Birding Western Mass

I’m starting a newsletter about birding here. I intend to publish weekly in the migration seasons and less often in the winter and summer.

Here’s a link to my newsletter page. It’s free (I hope that’s obvious). Or, you can just type your email in below.

I try to bird a few times a week in the Pioneer Valley and farther away, in the woods, in fields and at lakes. I’m collecting information and getting experience after about four years of doing that. I intend the newsletter to be a mixture of what to expect from birding in a coming week and how to bird here in general.

I hope to make it weekly in the busy birding seasons and less frequent in the slower seasons.

Then, I will publish a new handbook to birding Western Massachusetts in late 2026. Maybe I can get the book out sooner, but I think it’s reasonable to plan for two years of research and then a year of writing, editing, designing and publishing.

Birding has changed so much since I was little — I started in 1972, when I was six. It’s much more popular now.

When I was a boy, there were two guides: Peterson and the Golden Guide. Writing about birds was fairly academic or economic. Bird feeding was handfuls of millet tossed out the back door; we put pork bones in the suet feeder my father made from scrap lumber and hardware cloth; my grandmother had strong feelings about what birds were good and what were not. (She had a kind spot for the injured and, in the case of cedar waxwings, the inebriated.)

Now birding has reached so much farther. Optics are cheaper, bird food is more sophisticated; people bird who don’t come from histories of country living. (And thank goodness for all those things.)

Birds are in deeper crisis; we know far more about these creatures and digital resources for monitoring them are far more extensive. I use eBird — here’s my profile if you’d like to follow– and maybe you do too. I Google birds to see their pictures when I’m standing there looking at them and I employ Merlin to capture and interpret their calls.

When I tell people I want to write and publish a new book, some say they would prefer a new comprehensive web site; I think that the digital resources are so fluid and shimmering that a book offers stability and insight on top of incomplete digital immediacy.

Also, I think giving people a book is a great way to show them how to start, especially if they find themselves in the book.

So there’s room for a publication that looks at the question of how to enjoy birding here in new ways. I intend to offer suggestions on birding from the water, from the car, from a bike. I hope to help people understand the value of hawkwatching, of being still, of sharing birds with children and understanding them in urban settings as well.

I hope to tell stories of change — of the mockingbirds that present the history of a place in their song and the crossbills who traverse America in their tribes of Darwinian depth. I hope to tell stories of history and of the future — and all through the language of being among birds in joy that comes from hearing them, seeing them, anticipating and dreaming them.

I hope you’ll follow along with me.

Here’s my Instagram: bird.west.mass. It’s my earnest intention to increase my use of the platform’s features to make a stock set of how-to videos for various locations and tactics. What you won’t see there is great bird photos; I leave that to professionals with better equipment and artistic skills.

Here’s my Facebook profile for Whit Andrews. You’re welcome to friend me, although you can also just “follow” me if you want nothing but the public birding posts.

And if you want to email me, you’re welcome to use whit@pobox.com. I’m sure there’s reasons you might want to be in touch that don’t include a newsletter or using social media and I am delighted to hear what ideas you might want to share about the book or anything else.