaped. By 2006, 300 lived in Hyde Park, with others spotted throughout the city.

Her Oct. 4 Lightning Talk at Fred L. Mathews Library proved particularly timely because earlier in the day the college cabinet approved establishing a birdwatching station equipped with two binoculars for the glass-walled rear seating area overlooking the forest.

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