I don’t call myself a birder, as I really only started paying attention to birds in 2018 after we bought a window feeder. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started to photograph birds that visit our backyard, and I got hooked. I’m more of an aspiring bird nerd.
To date, I have seen and identified the following birds in Massachusetts. Most of these birds visited our backyard, but some I encountered during hikes.
- American black ducks (during a trip to Cape Cod)
- American goldfinches
- American robins
- Barn swallows (during a trip to the Berkshires)
- Black-capped chickadees
- Blue jays
- Brown-headed cowbirds
- Canada geese (in a pond in our town)
- Carolina wrens
- Chipping sparrows
- Common grackles
- Dark-eyed juncos
- Downy woodpecker
- Eastern phoebe (one during a hike)
- European starlings
- Franklin’s gull (one on a trip to Cape Cod, identified with the help of a birding Instagrammer)
- Great blue heron (one during a hike in the Berkshires)
- Gray catbirds
- Herring gulls (Plymouth)
- House finches
- House sparrows
- Indigo bunting (one during a hike)
- Mallards (Cape Cod)
- Mourning doves
- Mute swans (Cape Cod)
- Northern cardinals
- Northern flickers
- Oven bird (one during a hike)
- Pileated woodpecker (I saw one in our yard in 2020 but did not get a photo)
- Red-bellied woodpeckers
- Red-shouldered hawk (one that I was able to identify with the help from a birding Instagrammer)
- Red-winged blackbirds (my mother’s backyard adjacent to wetlands)
- Ring-billed gulls (Plymouth)
- Rock pigeons
- Ruby-throated hummingbirds
- Song sparrows
- Tufted titmouses
- Turkeys
- Veery (saw one a couple of blocks away from our house)
- White breasted nuthatches
I believe that’s a comprehensive list of all the birds I’ve seen in Massachusetts. I’m pretty proud of the fact that I learned to distinguish the different kinds of sparrows this year–though I’m not always confident about the identification.
One highlight of the year was seeing a song sparrow feed a much larger brown-headed cowbird. I was utterly confused at first, and then I recalled watching a video about cuckoo birds being brood parasite to reed warblers, and I decided to look up brown-headed cowbirds. Lo and behold, the brown-headed cowbird was, indeed, a brood parasite.
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Lisa Tang Liu 