Hi! Welcome back!

The good part about such a hobby is that you can be as involved as much as little as you wish...from casually observing common yard birds or putting up feeders, to actively going out to observe bird habitats.

More extreme birders can crawl through brush as 4 a.m. , travel to other countries, build vacations around birding hot spots, or invest from $100s to $1000s in various levels of camera equipment and scopes. These people are always aware of birds, even when deep in conversation on a city street they are keeping subconscious track of birds around them, and are likely to suddenly swing their heads to observe a distant diving Cooper Hawk or Peregrine. They are always excited about this or that migration, new camera equipment being released, rare birds, etc. Left unchecked, they also spend their time twittering other birders, checking out forums, are on birding listserves, and bore their families with Facebook entries that consist mostly of bird observations and links to theirs and others' latest bird photographs.

(Ask me how I know)

Hello and welcome Robbinsr!! I love this site..it is so nice to find a place where people understand!

@ rachel...you made me chuckle and I was nodding my head as I was reading your reply..you are so right!! I am constantly on the lookout for birds and I always point them out to my husband (or whoever I am with at the time). My husband even said to me the other day "everytime you see a woodpecker, you act like it's the very first one you've ever seen!!!" LOL..he just doesn't get it. I am constantly posting links to the Audubon Society, or interesting bird blogs or websites to my Facebook page, but they rarely get responses...but that's ok, I'll keep trying!! Maybe I'll eventually turn someone into a birder and they will learn to appreciate the joy and tranquility that birdwatching can bring to a hectic life.

You mentioned twitter....I have tried hard to find people who twitter about bird watching, but I am having difficulty. I've found a few, but nobody who posts very often.... how should I best go about my search?

Sorry for hijacking your thread Robbinsr, but the bird obsession took over!

Twitter is a GREAT place to meet fellow birders at any level of interest-they even get together with fellow bird tweeters in their area for excursions. Just no one lives very close to me.

To find fellow birders on Twitter ,you can fill in the search box with a word like "birds" or "birding" and it will link you to anyone who has included that particular word in his or her current post. Once you get a pile of people, click on each person's avatar or user ID to go to his or her page. Read quickly through a couple of pages of that person's "tweets" to see if interests match, then, if you like what you see, click the "follow" button.

Then start posting tweets about your birding adventures, mentioning birds you see, birding activities, posting photos on Twitpic, or whatever Twitter photo site you please, and people will start following YOU. I must have gained several hundred followers in a couple of weeks.

I always check the tweets of people I'm following and if they never talk about stuff that interests me, I de-follow them. I.e., clicked on a link yesterday of someone I was following to see his "duck photos" and they were all photos of hunters holding up bloody duck trophies. I couldn't de-follow him fast enough.

I'm "rachelbirder" on Twitter, and I follow some great birders and photographers..you're welcome to click on my "page" see whom I'm following, and check them out, or follow them as well.

I talk about birds, post bird photos, but today I was going on about other topics of interest to me as well. May have to go back to yesterday when I posted bird photos. An "RT" is a "re-tweet" when someone posts someone else's tweets so their followers can see it also.

http://twitter.com/rachelbirder

Welcome Rick! Where are you ? I am just North of Muskegon. There are quite a few Michigan folks on this forum, ya never know, you could be neighbors with one of us! ;)