We Helped Scientists Track Birds This Summer. (Published 2023)

One Saturday morning in June, Amy Simmons spotted some sparrows flitting around a coastal marsh in Maine. She and her two companions, all dedicated bird-watchers, quickly identified one of the foraging birds as a Nelson’s sparrow, a small, round bird with a yellow stripe over its eye. Then, overhead, they spotted something slightly different. The stripe over this sparrow’s eye had a more saturated, orange tint, and its breast was speckled with black and white.

It was a saltmarsh sparrow, a species threatened by sea level rise. Without significant conservation action, climate change could render the species extinct by the middle of this century, some scientists predict.

“It’s a beautiful bird,” said Ms. Simmons, who works in fund-raising at the National Audubon Society. “It’s exciting to see it. But then it kind of breaks your heart at the same time. Because it is so threatened right now.”

Ms. Simmons snapped some photos and logged the observation in eBird, a website and app that allows scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to collect observations from bird-watchers worldwide. The data has already helped scientists keep tabs on bird populations, many of which are in steep decline, and track how their behaviors and lives are shifting with a changing climate.

But the data has gaps; eBird generally receives fewer submissions in the summer than it does during the spring and fall migratory seasons, and much of the data comes from popular bird-watching locations, like parks and nature preserves. So this summer, The New York Times collaborated with the lab on a citizen science project, inviting readers to make birding part of their daily routines and to share their observations with researchers. Participants were encouraged to continue birding throughout the slow season and to venture beyond their favorite bird-watching haunts.

We shared a video showcasing participants, and how the data you submitted helps scientific research, with attendees of the The New York Times Climate Forward event, a gathering of leaders in business, science and public policy about the solutions to climate change.

America’s birds are in trouble. Since 1970, nearly 3 billion birds have vanished from the skies over North America.

Most of those losses have been in migratory species, which may breed in the United States or Canada in the summer before heading elsewhere for the winter. Many spend more time living on Caribbean beaches or in Costa Rican forests than they do in American backyards. “They’re really visitors to North America,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, co-director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Protecting these birds will require working across international borders and safeguarding all of their habitats, many of which are under threat. If migrating birds lose their winter refuges, the consequences will ripple across the hemisphere.

“If we lose Central America’s forests, we can lose North America’s birds,” said Jeremy Radachowsky, the director for Mesoamerica and the western Caribbean at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

To illuminate these connections, scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developed “shared stewardship” maps in collaboration with Partners in Flight, an international bird conservation network. Each map displays the key wintering grounds for the migratory species that have a significant summer presence in a particular U.S. state or region. The maps are based on data from eBird, a database of observations from bird watchers around the world.

As our thanks for contributing to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s important work, we are inviting readers to spot the many feathered friends that have appeared in the New York Times Crossword.

The good news is that these birds can be found without binoculars: All you need is a pencil if you want to print the puzzles out, or a device on which to solve them. And if you’d like a guide, the Wordplay crossword column provides hints and tips. (Fair warning: The columns contain spoilers for the puzzles.)

Birding Adventure No. 1 (Puzzle, Wordplay column)

Those chevron-shaped black squares in this puzzle make spotting the birds easy: They are supposed to resemble a flock of birds in flight. All you have to do is decipher the message that runs through the long Across entries.

The Maui wildfires are an ongoing human tragedy. At least 111 people have died, more than 1,000 people are unaccounted for, and many have been displaced from their homes.

But such fires also put animals at risk. Wildlife, livestock and pets often perish in fires. Flames can destroy critical habitats for endangered species and set back conservation efforts. (The Hawaii fires threatened the Maui Bird Conservation Center, which is home to some of the world’s most endangered birds.) And all creatures that breathe air are susceptible to smoke.

“Birds are especially vulnerable, because they have an incredibly efficient respiratory system, which is designed to deliver enough oxygen to power flight,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies how smoke affects birds and other wildlife. The avian respiratory system is especially adept at drawing oxygen out of the air, but if there are pollutants wafting around, birds take those up readily, too.

Precisely how smoke affects birds is still a nascent field of research, with many unanswered questions. But studies have shown that smoke can damage birds’ lungs and make them more vulnerable to respiratory infections. And the fine particulate matter that is present in smoke — and causes well-documented health problems in humans — can also accumulate in birds’ airways. “We know that air pollution, and smoke specifically, causes respiratory distress and makes it more difficult for birds to breathe,” Dr. Sanderfoot said.

