Little Brown Birds
For bird watchers, fairy-wrens, thornbills, gerygones and scrubwrens can be a major source of discouragement and confusion or a source of total engagement and delight. This one day birding workshop will give you the field skills and knowledge keys to quickly and confidently identify these birds, taking your enjoyment of birding to a whole new level.
Take your birding to the next level
Are Little Brown Birds the bane of your birding? Do they all look the same? Do you keep discovering Little Brown Birds which aren’t in the field guide? Do Little Brown Birds move so rapidly that you don’t even have a chance of identifying them? Do you shy away from or feel discouraged when Little Brown Birds appear when you’re out birding? If you answered “Yes” to any of these scenarios then this workshop is for you!
Most birders struggle with Little Brown Birds because they’re used to identifying species with very obvious colourful field marks. However, when confronted by very small birds with more subtle markings darting amid foliage they find that the skills they use when observing those other birds aren’t working for them.
Even if we can keep our binoculars on them long enough to get a reasonable view, what we see of these birds in the field seems to bear no relationships to what is in the field guides!
Little Brown Birds is a five or six hour birding intensive which will take you step by step through the field craft and the keys to observing and identifying Little Brown Birds, making you a confident birder! It’s also a celebration of these fascinating birds as we explore their surprising ecologies and the roles that they play in a healthy forest, woodland or heath environment.
This course begins with a presentation where we work through an overview of these birds before embarking on a field class in a beautiful forest or woodland. In the field we will learn the basic binocular skills and field craft which will give us a solid foundation in finding more birds and enhancing our observational skills.
These skills will improve our capacity to observe the birds. We combine this with the keys to identifying the Little Brown Birds which we encounter in the forests of Sydney. You’ll be surprised to know that most of these birds can be quickly identified based on a single field mark.
The skills and know-how that you obtain on this course will not only improve your birding here in Sydney. They will also ensure that you can identify the Little Brown Birds elsewhere as your birding journey takes you further afield.
This workshop includes a copy of my new book ‘Little Brown Birds of the Sydney Region’, which is packed with stories about the evolution of these birds, their breeding and feeding ecology, chapters on bird watching and handy species accounts/field guide which will help you to quickly identify these fascinating birds.
The “Little Brown Birds” workshop is run twice a year: August in the Royal National Park, where we indulge in the best of Sydney’s winter birding. Here, it’s a festival of brownness as we meet the Brown Thornbill, Brown Gerygone, Striated Thornbill, White-browed Scrubwren and Yellow-throated Scrubwren. My January workshop is in north-west Sydney’s Castlereagh Nature Reserve. Here, we enjoy a different assemblage of Little Brown Birds, celebrating the breeding seasons of the Buff-rumped Thornbill, Yellow Thornbill, Brown Thornbill and possibly second breeding efforts of the Striated Thornbill. We’ll be watching out for the Weebill too. Of course we’ll work through the keys for identifying fairy-wrens across their seasonal plumage variations in both workshops.
Secure a place in this workshop
Workshop numbers are limited to eight. Use the button below to find workshop dates, booking form, payment links, Terms and Conditions and more. The fee is $130 per person.
Aussie Wild acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land which we visit, the Dharawal and Darug people. We pay our respect to their elders past, present and emerging.