how to use ebird

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Where to Find Birds

eBird makes it easy to find birds no matter where you are, even if you are in a new city or location.

One of the best and most useful tools you can have in your birder’s toolkit is the knowledge of how to use eBird. Once you have mastered the art of eBird you will know the hottest and best places to go birding, no matter where you may travel!

hummingbird feeder saftey

Education, Guides, Main Feed

Hummingbird Feeder Safety

Hummingbirds are easy to attract to a backyard garden, a cinch to keep well fed, and a joy to watch. These sparkling jewels of summer are easy to love.

But if you don’t take proper care to provide healthy nectar and clean feeders, they’re also an easy bird to love to death.

Hummingbird feeders must be kept clean and free from mold and fungus, or the tiny hum-buzzers you so enjoy could develop a serious and deadly fungus infection. This infection causes the tongue to swell, making it impossible for the bird to feed.

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Tips for Printing Bird Photos

You’ve taken lots of photos of birds by now, selected the very best ones, put them in your online portfolio and now you’re ready for what comes next: making prints of your very best photographs!

There is a gratification that you get from holding and looking at physical copies of your photos that you will never get seeing them displayed on a computer monitor. Once you have shot many pictures, selected the best. and edited the photos, it’s time to think about printing some to frame and display in your home or office.

beginner birder's gull guide cover

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The Beginner Birder’s Gull Guide

Gulls can be confusing! Here are a few tricks to help tell some of the more common gulls apart.

This gull guide is for adult birds only. Gulls get even more tricky than depicted here, due to the fact that juvenile gulls are completely different colors, usually brown with a black bill. Juvenile identification will take more practice, but start with learning the differences between adult gulls, then focus on the young ones. These are the four main gulls I’ve seen in Southern California:

spotted towhee before and after editing

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Editing Bird Photos: A Beginner’s Guide

You’ve just returned from your first birding trip with a camera full of photos, now you’re ready to go through them all, edit them, and post them for the world to enjoy. Let’s get started! In this guide I’m going to be showing you how to edit bird photos with Adobe Lightroom CS6. This article shows some of the tweaks I make to my photos before posting them online, but won’t go into the technical things that each change does, you’ll see it for yourself as you edit your own photos.

Why Lightroom instead of Photoshop?

There are two main advantages of using Lightroom to edit your photos.