Plumes of smoke may also disrupt the journeys of migrating birds, many of which are under threat. In 2020, tule geese, which summer in Alaska, began their fall migrations in the middle of a record wildfire season on the West Coast. The geese needed more than double the usual time to arrive at their traditional Oregon stopover site, and their flight paths were nearly 500 miles longer, scientists found.

We’re featuring profiles of project participants. If you want to share your birding journey and be considered for a profile, please email birds@nytimes.com.

Patrick Maurice credits his mother for his birding passion. One of his earliest memories is of her lifting him up to a scope at age 5 to see a yellow-billed loon near his hometown, Atlanta. His brother also came along on such trips, but only Mr. Maurice became interested enough to become a birder. Now 24, he is trying to make birding a career, as a freelance tour guide around the country.

“Birding is not exactly a popular hobby for a young person,” Mr. Maurice said. “In high school, I kept it in the closet. I had friends, but I didn’t tell them I was a birder.”

He had stopped hiding his passion by the time he went to the University of Georgia, where he pursued a major in wildlife sciences and began thinking about birding for a living. He didn’t want to be a scientist, but he loved showing people birds. His mother encouraged him to find a well-paying job and leave birding for the weekend, as she had. “But I told her that saying, about doing what you love and it won’t feel like work,” Mr. Maurice said.

He has now worked as a junior instructor at several youth birding camps and as an interpretive naturalist for the Cape May Bird Observatory in New Jersey. This summer, he led tours in Yellowstone National Park for Natural Habitat Adventures, a wildlife company. The frequent travel makes it difficult to settle down with a girlfriend, he said, but he summed up his feeling with a German word, zugunruhe, a birding term that describes the restlessness that prompts birds to migrate. “I’m always thinking about the next trip,” he said.

Four out of five emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea region very likely lost their chicks late last year because of disappearing sea ice underneath their breeding grounds, according to a new study.

Parts of this coastal region had lost all of their sea ice by November, which was probably before penguin chicks had grown waterproof adult feathers and learned to swim. It’s the first time scientists have seen a widespread failure across multiple penguin colonies in a region, researchers said.

“At the moment, we’re not sure if this is just a blip,” said Norman Ratcliffe, a seabird ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey and one of the authors of the new study. “But if this becomes a consistent phenomena in the longer term, clearly it’s going to have repercussions for the species.”

This week’s challenge for new birders: Try joining a group for an outing, or go birding with at least one new person.

And if you’re already part of a birding community, tell us about it. Did you meet friends — or even your spouse — through birding? What does it bring you? In a future dispatch, we’ll share highlights from participants.

In early 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests were taking place worldwide and the pandemic was beginning to unfold, Ollie Olanipekun and Nadeem Perera founded Flock Together, a group for birders of color in Britain.

“I go to these remote towns where there’s no people of color, there’s no diversity,” Mr. Olanipekun, 38, said. “On your own, those looks you’re getting feel like daggers.” Numbers provided a sense of safety.

Whether or not you’re into birds, joining a birding group can change your life.

Last week, we looked at groups that birders can join to make the activity a community affair. Our challenge for beginners was to try bird-watching with at least one other person. We also asked if anyone had met friends — or even a spouse — through a birding activity. We didn’t expect so many answers in the affirmative.

“I’m not sure it was our very first date, as she claims,” Rick Wright from Bloomfield, N.J., said. “But it was very early on that I invited a woman to go to the swine effluent ponds with me to look for shorebirds. She said yes. We’ve been married 25 years.”

For Gordon Dayton in Connecticut, it was the reverse. He was not interested in birding when he met his wife of many years, but the activity was something that happened along the way. “Some of us come to birding through love of birds, some through love of bird-lovers,” Mr. Dayton said.

Not everyone is eager to make birding anything more than a solitary activity. “I’m not a joiner,” Margaret Poethig from Arlington, Va., said. But as a beginner, she knew that other birders could help improve her skills. “So I started by participating in a local citizen science project, joined a couple of local bird clubs, went on a few bird walks and volunteered at a couple of club events.” Now she sometimes meets people who post checklists on her local eBird hot spot.

Throughout the summer birding project, we have been encouraging new birders to try different ways to observe birds. Sketching is one way to deepen your observation skills.

We asked a master illustrator, David Sibley, to share tips on how to draw, and we invited readers to share their attempts. Below is a selection of what you sent us, along with insights into how it changed your birding experience.

Tell us in the comments: Have you tried sketching? Has it changed the way you observe birds?

Language has long been considered the exclusive provenance of humans.

