There’s a saying among devout outdoor recreationists:  there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad gear. Within limits, this is true.  Many pages could be written about how to dress for warmth in foul conditions, but here are a half dozen essential principles to keep in mind.

 1.  The base layer is more important than what you put on top of it.  The base layer is the one next to your skin, a.k.a your “thermal underwear,” and performs two critical functions.  First, it creates a layer of warmed air next to your skin that cold has a hard time penetrating, or more accurately, makes it harder for warmth to depart your body.  Second (if it’s the right stuff), it will “wick” moisture away from your skin. To do this, it must fit snugly (not tightly), must be of a moisture wicking material (NOT cotton or wool), and must be of a weight befitting the conditions.  Different brands use different ratings according to warmth, typically along the lines of light, medium, and heavy or expedition weight.  The expedition weight stuff is tempting, and that’s what I wear in extreme conditions (mine is sold under the brand name of MTP by Cabela’s), but most of the time it’s too warm. You can always put more clothes on top, because. . .

 2.  If two layers are good, five are better.  Most people are familiar with the concept of layering clothing, which leaves you flexible as conditions change.  Layers also trap air, and air is a poor conductor of heat away from your body.  When it’s really cold  I have  five or six layers on my upper body – for example, two of the Cabela’s MTP underwear (the second one a turtleneck), then a fleece sweater by Mountain Hardwear, then a fleece jacket by The North Face that zips to my chin, then a lightweight, incredibly warm Micropuff jacket by Patagonia.  Pay attention to layering down as well as up.  For example, take a bunch of stuff off if you are going into a restaurant or for an extended drive.  Moisture-wicking base layers are great, but have limits, and if you bead up with sweat, you will wind up with damp inner garments.  When that happens, nothing short of doing jumping jacks continuously can keep you warm then.

 3.  Keep your head and neck covered.  Wear an inner layering garment like a turtleneck or fleece jacket that zips up to your chin.  Then carefully place a fleece neck gaiter over the neck-covering garment but under your outer jacket to seal off all heat loss through the neck opening in your clothes.  A properly worn neck gaiter adds a good 10 degrees of warmth.  Wear a heavy wool or fleece cap – if it’s windy, choose a cap with some kind of wind protection material.  Consider wearing two hats, one right over the other.

 4.  Warm hands.  Wear Gore-tex lined, Thinsulate-insulated gloves with a wicking inner liner.  If your hands always get cold, drop a disposable handwarmer in each glove. Make sure your sleeves are not too tight, just snug enough to keep drafts out.  Otherwise you will lose circulation to your hands, something you do not want to happen.

 5.  Warm feet.  The base layer is important here, too.  I generally opt for heavy wool-synthetic blended socks that wick moisture (mine are sold under the brand name Ultimax). Plain wool socks seem never to conform properly to feet.  For boots, insulated leather boots are great for dry conditions, insulated pac-boots with rubber bottoms are the way to go if it is cold and wet.  Leg gaiters add a lot of warmth, so I often wear them even if there is no snow.  Foot gear must not be tight – you are better off with lighter socks than heavy socks if they make your boots too tight.  I don’t often need them, but when I do, disposable foot warmers make all the difference on super-cold days.  I use a brand called “Toasty-toes,” which are designed to stick lightly under your toes.  I wear them on top of the toes, which is much more comfortable.

 6.  Buy less, but buy good stuff.  As a general rule, I tend to look at what rock climbers, alpinists, backpackers, whitewater boaters, and similar ultra-intense outdoor enthusiasts are using for gear.  These folks are not shopping at big box stores.  Brands I regard highly include Patagonia, Mountain Hardwear, Marmot, The North Face, Outdoor Research, REI, Eastern Mountain Sports, and Cabela’s. Good gear is expensive, initially – but it works, it lasts, and some companies have extended or unconditional warranties.

It’s true that land birds can hunker down during rain or snow events, but not always.  They have to eat, after all.  And some of the best warbler fall-outs ever happen because rain knocks the birds down. I often try to spin bad weather field trips this way:  “Well, now we get to see what birds do in the rain!”

The author wearing a Seattle Sombrero in mixed precipitation. Much better than a hood for birding in foul weather!

Birding in bad weather can also be spectacularly uncomfortable, but I recently found a garment that has made all the difference. 

Often an outing in the rain, even with high-quality rain gear, you’ll take your jacket off and be soaked around the collar and down the front and back of your shirt.  This is from water running down your head and neck. The obvious solution is put up your hood, but I HATE hoods, as do most birders.  Yes, a hood is warm, and yes, it makes your raingear much more effective, but with a hood you can’t hear, and some hoods cut down your peripheral vision.

