Coastal counties in New Hampshire and Massachusetts will host a little-known, but major event for nature lovers on Saturday: the 2024 Superbowl of Birding, which involves hiking, walking, and spying with binoculars on common and hard-to-find birds.
For 21 years, participants have flocked to Rockingham County and Essex County, Mass. from as far as Pennsylvania and The Cornell Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, New York, which is considered the mothership for bird lovers, said David Moon of Mass Audubon North Shore, which runs the annual birding event.
At the stroke of 5 a.m., roughly 90 minutes before sunup, “We’ll be at a site where we want to listen to owls,” said Rebecca Suomala, a team member of the Rye-based, “The Twitchers out of the Rye” — “The Twitchers” for short — which has competed since 2009.
Last year the 12-hour bird-spotting marathon on a single day in January brought 110 people in teams of four to seven to scour marshland, beaches, woodlands and fields between 5 a.m. and 5 p.m.
On Saturday, the Twitchers will be bird-spotting in Hampton, hoping to win the “Townie Award” for finding the most species in a single town. Other citations are given for lifetime achievement so far, the most species counted in a single location, the most points overall (bird species are ranked from 1 to 5, depending on how tough they are to find) and for being the first to call in a rare bird.
The top prize, the Joppa Cup (named for Audubon’s Joppa Flats Education Center in Newburyport, Mass. where the Superbowl of Birding began) goes to the team with the most points.
The competition draws skilled birders across the Northeast, Moon said, but there are awards for all age and experience groups, including newbies.
“It’s mostly for people to have fun birding,” said Pam Hunt, a senior biologist with New Hampshire Audubon. COVID-19 brought a huge boost in interest, she said, as more people flocked to try new outdoor pursuits. Nationwide surveys by the U.S. Fish and Game Service have tracked an increasing interest over time in birding and wildlife observation, she said.
In a world of non-stop online entertainment, birding furnishes healthy outdoor immersion, the joy of spying on something beautiful in nature as well as hard-to-find peace and quiet — that is, until lots of birders gather in a hotspot to catch a glimpse of a highly-sought-after avian breed.
Suomala has been birding for 40 years. Starting Saturday when it’s still dark, she and other Twitchers will quest for night-flyers, including a great horned owl at a field’s edge; a barred owl in wetlands or woodlands, by listening for its signature call, which sounds like, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?”; the eastern screech owl, with a surprisingly soft trill; or the northern saw-whet owl, a very small bird that mimics the whistle on a truck as it backs up.
Chances are slim for detecting a snowy owl, a migrating Arctic dweller seldom seen on the Seacoast — which happens to be New Hampshire’s most fertile ground for birdwatching.
In a single town like Hampton, “We might get 60 species,” Suomala said. Her team will also scout for ‘feeder’ birds, including cardinals, goldfinches, chickadees, blue jays and tufted titmice, that can be found in New Hampshire throughout the year.
“We’re obviously looking for rarities” which carry the most points, she said. “Any kind of warbler could be rare.”
Small songbirds that eat insects are not usually here in winter, she added. That includes popular but often elusive Baltimore orioles — the baseball team’s namesake.
“You can be a birder from your backyard window, but it will limit what you see,” said Suomala, who is captain of the Twitchers. No matter where you are in New Hampshire it’s possible to see multiple species, but the key is to get outdoors.
“Birds are beautiful and their songs are beautiful,” she said. With birding as a pastime “You can keep learning about birds year after year.”