But in the animal kingdom, birds, not primates, communicate with the level of vocal complexity and variability closest to ours. Ornithologists have made progress in understanding the rich variety of ways in which birds converse, thanks in part to large and growing databases of bird calls such as one from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which includes millions of recordings captured by citizen scientists.

Each bird species has its own distinct set of sounds. Consider the black-capped chickadee, which frequents the northern United States and southern Canada year-round.

With only slight variation, black-capped chickadees from Vancouver to Virginia make this same vocalization.

Still more amazing is what birds can express with specific sounds. Test your ability to decipher them.

On the same day George Floyd was murdered by a police officer on a Minneapolis street — Memorial Day, 2020 — Christian Cooper was searching for songbirds in Central Park. Mr. Cooper, who is Black, would be vaulted to fame after a run-in with a white woman who called the police and falsely claimed he was threatening her when he asked her to leash her dog.

To David Yarnold, the chief executive of the National Audubon Society at the time, both events demanded a response. The powerful conservation group and pre-eminent bird enthusiasts’ organization needed to weigh in, and even examine itself.

“Black lives matter,” Mr. Yarnold, who is white, wrote in a letter to the society’s staff after the first weekend of the George Floyd protests. “Our nation is in turmoil because our governments, our institutions (including Audubon), and private individuals haven’t done nearly enough to act on that fundamental truth.”

Mr. Yarnold promised to start a “long conversation” about how the Audubon Society could “become antiracist in everything we do.”

Three years later, that long conversation has led the society into an all-out feud over its own handling of race within the organization. Complaints about workplace conditions and the treatment of minority employees and hobbyists are bound up in the question of whether the conservation group should drop its namesake, John James Audubon, who owned slaves.

Record temperatures, drought, smoky air and loss of habitat make it increasingly difficult for feathered and other winged creatures in urban and suburban areas to find the water they need.

But there’s a simple way that humans can help them out: install a birdbath.

“A source of clean, fresh water can be one of the hardest things for birds to find,” said Kim Eierman, an environmental horticulturist and the founder of EcoBeneficial, an ecological landscape design firm, who teaches at the New York Botanical Garden and Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Putting in birdbaths is something that’s easy for homeowners and even apartment dwellers and tenants of commercial spaces, she said. “You’re increasing the health of the birds by providing a resource that’s really tough to find,” said Ms. Eierman, who lays out nature-friendly tips in her book “The Pollinator Victory Garden.” “In the summer months, it’s way more important than putting up birdseed.”

Every Memorial Day weekend since 2020, the five members of the Galbatross Project have hosted Female Bird Day to encourage birders to identify, appreciate and collect data on what they call the “most misunderstood birds in North America.”

“Humans are visual creatures,” said Joanna Wu, a doctoral student in the ecology and evolutionary biology program at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a member of the Galbatross Project. “We are attracted to things that are bright. In North America, that tends to be male birds.”

Half of all birds are females, yet they have long been overlooked in ornithology. A study of five prominent natural history museums, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York and London’s Natural History Museum, found that their avian collections skewed heavily toward male specimens. In a 2018 article Kenn Kaufman, a field editor for Audubon Magazine, wrote that “an unconscious bias against female birds is widespread in birding,” and described his own efforts to correct his partiality.

Scientists are beginning to realize what they’ve been missing. For instance, female birds were long assumed to rarely sing. This notion likely grew out of a longstanding focus on birds of North America, where female birds do tend to sing less than males. But, in the 1990s, researchers turned their attention to the tropics and found that female birds there were prolific singers.

Karan Odom, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park, is one of the leaders of the Female Bird Song Project, which asks birders to observe and record female birds singing. She has found “evidence that a lot of species have female song and that it is probably more the norm, rather than the exception, and that it’s probably ancestral,” she said.

At the outset of the Times birding project, we asked participants what they most wanted to know about birds. The most common question we received: How do you make a yard appealing to birds?

We invited Kim Eierman, an ecological landscape designer based just outside New York City, to share some tips. Ms. Eierman, the founder of EcoBeneficial, a horticulture consultancy, teaches at the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, among other places, and will be leading a discussion on the topic at the Climate Forward event on Sept. 21.

Start with thinking of your landscape as an ecosystem, not just a garden, Ms. Eierman says. In her view, conventional lawns — “green deserts” — and nonnative plant species have no place in that system. Instead, focus on what she calls “the big four for birds”: nesting sites, cover, natural food sources and clean water.