Enter the “Seattle Sombrero,” a hat made by Outdoor Research.  The minute I saw one while wandering through an REI outlet, I suspected I had found the solution to foul-weather birding.  At $50 there was definitely a jolt of sticker shock, but I bought it anyway and I’m glad I did.  There may be other brands of hats out there that are just as good, but I haven’t found one yet.

The Seattle Sombrero does a superb job dealing with the rain, even a downpour. The brim is wide and the back brim is long, and I have never had the rain funneled down my neck like so many lesser hats allow. Add good raingear, and it’s like wearing a tent. It also doubles as a fine sun hat, though it’s a little warm in the heat of summer.

The hat is composed of waterproof, breathable Gore-Tex® and nylon, with a soft, moisture-wicking lining. The brim can be turned up and secured with Velcro®  closure tabs on one or on both sides. There is a chin strap to keep the hat from flying away on windy days. An internal cinch-band size adjustment system allows you to customize the fit, so for example on cold, rainy days you can fit a wool hat underneath. It’s very portable – I fold it, crush it, shove it in my pack, and it will look funny for an hour or so but eventually regains it’s shape.

The only downside to the hat I’ve found so far is in a high wind the brim can flip up, sometimes even Velcro-ing itself back into the upright position, thus far a small issue for an otherwise great product.

You can judge an outdoor garment a lot of ways, and you should. Is it warm? Is it windproof? Waterproof? Tear resistant? Breathable? Comfortable? Packable? Durable? Affordable? Does it have enough pockets? Are they big enough? How about a hood? Does it look good? (In my view the least important question—form over function, always).

Which jacket would you choose for birding? The less swishy fleece keeps your own noise from overshadowing soft or distant bird sounds, and is less reflective, meaning less visible.

Each of these attributes has a bearing on a garment’s usability, and I suggest you consider each the next time you buy a jacket or sweater, weighing the importance of the answers based on what you hope to use the garment for. But if you are buying a piece of outerwear for birding, please add one more question: does it swish? If the answer is yes, move on.

If that seems obvious to you, GREAT! And you probably hear your bittern every spring. But if you often wear swishy, crinkly outerwear (think “windbreaker” or “rain jacket” or “hard shell”), you are almost certainly diminishing your birding results, and those of your companions.

The main reason is that noisy jackets make it hard to hear beyond the swish. Many bird sounds come faint and distant—still readily hearable, but not without effort and concentration. One of the main challenges for birders new to birding by ear is filtering extraneous sounds, often including a cacophony of bird calls, to single out the one song they want to hear. Human-made sounds must be filtered out to, and while we can’t control the passing airplane or the chatting of our companions, we can certainly control the sound our own clothing makes.

To some extent, the problem of swishy clothing is solvable simply by not moving. The problem is we never know when a bird will vocalize. It could be while we are standing stock still at attention, straining for the sound. If it does, we’ll hear it. But what if the bird waits until we just start to move again to call? The sound could be lost because of noisy clothing.

A minor, secondary issue is that swishy clothing tends to be light-reflecting, meaning it can make our forms more obvious to wildlife than more textured material like fleece and wool. Fleece and wool are, by the way, my two number one choices for birding outerwear.

The downside of fleece and wool is that they are not waterproof and less windproof than harder fabrics. However, higher-end fleece and wool jackets are woven tightly enough to repel all but the most persistent wind, enough so that, if you need more protection, you are probably not going to be hearing much over the wind anyway. So go the soft, non-swish clothing route whenever you can.

Among the relatively few things that stuck with me from college were the words of my environmental law professor. He loved to say, “Knowledge is king.” In this case, he referred to what you know versus what the other party to a lawsuit knows. The side with the most knowledge has the best chance for success.

Probability is HUGE in birding, and smart birders go into the field pre-equipped. This is not to say that possibility should ever be ignored—only that impossibility often should be. (The bar graph shown here is from The Birds of Cape May by David Sibley.)

This is true in birding, too, and with the winter months upon us and the birding slowing down some, now is the time to expand your knowledge of bird occurrence and distribution. I didn’t need a field guide to identify those sandpipers – I needed bar graphs showing what sandpiper species are common in December, which I could find, and have studied many times, in Sibley’s The Birds of Cape May. Before Sibley, I had pretty much memorized the annotated checklist in Bill Boyle’s 1986 edition of A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey.

