How to Know the Birds: Field Craft with Ted Floyd

Join us on a day of exploring birding field craft, and spend some serious quality time with the diverse and fascinating breeding bird community in and around Aspen. Field trips to different birding hotspots will give us direct experience with around 100 species of mainly mountain birds: everything from ridiculously colorful neotropical migrants to behaviorally complex waterfowl to striking raptors to hardy permanent residents of the boreal forest. We will cover the basics of bird identification—with an emphasis on the “whole bird” approach that encourages us to watch birds in a broad ecological context. A major theme will be bird study in the digital age; to that end, we will learn how to contribute our bird sightings to eBird and other citizen-science databases. Field time will be interactive, dynamic, and fun!