Here’s what Ms. Eierman recommends:

Emulate the layers found in a local, natural ecosystem

Climate change is an issue that stretches across borders, touching every facet of our lives. Addressing it likewise requires shifts in almost every industry and institution. On Sept. 21, The New York Times will bring together newsmakers, including innovators, activists, scientists and policymakers, for an all-day event examining the actions needed to confront climate change.

Times subscribers can sign up to watch the livestream and connect with online attendees.

Sessions will include: Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank Group; Al Gore, former vice president of the United States; Bill Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Ebony Twilley Martin, executive director of Greenpeace USA; Marie Kondo, tidying expert and founder of KonMari Media; Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg L.P. and Bloomberg Philanthropies and Robin Wall Kimmerer, scientist and author.

Signing up for the livestream will also give you an opportunity to chat with attendees on the messaging platform Slack, launching a week before the event. Each day will feature a different topic and guests, including about birding and biodiversity.

Details about the Slack channel and event schedule will be shared after registering.

This summer’s weather records — a summer of climate reckoning, in the words of the Times Opinion columnist David Wallace-Wells — have brought a number of challenges for birds. Unprecedented wildfires have burned all summer in Canada, posing a threat to the respiratory systems that power the flights of migratory species. Emperor penguins lost breeding grounds to record-low Antarctic sea ice.

Now it’s hurricane season. Just like wildfires, hurricanes can divert birds from their migratory paths; in the parlance of ornithologists, birds are entrained and displaced by the storms. Essentially, birds that are entrained are pulled into the hurricane, sometimes all the way to its eye; birds that are displaced are pushed away by it.

For birders, this presents an opportunity — birds entrained or pushed off course can make for a rare sighting far inland from normal habitat or migration routes. Hurricane Idalia has been the most significant hurricane of the season so far, briefly reaching Category 4 status before making landfall in rural Florida with a powerful storm surge. And it sent birds in all directions from its path, in a manner that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology has been tracking: American flamingoes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, black terns in the Atlanta area.

Hurricane Hilary, which resulted in the first tropical storm warning for Los Angeles, scattered birds across the desert. Storm petrels were sighted from Las Vegas to Tucson, Ariz., and another was spotted in the high desert of Nevada toward Reno, near the California border. A red-billed tropic bird, typically found off the coasts of Southern California and Baja California, was seen near Lake Havasu City in Arizona, and frigatebirds clustered near Yuma.

Hurricanes are tough on birds. The Gulf of Mexico, where Idalia pushed through, is one of the hemisphere’s most important migration routes. Entraining and displacing is extra work for birds, and not all survive what is sometimes called a “wreck.” The course and aftermath of a hurricane can be risky for birders, too. But along with the personal reward of spotting an unusual bird, such post-hurricane counts help monitor the health of ecosystems at their extremes.

Ice storms in Texas, smoke from Canadian wildfires billowing over much of North America, 31 consecutive days of 110-degree heat in Phoenix: Those have been just some of the swings in the weather this year.

How are the birds faring through it all?

It’s too early to draw any confident conclusions from the data, scientists say. Maybe there were fewer sightings of birds in Phoenix during the heat wave, or maybe fewer people ventured outside to bird watch. Based on past data, however, researchers know that hot and cold spells have a negative effect on birds, especially newly born hatchlings. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology runs a program called NestWatch that enables volunteers to report what is going on in a nest: how many eggs, how many of them hatch, how many of the hatchlings eventually fly away.

In a paper that has been submitted to the journal Nature Communications, Conor Taff of the Cornell Lab and J. Ryan Shipley of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research examined more than 300,000 breeding records for 24 North American species of birds from NestWatch and two similar programs, Project NestWatch in Canada and Project MartinWatch, which tracks young purple martins.

For each of the 300,000 nests in North America, Dr. Taff and Dr. Shipley looked up the weather records at that location, noting the hottest and coldest three-day stretches during the nesting period. “When there’s a particularly cold or a particularly hot period, does it impact your ability to successfully fledge nestlings?” Dr. Taff said.

I should probably begin with a confession: I am not a birder. There were even times when I found myself thinking that birds could be a little, er, boring. For years, I chalked my disinterest up to the fact that I lived in New York City, where the avian world seemed to begin and end with the pigeons I saw pecking at the street trash in my neighborhood.

Eventually I came to realize that the birds were not lacking; I was. My indifference was a failure of observation and imagination; even a novice bird-watcher could have told me that urban bird life includes far more than pigeons.