In the common smallish sandpiper department there really are only two December candidates in Cape May, Sanderling and Dunlin. Sanderlings wouldn’t be flying over mudflats in significant numbers, so they had to be primarily Dunlin. What’s smaller than an 8.5” Dunlin? One of the peep, and the only reasonable possibility for a mid-December peep is Western Sandpiper. See, winter plumage shorebirds are easy!

One of the best ways to prepare for a birding trip anywhere is to lay hands on some printed material that will tell you what you could see. Virtually every area in North America now has this kind of information in great detail, often in the form of bar graphs like the one in Sibley. Periodically while traveling unfamiliar places I’ll hesitate on an identification with the question, “Is it supposed to be here?” That’s the time to check a state checklist, or maybe one from the National Wildlife Refuge or park you are birding.

Actually, that’s not quite right. The time to check the checklists and bar graphs is before you go into the field – then you’re ready when those shorebirds flash by.

Lynn Waterman, of Beaver Dam Boat Rentals (a CMBO business partner), had a good idea, but unfortunately I was pretty sure it wouldn’t sell.  The Glades, a fantastic mosaic of Cumberland County tidal marsh, creeks, and woodland, is undoubtedly one of the best birding spots in New Jersey, and a few hours spent hidden in one spot there could bring anyone some of the best birding experiences of their life.  The trouble is, birders don’t do that.  We tend to be a restless lot, thinking that if the birds aren’t here now, well, they’ve got to be somewhere else, right?  So off we go to look.

At the Avalon Sea Watch migration count, counter Ken Behrens remains stationary as he scans the birds moving past him along the coastline. Photo by France Dewaghe.

Generally I think birders are too impatient.  Migration counts, where the birds come to us, are great examples of sit-and-wait birding at its best, but other than hawk watches and sea watches, how many birders have spent more than a half hour in one location, watching to see what appears?

Perhaps I am biased, thanks to the fact that before I was a birder I was a hunter, and hunting often means long hours in a tree stand or ground blind.  In such situations, periods without wildlife “action” are rare, and even if there are occasional quiet times, they can be punctuated with extraordinary sightings.

For example, if you saw a painting of an adult Northern Goshawk taking a male Northern Cardinal in a snowy landscape, I bet you would think that was an extreme case of artistic license and imagination.  Yet, I was treated to that very scene while deer hunting one winter.  Such sightings come to those who put their time in, concealed and waiting for something to happen, and rarely to the average birder trundling across the landscape.

Excitement builds at the Hawk Watch platform as a juvenile Peregrine Falcon dives on and strikes a Rock Dove—all at eye level for those watching. Photo by Laura Guerard.

Sit-and-wait birding works in any landscape, but there are four situations where I think it is the best method:

1. At migration concentration points. This is no big news – official and unofficial hawk watch sites being only one example of choosing to let the birds come to us.

2.  Near water. Most birds drink and bathe daily, so stationing oneself at a spring in dry country, or a freshwater pond near the ocean, will bring an ever changing selection of birds.  Stationing oneself near water used by drinking and bathing birds is particularly effective in the afternoon, when other birding is slow.

3.  At feeding stations, or near rich sources of natural foods. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  finding birds is often about finding their food.  Once you do, stay there, and the birds will come to you.

4.  In places where there is tidal movement. Incoming tides flood feeding areas, and force birds to find high ground to roost.  Falling tides reveal the same feeding areas, and birds will return to the mud flats, oyster beds, and beaches as the water recedes.  It is only logical to place oneself where the ebb and flow of tides, and birds, can be observed.

Even the most fanatic birder will benefit from being still and observing in one location.  You may even find that you notice more than just birds, the whole natural landscape and the other beings that reside there.  If you are moving too fast, you may miss it.

The first way to prevent cold hands is to not be cold anywhere – when the body begins to feel cold, it responds by reducing circulation to the extremities, and that’s bad news for the hands and feet. Being warm is a package deal.  So wear the right layers, get a good hat and neck gaiter, and you are on the way to warm hands.

What you eat and drink is also important, and unfortunately, coffee is on the do NOT consume list.  Coffee is a vaso-constrictor and as such reduces circulation to the extremities, exactly what you don’t need.  However, you can and should ingest some other not-necessarily-good-for-you-otherwise foods:  fats.  Fatty foods like cheese, eggs, bacon, or peanut butter are very calorically dense foods, and calories keep you warm.

Obviously, to have warm hands you’re going to need some kind of glove or mitten.  Mittens are warmer than gloves because your fingers work as a team to keep warm.  But although some birders use mittens, I find they impair dexterity with optics too much, and have always preferred gloves.

My favorite birding gloves were actually designed as shooting gloves by a company called Bob Allen.  Made of leather with an insulated lining, these keep hands warm down to upper 20’s F, and colder when I’m dealing with in-and-out-of-the-car birding.

