Preparing for a Trip
A lot of the fun of travel happens in the weeks before leaving home.
(Listen to the radio version here.)
Whenever I go on any trip, whether it’s a dedicated birding tour like Russ and I will be doing to Hawaii in two weeks, or a family vacation on which bird excursions must appeal to nonbirders, too, there are several important things I always do to prepare myself ahead of time.
First, I make sure I have a good field guide. For this trip, I chose Hawaii Audubon Society’s Hawaii’s Birds, which is authoritative and complete, but also pocket sized, and The American Birding Association Field Guide to Birds of Hawaii. I hardly ever look in books while I’m out in the field, but studying a field guide ahead of time pays off. Showing the pictures to Walter has been a good way for me to pay closer attention to the pictures myself.
Victor Emanuel Nature Tours sent out a checklist for this trip several weeks ago. On both the checklist and in the field guide, I marked in potential lifers, the species I’ve already seen, and on which island(s) each can be expected.
For this trip, I also bought a fairly inexpensive (well, $6.99) app, Bird ID for Hawaii, not so much for the photos (though they’ve been helpful to study) but for the sound recordings, which Walter has also enjoyed hearing. When I spent a day at the ER a couple of weeks ago, the app, with ear pods, was a welcome distraction.
Ahead of any trip, I make sure to have the most recent versions of three indispensable phone apps: the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird and Merlin, and Lang Elliott’s “Hear Birds Again.” Then I make sure I have the appropriate eBird location “pack.” I always keep the Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida packs on my phone so whether I’m birding close to home or visiting my son, I can hit the ground running. It’s not a huge disaster if I don’t have the right pack before a trip, but it wastes time if my phone has to download it in the field, especially because a great many good birding spots have spotty cellphone service.
Now that my high-frequency hearing has gone downhill even with my hearing aids, the Merlin app alerts me to the presence of good birds I can’t hear, as long as I have the appropriate Merlin location pack on my phone. I NEVER add any species to my eBird checklist until I’ve personally confirmed them—Merlin sometimes gets identifications wrong, and even if it was 100 percent accurate, my list reflects the birds I personally saw or heard. Merlin’s value is telling me what to look for.
If it’s a potential lifer or bird I want to photograph or just look at but cannot find myself, I pop on my special binaural headphones, plug them into my phone, and pull up my trusty “Hear Birds Again” app. That lowers the frequency of the bird songs to within my hearing range, and thanks to the directional microphones built into the earpieces, I can almost always locate the bird. The headphones are small enough to fit in a small zippered bag in my camera equipment carry-on bag for travel and then a small daypack when I’m birding.
When I’m going to a new place or one I haven’t been to recently, I like to brush up on the birds I’m likely to see by going to eBird.com; there I click on “Explore” and then on “Bar Charts.” When I put in the right location, I get a complete listing of all the species ever reported there with a graph reflecting abundance in each month of the year. Hawaii has few enough birds that I printed out these detailed checklists for each of the three islands we’ll be visiting: Oaho (Honolulu County), Kauai County, and the Big Island (Hawaii County). That would have used up a lot more paper if I were headed somewhere in Africa or the American tropics, or even just Duluth, Minnesota (well, except in the dead of winter). Last winter, on Erik’s tour to Hawaii, he amassed a total of 87 species in 12 days; on his tour to Panama’s Canopy Lodge, he saw twice as many species in half the time.
I studied Hawaiian birds before we went there in 2000 and remember most of them, but when I’m there, I’ll have to remember which birds go with all the cool Hawaiian names, such as the Amakihi, Akepa, Anianiau, Apapane, Akiapolaau, Elepaio, Iiwi, and Palila.
When we went to Alaska, Russ was mostly serving as a typical SOB (Spouse of Birder), but this time he wants to participate more actively, so we’ve been studying Hawaiian birds together. A few weeks ago, I created a set of 72 bird flash cards of species we hope to see. Since this is strictly for personal use, I used illustrations from Cornell’s Birds of the World website (yet one more reason a subscription to Birds of the World is well worth the price).
The cards took several hours to design and set up, print, and laminate, but were well worth it—we’ve already spent even more hours using them. This would not be a good plan if we were going somewhere with hundreds of possibilities, but flashcards of, say, the hummingbirds, trogons, woodcreepers, or raptors we might encounter on a trip could be very much worth making beforehand.
I use Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit my photos. I have my Lightroom program and catalog on a 4-terabyte SSD which I back up regularly onto a second 4-terabyte SSD, including immediately before any trip. This way I can use the drive on my main computer or take it along to use with my laptop, and nothing gets messed up.
Every evening during my travels, I import that day’s photos into Lightroom while keeping them all on my camera’s memory card as a backup. As I have time, I tag each photo with the location and English and scientific names of the species. That’s not crucial—part of the joy of any trip comes in playing with my photos during the aftermath—but it’s nice to be prepared when I do have extra time or want to post something quick to send to someone before I get home. Lightroom allows me to organize my tags by order and family, and so in anticipation of this trip, I’ve already optimistically added dozens of new species and location tags.
All this may seem like work, but it’s filled with anticipatory pleasure. That’s how a single 14-day trip can give me joy for weeks ahead of time as well as a lifetime of satisfaction afterwards.
Those were helpful hints and ideas.