Of course, pigeons are remarkable in their own right. They have top-notch navigation skills, and their willingness to gobble down nearly any food item they encounter may be what secures their future in our ever-urbanizing world. Indeed, in a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers found that cities tend to favor bird species with broad diets.

“They can take advantage of resources as they become available,” said Frank La Sorte, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who was one of the authors of the study.

That is just one of the findings of the new paper, which explores the functional traits of urban animal communities around the globe. A large international team of researchers analyzed data not only on birds but also on bats, bees, beetles, reptiles and amphibians in 379 cities in 48 countries.

We asked readers what hurdles you have encountered while birding. Whether you are experienced or new to the activity, have you had any stumbling blocks that made you think twice about continuing? Respond in the comments.

We live in southeastern Arizona where summer temperatures make birding more challenging, especially this year when it’s been over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the past month. The heat is tough on both birders and the birds they love. Getting an early start to arrive at a favorite spot before 5 a.m. is the best fix. We’re also making sure that the birds in our yard have plenty of water for drinking and cooling off.

—Diane Drobka Pima, Ariz.

“Do you know how much trouble I would be in if I’d hit you?” raged the golfer. And right he was to be incensed — I’d endangered us both. Without sufficiently surveying the scene, including the tee box about 25 yards away, I’d rushed over to the edge of the fairway. Why? To get a better look at the white pelicans blissfully floating on the pond, enjoying the balmy winter weather in Palm Springs, Calif.

—Gayle Smith Padgett, Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France

Even with field guides and online encyclopedias, even with an app that can instantly identify birds from a few chirps, bird-watching can be hard.

Roughly half of the 30,000 Times readers who signed up to join the NYT birding project indicated that they were new to birding. Count me among them. I’ve honed the reflex to whip out the Merlin app to identify bird calls when I’m between work calls or on daily dog walks — yet I still struggle to actually remember what bird it was when I hear the melody again. Never mind the dots that fleet overhead, which experienced birders manage to name in seconds. Maybe, I thought, it was time to learn from people who have been doing it a while.

Recently we urged birding-project participants to join a local group outing. BirdLife International coordinated several walks in support of the Times project — one in Manhattan, one in Singapore and another in Nairobi, Kenya (more on those below). Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Golden Gate Audubon Society organized outings, too; I joined two of them.

One started in the parking lot of a protected wildlife area called the Dotson Family Marsh, in Richmond, Calif. The group leader, David Mostardi, had barely introduced himself when he pointed a scope at an American kestrel that had perched on a nearby pylon. Two ospreys appeared overhead, and soon after we saw egrets flying close to the shore. All the while, Mr. Mostardi apologized for the lack of bird species compared to winter.

On the walk, we spotted a lone long-billed curlew by the water, about a dozen killdeer scurrying between shrubs and dozens of Canada geese, among other species. Fumbling with my binoculars, I struggled to see the various birds that people were calling out, until someone advised me to first look closely with “bare eyes.” It worked.

This week, we invite participants to try birding by ear. Practice identifying five species common to your area by their vocalizations. The Sound ID feature of the free Merlin Bird ID app can offer suggestions for which species are calling or singing around you. (People who are deaf or hard-of-hearing may find Merlin’s spectrograms helpful as visual representations of the sounds.)

Tell us: If you’re an experienced birder, share tips for identifying birds from their sounds. And if you’re trying this for the first time, let us know how it goes.

Michael Hurben, 56, first got into birding in his 20s. He also got interested in Claire Strohmeyer, who happened to be a more experienced birder. On their third date, when she mentioned that she was going on a walk with the Audubon Society, Mr. Hurben knew he had met the woman for him.

“I just lost it, because she had been doing this her whole life,” he said. “That was our instant bond. I wasn’t going to let her go after that.” They were married in 1993, and birding became the activity they did together, eventually taking them to 45 countries to see new species.

But just as Mr. Hurben’s interest in birding, and in Ms. Strohmeyer, was blossoming, his vision began to deteriorate. “It was nasty timing,” he said. “It used to really bother me to not see birds. I had to come to grips with that eventually.”

Auke-Florian Hiemstra, a biologist who studies how wild animals repurpose human materials, thought he had seen everything. In his research on the common coot, a water bird often found in Dutch canals, he had discovered nests containing windshield wipers, sunglasses, plastic carnations, condoms and envelopes used to package cocaine.

“So my definition of what is nesting material was already quite a broad one,” said Mr. Hiemstra, a doctoral student at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. “Almost anything can become part of a bird nest.”