If it’s damp or rainy, waterproof gloves are a must, so a glove with a Gore-tex liner and Thinsulate or other insulation is called for.  I have two pairs of these, one with lightweight 50-gram insulation, and another with much heavier 150-gram insulation that are quite big and bulky, but warm.  The latter gloves were also designed for shooting, and have a less-insulated index finger that makes it a bit easier to focus binoculars.

In extreme cold, disposable hand warmers are a final line of defense against cold hands.  I usually place these inside my gloves, on the palm side so I can wrap my fingers around the hand warmer.

Handling cold binoculars or metal tripods will quickly chill hands.  The tripod issue can be helped by wrapping the legs with foam insulation of the type used to insulate around water pipes, readily available at any home supply store.  As far as binoculars, no one has come up with a binocular heater (yet), but a somewhat effective substitute is the dashboard of your car.  Between stops, toss your bins on the dash and run the defroster.  They won’t be frigid when you next get out, and if it’s been a bit of a drive, will feel quite toasty for a little while.

If you want to find birds, find their food. It really is that simple most of the time. Want to see a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, for example? Find the marsh with the fiddler crabs in it – not what you’d do to find a Black-crowned Night-Heron, which eats mostly fish.

So what do sparrows eat? One look at the typical sparrow bill answers that question: their thick, conical bills are designed for cracking open seeds.

Sparrows eat mostly “weed” seeds – but not just any patch of growth will do. The most important natural foods for sparrows are annual weeds, like foxtail and ragweed. Why? Annuals invest a much higher proportion of their resources into seed production since, by definition, they only have one chance to reproduce. Perennials invest much less in seeds, because if they don’t reproduce successfully this year, there’s always next year. Thus, a field of goldenrod and New York ironweed might look appealing and attract butterflies, but it’s not much good for sparrows.

The upshot: learn to recognize foxtail and ragweed, and bird areas that contain these plants during the sparrow months of October and November. You might even find a Lincoln’s Sparrow.

Learn through Photos

Foxtail patch: This patch of foxtails, also called bristlegrass, volunteered at the edge of CMBO Center for Research and Education’s parking lot in Goshen. Like other annuals, foxtail thrives on disturbed earth – “disturb it and they will come” is a good adage for annual weeds.

Foxtail close-up: Note the seeds still remaining on this foxtail head. The dozen or so foxtail species (all genus Setaria) top all other weeds in the country in food value to wildlife.

Ragweed: Ragweed plants are shriveled and gray by November, their fern-like leaves dry and shrunken. Don’t let that fool you; some of the oil-rich seeds persist on the plants well into fall and winter, and remain available even when other food sources are covered by snow. This ragweed was another volunteer in the CMBO parking lot.

Michael knew perfectly well what I had been doing, because he was there at Cape May Point State Park for the same reason:  it was late October, the winds from a cold front two days earlier had finally laid down, and we were hoping to see migrating owls (and anything else) against the rising light in the east.

Everyone knows the best birding is early in the morning, but what should you do if you arrive at your chosen patch before there’s enough light to see well?  The answer is, position yourself where you can see silhouetted birds.  The way to do that is usually to station yourself relatively low in relation to the surrounding topography, and face the rising sun.

Use your binoculars, too.  Scan for flying birds silhouetted against the pink light of dawn.  Check every snag (a snag is a standing dead tree) for perched owls and other birds – I’ve routinely found perched Great-horned Owls and Great Blue Herons near marshes this way.  Distant silhouettes can be confirmed by using a spotting scope.

I’ve looked for birds this way even before there is any light from the sun at all, by using the distant lights of a city or town, the headlights of an approaching car, or lights from stadiums and ball parks.

February through May, depending on where you are, American Woodcock often display well past dusk and well before dawn if there are bright lights nearby.  In warmer months, bright lights often attract moths and other insects, which in turn can attract nightjars like Common Nighthawks and Chuck-will’s-widows.

Silhouettes bring bird shapes into sharp relief, so if you are not accustomed to looking at shapes, this is a great way to practice.  Many birds, perhaps even most, are more easily identified by shape than by fine points of plumage. See the photos below for examples.

Learn through Photos

Can you spot the Ruddy Duck in this flock?

Green-winged Teal are most easily distinguished from Blue-winged Teal by shape. Note the Green-winged’s small bill and steep forehead.

Double-crested Cormorant silhouette revealing this bird’s hook-tipped bill.

One effect of the sit-in-the-same-tree phenomenon is there is a large build-up of pellets and “whitewash,” i.e. owl droppings, under the roost tree, making it much easier to find.

