This Month in Birding – December 2022
December 22, 2022
Thanks to all our listeners and supporters for another exceptional year. To wrap up 2022, we welcome back some insightful and entertaining birder friends to the last This Month in Birding for the year. We’re joined by Popular Science’s Purbita Saha, science writer Ryan Mandelbaum, and The Birdist, Nick Lund to talk about the biggest birding trends of 2022 and our best birding experiences of the year.
Links to article discussed in this episode:
New Shazam for Birds will Identify that Chipping For You
Female Blue Tits Sing Frequently
Old Bones Suggest Presence of Thick-billed Parrots in the Southwest
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The American Birding Podcast brings together staff and friends of the American Birding Association as we talk about birds, birding, travel and conservation in North America and beyond.
Join host Nate Swick every other Thursday for news and happenings, recent rarities, guests from around the birding world, and features of interest to every birder.
Nate is correct regarding Merlin and the Breeding Bird Survey. It should not be used, as it is effectively a second observer – and the 50+ years of existing BBS data are based on the premise of a single observer, with assumptions about imperfect detection built in. The degree to which adding Merlin to the mix would boost the number of species/individuals reported would vary by observer of course – but *any* additional entries would be a “false increase”, and would affect the trends estimated from BBS data. Given how critical the BBS database is for trend estimation (e.g., the… Read more »
I have seen Merlin sound ID to be a huge help for a local birder who is profoundly hard of hearing. They would use Merlin to help them know what birds might be in the area so they could then look for them. Until I birded with this person I had never realized how much it could help to open the world of birding to differently abled people.