Still, he was not prepared for what he found when he went to investigate a strange nest that had been spotted outside a hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, in July 2021. Nestled near the top of a sugar maple tree was a Eurasian magpie nest that resembled a cyberpunk porcupine, with thin metal rods sticking out in every direction.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he recalled. “These are birds making a nest with anti-bird spikes.”

This week, for the New York Times summer birding project, we invite birders to try their hand at drawing a bird. You can do this from life or from a photograph. Try to produce at least one sketch in the upcoming week. Share it with us by emailing birds@nytimes.com.

You don’t need to spend hours honing your illustration (unless you want to). As the master illustrator David Sibley, of the widely popular Sibley field guides, describes in the interview below, the most important aspect of drawing a bird may just be that it changes how you see.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Do you have any formal training in illustration?

No, I am self-taught.

I should say that I don’t consider myself really an artist as much as a scientific illustrator. I am trying to convey information, and it’s all about the details of the bird: the shape, the posture, the colors, the patterns. The outline is the most important part; if that’s right, everything else sort of falls into place, and it’s just like a coloring book.

How often, and where, do you go birding?

I’m lucky now to live in a place where I can just step outside and walk into the woods or around some fields and go birding right here. But I am always aware of birds. I am listening and watching through a window or along the road — wherever I am, I am always birding.

Do you think technology will ever replace illustration in the birding world?

I’ve wondered about that. I don’t think so. An illustration provides so much more than a photograph. In an illustration, I can create a typical bird, an average bird of a species in the exact pose that I want, and create an image of a similar species in exactly the same pose so that all the differences are apparent. And I control the lighting and the color. You just can’t get that with photographs; photographs are always a record of one individual bird at one instant in time.

One of my concerns is that the craft of illustration might disappear, that the motivation for someone to put in the time to learn a subject like this, to be able to produce the illustrations — there might not be the same kind of incentive to do that. There’s a real, deep, personal satisfaction and reward for taking the time to really watch a bird and study it and figure out how to draw it.

How has spending so much time illustrating birds and ruminating on them shaped your understanding of the natural world and of birds?

It has really shaped the way I think about everything. Drawing is a way of slowing down to take the time to look at something, and drawing also gives you a record of what you thought you saw. It’s not like a photograph; it’s your interpretation of what you saw.

Getting better at drawing is partly about developing technical skill, but it’s more about getting to know the subject. Your drawing becomes a record of your understanding of that bird in that moment. Drawing in that way encourages you to be a more thoughtful observer.

How to Draw a Bird the David Sibley Way

Camille BakerSketching in New York City

For The Times’s summer birding project, I spoke to the field guide illustrator about how to sketch a bird. Here’s how he draws a black-capped chickadee →

David Sibley

This week, for The New York Times’s summer birding project, we invite beginners to try birding at two different times of day for at least five minutes each. Note what you observe and compare. Are certain species more abundant or vocal at particular hours? How does the behavior of various species differ?

Report back with your observations in the comments section.

You might think of a birder as the type to rise at 5 a.m., slip on a bulky pair of rain boots and plod off into a muddy marsh to spot a rare sparrow just as the sun begins to peek over the horizon — and to do it all in time to be home for breakfast.

But the truth is, “any time is a good time to go birding,” said Kevin McGowan, an instructor at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Early birders have the best chance of catching a lot of activity, as many species begin to vocalize and feed to greet the day. During the early morning, “people can hear things like thrushes singing that are much less frequent later, ” Dr. McGowan said.

You’ve decided to take up birding. You’ve even decided to use eBird, an app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that collects sightings by birders around the world.

After going out and looking for birds, making a list of what you’ve seen and checking it twice, you submit it to Cornell …

And then what? What does Cornell do with your checklist?

“It doesn’t go to a black hole,” said Jenna Curtis, one of the leaders of the eBird project. “A lot of things happen all at once when an observation gets submitted.”

Birders sometimes make mistakes, but Dr. Curtis hopes that people using apps like eBird, especially beginners, aren’t deterred by the fear that they are wrong. Sometimes what seemed to be a mistake turns out to be a new discovery.

Christian Cooper and Amy Tan came to birding from very different paths. Cooper had found refuge in birding as a child, long before the Central Park incident that brought him to national attention. For Tan, birding was a more recent discovery, prompted by a need for an outlet away from political events.

For both, birding has been a powerful source of solace and community. In a free, live discussion on Thursday, June 22, Cooper, the author of the new book “Better Living Through Birding,” and Tan, author of the forthcoming book “The Backyard Bird Chronicles,” spoke about the transcendent power of birding and the challenges and the rewards of navigating a predominantly white pastime as people of color. The conversation was hosted by Dodai Stewart, a birding enthusiast and a Metro writer for The New York Times.

