Are you an aspiring or beginning birder, looking to learn the common species and master basic birding skills? Are you a more advanced birder, honing your ID skills? Or are you looking for a birding project that will help you understand the seasonal rhythms of the birding year?
In any of these cases, what you really need is your own “private patch,” a convenient birding location, not much visited by others, that you can adopt –– in your own mind –– as a place you’re committed to learning as thoroughly as possible.
There’s nothing formal or official about a private patch, and no firm rules about how you should use it. Patch birding is simply a birding tradition that evolved to meet the desire for frequent birding and the need for convenience. Typically, a private patch is a small site, easy to cover in a quick visit (one of mine, years ago, was nothing more than a cluster of a dozen pine trees in a quiet corner of a university campus). It’s likely close to home, near your workplace, or along a route you frequently travel.
While you end up going there because it offers some decent habitat, it probably doesn’t offer truly great habitat. If it did, it would be well-known, and not private! The point is having your own special place, and over time, getting to know that place better than anyone else does.
One effect of having a private patch is a readjustment of what registers as exciting. Birders, and indeed naturalists of all kinds, like nothing more than finding a rarity. But the definition of “rare” is context-dependent. Take a species like the clay-colored sparrow, for example –– an uncommon but quite regular fall migrant on Martha’s Vineyard. If you bird a traditional migrant hotspot in mid-October, the odds are good you’ll encounter this species several times in a season. It’s a nice bird, for sure, but exciting? No, not really.
But putting a clay-colored sparrow in your private patch makes things look quite different. On that small, local scale, it’s probably a true rarity, hoped for on every fall visit but found only every few years, if that.
Finding a clay-colored sparrow at the Gay Head Cliffs, then, is a mark of competent birding: You hit a known hotspot at the right time, and worked it well enough to find an uncommon but expected species. Finding the same bird in your private patch, though, is a real reason for pride. It shows that you visit there often enough to catch a local rarity when it shows up, and that you bird carefully enough to notice a surprise.
A local patch enhances birding in a variety of other ways. Most importantly, frequent visits to the same site enrich your knowledge. During the breeding season, you can expect the same individual birds to be there, day in, day out. You’ll learn the favorite singing perches for each male songbird; you’ll discover which pairs are twitchy and which are more relaxed. Such intimate knowledge is a great way to learn the possibilities and limits of the different species.
Over a few seasons, you’ll also begin to develop an understanding of how things change across time, from early to late in the day, from season to season. Population trends will be evident, as species wax or wane in your patch. You’ll refine your knowledge of when different species migrate, and what conditions prompt that behavior. The results will translate automatically to a larger geographic scale; at some point, you’ll realize that patch birding has helped you develop an almost instinctive sense of what is going on in the bird world.
Patch birding is also a good way to boost your birding skills. Birders dream of finding rarities. But the way you find a rarity is by learning the common, expected species really, really well. Your rarity, when it does show up, will likely present not as a full, close-range view with all important field marks showing. More likely, it will be a fleeting glimpse of a partial bird that looks, somehow, not quite right, prodding you to investigate more fully. It’s the intimate knowledge you’ve built of the common local species that sets your brain up to notice something odd.
I’ve written mostly about birding here, but of course the private patch is a concept that works with any type of natural history interest, be it butterflies, dragonflies, or any other group. The principle is the same: a spot that nobody else notices, but that you come to know inside out.
I won’t divulge my current private patch because … well, it’s private. But I’ll keep an eye on it through the winter, and as spring returns, more and more of my commutes and errands will somehow end up allowing for a quick stop, just to see what’s there. You never know.
