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Learn the Birds
Learn the Birds

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Learn the birds from global specialists around the World
Learn-the-Birds brings together people keen to learn more about birds, improve birding skills, and improve their bird photography with people who have knowledge and expertise in these areas. We are new on the scene, having gone live on August 6th 2020. We are creating and offering interesting and informative webinars, master classes, courses, news, articles and other content for you.
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Free webinars every month
We run webinars at least once a month for the birding community. Our webinars are, and always will be, free for anyone to attend. You only have to register to obtain the webinar link, and you can participate.
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Articles and news
Articles and news from the world of birds, birding, ornithology, and bird photography provided by knowledgeable and experienced birders and global experts.
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Upcoming Webinars

Our webinars are always free. Below you will find a list of the upcoming webinars. Click the webinar image to open the webinar details and register.

Events

News and blog posts

12 BILL DESIGNS IN BIRDS

Lynette Rudman 22 March 2023

Birds’ bills have evolved to serve various functions beside the procurement of food. Bills are also used for carrying nesting material when building a nest

Walbergs Eagle

The eagle and the bats

Derek Keats 26 October 2022

A Walberg’s eagle was photographed catching bats in the air at near dark in Letaba, Kruger National Park, South Africa.

Two striped kingfishers on a branch

The wood kingfishers

Derek Keats 9 October 2022

The wood kingfishers: jewels of the bushveld Visitors from Europe are often surprised when visiting this part of the world when they learn that we

Willow warbler as featured image

A leaf warbler fly-by

Derek Keats 19 August 2022

The leaf warblers form the only genus belonging to the family Phylloscopidae, introduced in 2006, prior to which it was placed in the Old World warbler family Sylviidae that has undergone much revision of the past couple of decades. The Phylloscopidae contains 81 species of tree-loving warblers that occur primarily in Eurasia and Africa, with one species making it as far east as Alaska.

Featured image

Helmetshrikes: characters of the bushveld

Derek Keats 7 August 2022

Helmetshrikes: characters of the bushveld The helmetshrikes comprise one of the most distinctive groups of birds that you find in the Hoedspruit area where I

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Archive of past events

Events

Check out our YouTube videos

with Paul Baicich This presentation will allow us to visit several important bird locations on the island of Cuba – Viñales, Zapata, Guanahacabibes, Cayo Coco, Baracoa, Topes de Collantes, and Havana – as well as examine opportunities for connecting with our counterparts in Cuba. We will look at the country’s fascinating birds, places, and people in terms of advancing bird education, conservation, and responsible eco-tourism. Attendees will learn about some of the birds, nature, and opportunities that can be found on the largest island in the Caribbean.
Birding and Beyond in Cuba – Opportunities and Lessons for Today
with Etienne Marais Recent years have witnessed a transformation of the birding environment both locally here in Southern Africa but also globally. Smartphone based listing apps tied to global bird databases like eBird have created a synergy between citizen science and the gamification of birding at local and regional levels. These have had and continue to have a profound impact on how birders record and collect data, report their sightings and are goal driven in both competitive and non-competitive ways. Is this good or bad for birding? What impact can local and regional challenges have on our knowledge of the birds around us, and the conservation of rare and localised birds. The talk takes a look at eBird, Birdlasser, online “Big Days” and a host of other challenges. We explore changing birder behaviour, birding cultures, and other aspects of the psychology of birding. Is there potential for greater synergy between the gamification of birding and citizen science; and what does the future hold?
Local birding challenges – and their impact on Birding and Birds
with Kerri Wolter VulPro approaches conservation holistically through in-situ and ex-situ management strategies. VulPro began as a rehabilitation facility, recognizing that each individual bird carries significant importance for the continuation of the species. Rehabilitation continues as one of VulPro’s key efforts, with all released individuals now contributing to research with coloured leg bands and/or tracking devices. Non-releasable vultures form part of VulPro’s captive breeding program, where offspring contribute to release studies. We monitor many of our released birds’ survival and foraging movements through GPS transmitters. These data bring critical understanding of movement patterns and behaviours e.g. habitats of high use such as breeding and roosting sites. We monitor wild populations annually at breeding sites and maintain a re-sighting database through camera traps, photographs and public sightings. This information helps us track wild populations, rehabilitated, and ex-captive bred individuals past the point of transmitter failure. Our presence in the field has increased local landowner engagement, ultimately improving awareness of African vultures’ plight. Our efforts highlight anthropomorphic changes in the environment and enable us to recognize threats and install appropriate mitigation. The interface between the in-situ and ex-situ facets has engaged scientific and veterinary research, including but not limited to diseases, threats, and toxicology. VulPro’s holistic, scientific conservation work is ground-breaking and showcases how each bird plays a role in saving wild populations. We have released over 80 captive bred vultures into the wild and over 1600 rehabilitated vultures over the past 17 years. Our efforts have documented a 75% survival rate from our released rehabilitated vultures, with many successes but also some failures from our captive bred released vultures. We strive to always improve our methods and aim to expand into other countries where vultures have become scarce or no longer breed. We must ensure that vultures will not be forgotten, as it is significantly harder to re-introduce a species than to translocate individuals to supplement an in-situ population, however small it may be.
An integrated approach to saving southern Africa’s vultures
with Caroline Walta The white stork (Ciconia Ciconia): from extinction in the 60’s to about 1.600 breeding pairs in The Netherlands nowadays. What did it take to re-introduce this bird? We get an exclusive look in the last remaining stork station, where the birds were bred and which transformed into a stork hospital. Further, we learn about the urban storks in The Hague. Why is not everyone excited about this charismatic bird? Caroline is on a mission to turn stork critics into stork friends. To protect the nests, she starts collecting data with year-round monitoring and ringing of the stork nestlings. For this, we climb the city roofs and… we get some unexpected help. A research project is born. Fasten your seatbelts to take a ride though the white stork season.
The rollercoaster life of the Dutch white storks
with Prof Adrian Craig From old speculations, and observations of birds in other places when they are not at their breeding sites, we now have many different approaches for describing their journeys. In particular, individual birds may be tracked throughout the trip, which has produced some very surprising and exciting results. These will be especially important in conservation as both their world and ours continues to change.
Bird migration: discovering where they go
Learn-the-Birds Team Rambles about Birding on the holidays and other recent observations. For the first webinar of the year we are going to repeat the year start we did for the last two years. The Learn-the-Birds team will be all together talking about their experiences of birding in the December/January holidays, and perhaps a little earlier as well. For some of us that will be summer, and for some winter. Places visited include Washington State (USA), Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Kwa-Zulu Natal and the Eastern Cape in South Africa, the Caribbean, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, and mainland China. The team will talk about and illustrate some of their recent birding adventures, talk about what they learned, and discuss our plans for Learn-the-Birds for 2024 and beyond. Join us on https://learnthebirds.com for birding and ornithology webinars.
Learn-the-Birds Team Rambles About Holiday Birding
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