We also discussed how you can start birding as part of the New York Times summer birding project. Thousands of people have already signed up to learn more about birds and to help scientists collect birding data during the summer season, when fewer observations are typically submitted. Alan Burdick, an editor on the science desk at The Times, spoke with Jenna Curtis of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology about the importance of gathering this data. Plus, we heard tips from other birders.

Below is an excerpt from Christian Cooper’s essay in the Times Opinion section.

Early in the morning of May 25, 2020, I biked from my apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Central Park to go birding in the Ramble. Despite the uncertainties of the time — New Yorkers were living in a hot spot of the raging Covid pandemic, with no vaccine in sight — I strove to start this warm, sunlit Memorial Day on a happy note by wandering my favorite urban woodlands in search of migrating songbirds.

I was focused on the end-of-season hunt for a mourning warbler, a small yellow and gray skulking bird that’s difficult to spot and relatively rare. I hadn’t yet seen one that year.

Visiting the park in the morning to look for birds has long been a springtime routine for me. I wake before sunrise and grab my Swarovski binoculars — a 50th-birthday present from my father — and head out the door.

On that particular day, just as I approached some ideal mourning warbler habitat, a noise shattered the tranquillity, making me wince. The sound was loud, strident and unmistakable: a person calling after a dog.

Our colleague at Wirecutter, Dan Koeppel, offered this step-by-step guide to birding from inside your home.

There are lots of things to look at from the window of my third-floor apartment in Portland, Maine. There’s a nice view of 19th-century rowhouses and brick sidewalks. There’s Casco Bay, in the distance, with a string of rocky islands and the ferries shuttling between them. There are the idled container ships at the port’s terminals, waiting for commerce to begin again. And there are three different kinds of gulls.

The most common gull — the one you’ll recognize — is the gray-and-white herring gull. But there are two others as well, and using an electronic bird identification guide, it’s pretty easy to figure out what species they are. Their names give them away: the great black-backed gull is large and dark; the ring-billed gull’s beak is encircled by a telltale hoop.

The gulls were the first birds I added to my window list when quarantine began in March 2020. In my first two months birding, I counted another 10 distinct species.

You might be able to see even more, all without leaving the comfort of your home. Depending on your location, your window or yard list could reach 200 or more individual bird species. We’ll go into more details below, but the best place to start is by assembling birding basics.

As part of the New York Times birding project, The Times has a series of prompts to help readers learn how to get started birding. Begin with something foundational: Learn to identify a few of the birds most commonly seen near where you live.

For beginner tips, The Times spoke with Alli Smith, the project coordinator for Merlin — a bird-identification app created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — about learning to bird, and the joy of it.

How do I learn to identify birds?

We’re obviously a little bit biased here, so I’m going to recommend the Merlin Bird ID app. It walks you through a series of five questions that you should be asking yourself when you’re looking at a bird.

Merlin will ask you where you saw the bird specifically and the time of year. A lot of places see different birds depending on the season.

When a bird sings, you may think you’re hearing music. But are the melodies it’s making really music? Or is what we’re hearing merely a string of lilting calls that appeals to the human ear?

Birdsong has inspired musicians from Bob Marley to Mozart and perhaps as far back as the first hunter-gatherers who banged out a beat. And a growing body of research is showing that the affinity human musicians feel toward birdsong has a strong scientific basis. Scientists are understanding more about avian species’ ability to learn, interpret and produce songs much like our own.

Just like humans, birds learn songs from each other and practice to perfect them. And just as human speech is distinct from human music, bird calls, which serve as warnings and other forms of direct communication, differ from birdsong.

While researchers are still debating the functions of birdsong, studies show that it is structurally similar to our own tunes. So, are birds making music? That depends on what you mean.

In 1993, “Jurassic Park” helped inspire 9-year-old Stephen Brusatte to become a paleontologist. So Dr. Brusatte was thrilled to advise the producers of last year’s “Jurassic World: Dominion” on what scientists had learned about dinosaurs since he was a child.

He was especially happy to see one of the most important discoveries make it to the screen: dinosaurs that sported feathers. But judging from the emails he has been receiving, some moviegoers did not share his excitement.

“A lot of people thought it was made up,” said Dr. Brusatte, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. “They thought it was filmmakers trying to do something crazy.”

