Birdwatching

Irish Firsts even, the twitches are relatively small.

Which is always nice as well, but to get the mix of a Twitch like that, it was just chaotic.

Got a great aura, haven't

they? You seem to be a very popular figure in Britain, Brian.

Everybody was saying hello, I understand.

Is that the cafe? Well, just at the Twitch.

Yeah, no, it was great to meet so many people and...

Yeah, a lot of people kind of come up and introduce themselves to me, and yeah, it was great to be able to chat away to them.

By the way, if you listen to this like November 7th or something, it'll be depressing that I'm talking about Halloween.

Hundreds of bird watchers.

Now, I saw these bird watchers when I was in Costa Rica.

I thought they were losers.

But, you know, I actually think it's kind of cool that they have a hobby, like throwing a ball to yourself on the front lawn.

Hundreds of bird watchers descended on a tiny coastal community of Moss Beach, California, after a Stanford student, what a dork, spotted an incredibly rare bird called a yellow-browed warbler.

W-A-R-B-L-E-R. Warbler.

Wobbler.

We're

back at Plummer Park in Hollywood, California with the Three Stooges and the Bird Watchers.

Look how short they are.

They're all like 5'1".

At Vogue, a lot of our staff members are ardent birdwatchers.

And so we wanted to do a birdwatching fashion story of sort of haute technical gear birdwatching in Acadia National Park.

And we had a trained ornithologist and long-in-the-tooth ornithologist who... came with our models to Birdwatch, and he said it was the first time in 40 years that they hadn't seen any birds in two days, so that was unfortunate, but it was the spirit that counts.

Yeah, so we have our general take a cover, which she has the movie Clara and the Sun coming out, and the new season of Wednesday comes out early next year.

She was filming Wednesday in Ireland when this shoot and interview was happening, so we really got in touch the middle of that moment.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It's the American Birding Podcast and the American Birding Association.

I am Nate Swick.

Good bird conservation news is occasionally hard to find these days, but it's always worth highlighting it when we do get it.

California doves.

Additional help comes from Maggie Fitzgibbon, Greg Neese, and Frank Izagiri, who suggests enlisting the dead Kennedys in the promotion of this effort because California Uber Atlas is right there.

You can find us online at aba.org, on social media, most everywhere as American Birding Association on Blue Sky.

We are at ABA Birds.

But if you're doing bird photography, you need like a big scope.

And I guess that's kind of what it turned into later on, right? It's like, you know, a lot of the bird watchers and stuff, they have like big binoculars, they have big bird watching scopes.

It's pretty cool.

It's like normally the scopes, you know, like the Simmons scopes or the vortex scopes or the loophole scopes that like hunters would normally use as, you know, it's monocular ones.

And that's even still kind of hard to see because, you know, they're pretty small animals.

So if you really want to get up close and then make sort of more specific observations about their physical features and their nature, you know, like where locations of certain colors are, certain color feathers or certain spots.

I think that's sort of a fun of the bird watching hobby that's out there of what people are doing.

You know, like they're trying to identify, trying to look for, trying to observe and appreciate the differentiations that they see in the species that they spot.

Because you are so focused moving through nature, you tend to forget about all the other stresses and all the other things that's busy in your life.

Welcome to the Birding Life Podcast, Africa's biggest birding podcast.

My name is Adam, and today I'm really excited to highlight a birding event that has been growing into something very special, the Batau Birding Festival in Plettenberg Bay.

The festival runs from the 23rd to the 30th of October, 2026, and brings together great birding, beautiful habitats, conservation, community, and a slightly different way of experiencing birds.

Summed up perfectly in this year's theme, slow down, look up, reconnect.

My guest today is Stephan van Wyk, the person behind the festival.

We're going to chat about how the festival started, why Batao is such a special birding area, and what makes this event different, and what visitors can look forward to this year.

So Stefan, first and foremost, welcome to the Birding Life podcast.

Although it was from a distance, he recalls today, it was a memorable moment and an awesome feeling.

Across the bottom of pages 28 and 29 is a box titled Birding as a Hobby, Inspiration from Will Gladstone.

What is a birder? A birder is a person who enjoys observing birds in the wild and trying to identify them.

Most birders invest in a good set of binoculars.