The Year in Birds: Canadian bird and birding highlights from 2021

We sat down with our friends, Yousif and Mike, expecting to chat about the past year in birding—but we couldn’t settle on one topic!  

In this episode, we marvel over rare bird sightings, like the Steller’s Sea Eagle that visited multiple Canadian provinces this year. We dig into what it means to be a “birder”, and how the birding community has changed for the better in recent years. And we chat about how bird populations have fluctuated in our lifetimes, and how the influx of new birders and technology like eBird helps us track those changes. 

This is an episode with a little bit of everything—we hope you enjoy it. 

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Mike Burrell grew up in a nature-loving family outside of Waterloo, Ontario and inherited his love of birds from his Dad. He has participated in almost every bird citizen science project he can and currently acts as the Ontario coordinator for eBird Canada. In addition, he acts as the secretary and archivist for the Ontario Bird Records Committee, the Ontario regional editor for the Christmas Bird Count program, several committees for the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas-3 and is a member of the Bird Specialist Subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. Mike, with his brother, Ken, also co-authored the book, Best Places to Bird in Ontario. Follow at @mike_va_burrell

Yousif Attia grew up watching birds and exploring the wilds of central and southern Alberta since he and his family immigrated there when he was four years old. He was drawn to the concept of volunteering for citizen science programs in his early teens when he would tag along on Christmas Bird Counts. Although he has lived in several places across the country, he is now settled on the Fraser Estuary on the West Coast of BC. Yousif has worn many hats over the years at Birds Canada, including work on species-at-risk in southern Ontario, field surveys in the boreal including the Ontario Breeding Bird Atlas-2, and managed the Long Point Bird Observatory where he eventually became a North American Banding Council certified trainer. Yousif is now part of a team at Birds Canada that coordinates the Christmas Bird Count and eBird in Canada, and another that develops content on the website.  Follow on @ysattia or @biophylia

Andrea Gress studied Renewable Resource Management at the University of Saskatchewan. She pivoted towards birds, after an internship in South Africa. Upon returning, she worked with Piping Plovers in Saskatchewan and now coordinates the Ontario Piping Plover Conservation Program for Birds Canada. Follow her work at @ontarioplovers

Andrés Jiménez is a Costa Rican wildlife biologist with a keen interest in snakes, frogs, birds and how human relationships are interconnected with the living world. He studied Tropical Biology in Costa Rica and has a Masters in Environmental Problem Solving from York University. He is Birds Canada's Urban Program Coordinator and you can follow him at @andresjimo

Friendly Day by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/<