Far from crazy, feathered dinosaurs have become a well-established fact, thanks largely to a trove of remarkable fossils that have been unearthed in northeast China since the mid-1990s. Now Dr. Brusatte and other paleontologists are trying to determine exactly how feathered dinosaurs achieved powered flight and became the birds that fly overhead today — an evolutionary mystery that stretches more than 150 million years.

Daryln Brewer Hoffstot, a freelance writer in Pennsylvania, is worried about the eastern phoebes around her home.

She thought at first that a nesting female living by her back door could be an eastern wood-pewee, another grayish-white flycatcher with a short bill, but the giveaway was the way the eastern phoebe wagged her tail when she flew off the nest.

Eastern phoebes are in the flycatcher family and consume not just flies but also wasps, grasshoppers and even ticks — great news to those of us who can’t walk in the woods without getting bitten. Native to North America, they also eat small berries from plants such as Virginia creeper. The bird’s call is like its name: an onomatopoeic “fee bee.”

One day last spring when Hoffstot went to check on the mother bird, she found three raw and naked eastern phoebe nestlings tossed onto the porch floor. At first, she suspected brown-headed cowbirds, famous for raiding nests. But she had observed house sparrows divebombing the back door, which she had never seen before, and then she learned that while brown-headed cowbirds often remove eggs to make room for their own, they don’t dump out nestlings.

If a bird is not in a forest and there is no one to see that it is not there, is it really not there?

That, in essence, is the conundrum that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is confronting. For more than two decades, the lab has run eBird, a project that collects observations from amateur bird watchers. It is a successful project: Nearly 900,000 participants around the world have submitted some 18 million lists a year of what they have spotted during their bird-watching sessions. And the number of lists has been growing at a pace of some 20 percent a year.

That has proved to be a trove for scientists to study changes in populations and behavior of birds, revealing “complex relationships between people and birds in ways that we couldn’t have before,” said Tom Auer, who leads the geospatial data science team at the Cornell lab.

For example, the voluminous eBird data has established how the bright lights of big cities draw in migratory birds, especially young ones. And cities, with their canyons of concrete and asphalt, are generally poor habitats for birds. Cornell scientists are now studying whether the diversion leads to exhaustion and starvation, and whether fewer birds survive the migratory journey.

But, as the project relies on the efforts of volunteers, the data does not cover all places equally. “You can imagine obvious places where there aren’t data,” Mr. Auer said. “Mostly because people are drawn to places where they can see the most birds.”

If there’s new hope, it’s blurry. What’s certain: The roller coaster tale of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a majestic bird whose presumed extinction has been punctuated by a series of contested rediscoveries, is going strong.

The latest twist is a peer-reviewed study Thursday in the journal Ecology and Evolution presenting sighting reports, audio recordings, trail camera images and drone video. Collected over the last decade in a Louisiana swamp forest, the precise location omitted for the birds’ protection, the authors write that the evidence suggests the “intermittent but repeated presence” of birds that look and behave like ivory-billed woodpeckers.

But are they?

“It’s this cumulative evidence from our multiyear search that leaves us very confident that this iconic species exists, and it persists in Louisiana and probably other places as well,” said Steven C. Latta, one of the study’s authors and director of conservation and field research at the National Aviary, a nonprofit bird zoo in Pittsburgh that helps lead a program that searches for the species.

But Dr. Latta acknowledges that no single piece of evidence is definitive, and the study is carefully tempered with words like “putative” and “possible.”

Our understanding of birds has been profoundly shaped by the work of everyday people. After all, anyone can step outside and pay attention to the untamed world swooping above.

We invited readers, both new and experienced birders, to participate in a science project we worked on with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We gathered observations about the birds around us, filling in data gaps and giving researchers a clearer picture of biodiversity.

It’s important work. Nearly half of all bird species worldwide are known or suspected to be in decline, and climate change could accelerate this trend.

For beginners, we provided a series of birding challenges to help put them on the path toward contributing scientific data. For experienced birders, we had a bit more to ask. Cornell’s scientific database typically receives fewer birding observations in the summer. So we asked readers to submit as often as possible, even if it was just to record the common birds in their areas.

The project brought together a global community of readers, scientists and researchers who engaged in online discussions and shared what they learned to help others. We also had a virtual event with Christian Cooper and Amy Tan on the joy of birding.

We’re so glad you’re taking part in our summer birding project! Tell us in the comments what got you interested in birding. And if you are just getting started, let us know what you could use help with. We may share your comment in New York Times newsletters and articles.