So how do you find owls during migration? By being extremely alert. Look for whitewash, even a small splash of it, and carefully check the trees above if you find any. Even better is finding a single owl pellet – all birds leave whitewash behind, and telling the splash of a Sharp-shinned Hawk from that of a Long-eared Owl is a task beyond my skill, anyway. But Long-eareds and Saw-whets cast well formed, cohesive pellets. Other birds, like hawks and gulls, sometimes cast pellets, but these are usually irregularly shaped.

Owls prefer conifer trees for roosting, with Eastern Redcedar being a particular favorite. But they’ll use what’s available, including other conifers, hollies, and deciduous trees, too.

Another trick for finding migrant owls is to pay very close attention to signs of mobbing behavior from chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches. I’ve found jays to be completely unreliable – they’ll fuss and scold just because they feel like it, and literally hundreds of times I’ve tried to track down the source of jay angst and come up empty.

But mind those little parids in particular. Twice I’ve found October Long-eared Owls in the woods at Brigantine NWR, thanks to scolding chickadees, and I’ve found a number of one-day wonder Saw-whets this way, too.

If you do find a roosting owl, be especially respectful of its space and avoid the natural tendency to get “just a little closer” for a better look. Migrant owls are readily flushable, and once flushed are forced to expend energy unnecessarily and may be exposed to predators, including hawks and other owls.

Notepad - A handy notepad that fits in a shirt pocket is ideal for keeping track of species, numbers, and taking field notes on a particular bird.

We’re coming up on one of the biggest, if not the biggest, citizen science events in the world: the annual Christmas Bird Count (CBC).  Like the name suggests, birds are counted during the CBC’s, and there are a variety of ways to do that.

I do a couple different counts a year with Pete Dunne, and his method seems completely unscientific (but isn’t quite as bad as it seems):  we bird all day, and at day’s end we pull out the checklist and estimate how many of each species we saw.  This is easy for low-number species, like eagles or Rough-legged Hawks, but much more difficult with common birds like White-throated Sparrows or Canada Geese.  Interestingly, though, when one of us floats a number, very often the other had the same number in mind, or one within 10 %.  I use this same method when I create a report in eBird after a CMBO field trip.  Usually during a field trip I have no time to take notes, so the best I can do is remember to count consciously as I point out birds.  For me, it is essential that I eBird immediately after the trip – if I wait even until that day’s end, there is no way I can remember with any accuracy what was seen, mostly because one field trip blends with others over time.

It’s much better to write bird numbers down, and when birding on my own I carry a little pad and pen to do just that.  The pad is also handy for taking field notes.  For CBC’s, some birders create a list from scratch as the day unfolds, adding species as each new one is seen and writing down numbers next to each bird’s name as the day goes along.

CBC data sheet - Example of a data sheet created for a particular CBC, in this case the Northwest Hunterdon, NJ CBC, with data filled in.

I prefer to start out with a data sheet listing the birds I expect to find on a CBC, in checklist order.  On counts I do frequently, I’ve made sheets with all the species I’ve found in my count territory in previous years, with a few others I expect to someday appear.  These run to 3 or so pages.  Then, at each stop or after each excursion from the vehicle during the count, as we see given species we add their numbers to the list.  Thus, at days end, the line for White-throated Sparrow might read like this:

White-throated Sparrow – 25, 40, 10, 20, 50, 10, 100

Before we go to the count wrap-up, we take out a calculator and total each species.

Serious counts, such as CMBO’s Hawk Watch, Sea Watch, and Morning Flight, make extensive use of clickers, which are readily available from Forestry Suppliers and other on-line purveyors of scientific equipment.  A separate clicker is maintained for each of the more common species, and the totals for each clicker are normally written down on data sheets hourly, after which the clickers are re-set.  When birds are coming fast and furious, they may be clicked in 10’s or even 100’s.

Clickers - Clickers, the tool of choice for CMBO count projects, also lend themselves well to common species on CBC’s.

When I counted nocturnal flight notes along Delaware Bay this fall, I had two clickers on my right hand and two on my left, about as many as I could keep track of in the dark.  One was for unidentified notes and the others for Swainson’s Thrush, Gray-cheeked Thrush, and whatever the third-most common species proved to be. The remaining notes identified to species I wrote down on a pad.

This CBC season I intend to use clickers for some of the more common species, like white-throats.  The model I prefer is available from Forestry Suppliers as product # 53029, U.S. Government Type Tally Counter, Heavy Duty. [Ed note: Staples.com carries a single clicker as well.]