Welcome to Avocet Birding Courses! We conduct birding workshops aimed at improving bird identification literacy and overall birding skills. If gaining more knowledge of birds or finding more enjoyment in the hobby of birding are among your New Year's resolutions, then one of our workshops is the perfect way to jump start your goals.
One of the joys of birding is there is always more to learn, more to discover, more reasons to let your curiosity whisk you away to new places and new horizons. Avocet Birding Courses can help you accelerate your journey by helping you overcome aspects of identification that may be persistent points of frustration. Over time these aspects have a tendency to metastasize into full blown mental blocks. It could be a certain group of birds that is a block for you, or a certain season when you find birding more challenging. These types of struggles can affect your enjoyment and undermine your overall birding confidence. Our workshops can be the treatment you need to remove these blocks.
We as birders have a widespread misunderstanding of how we learn bird identification and more problematically, how we do it. When we don’t fully understand what and how we do something it slows the learning process. Fortunately, time spent watching birds eventually masks and improves these issues. No matter your approach you will always improve with Practice. With a better method could we learn faster, with fewer fits and starts, and greater satisfaction? I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
We are working to provide that better method. Our workshops are not simply a rehashing of information that you could easily look up in a guide. Instead we start by understanding how humans perceive their environment and learn based on the most recent studies in learning and behavioral psychology and have applied it to bird identification. Using this knowledge, we have crafted concepts to refine and improve our abilities based on how we actually perceive and identify birds, not the popular narrative on how we identify birds. Our workshops are the product of these concepts. But we don’t stop with concepts. The workshops also focus on birding skills: the basic skills essential for bird identification but also many less widely known skills, like leveraging the context that viewing birds in a flock presents to accelerate identification and improve accuracy.
Unlike a Zoom workshop or online course where there is a whole lot of “Tell” and very little “Show”, our workshops include multiple outdoor birding sessions where we can show that these techniques work and practice skills in the field. Including outdoor elements also allows us to use whatever birds we find to teach yet another layer of identification: species-specific, down and dirty ID tricks our instructors have learned over a lifetime of birding. Birding together also creates actual human connection where mistakes can be corrected in real time, where experiences can be shared, where in the moment discussions can occur. This aspect is essential as it forges real, durable learning, not a hazy concept that begins to dissipate the moment the Zoom screen goes black.
To maximize the experience, these workshops will occur in some of the best, most exciting birding locations in the world. With great birding plus great learning the experience will be unforgettable. If you enjoy learning, love a challenge, and thrive in an environment with other intelligent, curious people then come Bird Better with us!
Explore our website: www. birdingABC.com
Check back with us regularly as we will post discussions of some of these subjects in greater depth in the future. We will also be regularly updating our upcoming events. If you represent a birding club or organization and would like to discuss arranging a workshop please reach out at info@birdingABC.com
Comments