While birding by bike has long been a favorite mode of birding for many people, it’s an aspect of birding that you can enjoy on your own or in a group. It can take you through suburban landscapes and into the great outdoors, providing exercise and a birding outlet beyond walking or driving.

It’s fun, refreshing, and it’s a great source of exercise – but biking anytime is a great option for birders looking for a break from their car, and the gas station. It’s amazing to realize the bird sounds you hear, and the birds you see with the clear view and quiet approach provided from the seat of a bicycle. It’s not news to many birders, but it’s interesting to find that some birders have taken casual birding by bike to another level, when they participate in Big Days, and even on guided tours by bike.

A young naturalist in San Francisco joined a group of birders on an ambitious Big Day excursion. The plan: Drive, drive, and drive, hopefully to see 150-plus bird species between dawn and dusk. That was a quarter century ago, and ecologist Josiah Clark remembers that 300-mile road trip with a bit of distaste; how they all piled in and out of the car every 20 minutes and spent hours elbow to elbow while fighting for leg room and a view out the window. Clark shared, “After that, I thought, ‘I don’t ever want to do a Big Day by car again’.”

That event prompted a radical shift for Clark. The next year, he rode his bicycle 90 miles and climbed more than 10,000 feet on the first of his biking Big Days. He has since completed several birding-focused long rides up to 160 miles lone, usually with several companions. Each year, more birders join him, and he also leads increasingly popular organized birding tours by bike of varying lengths. Most recently, before Covid concerns, he led 28 birders around San Francisco on bikes.

Pedal-powered birding might not be for everyone due to added gear, safety concerns, or strength and mobility limits, but around the country, more birders are choosing to break away from their car and opt for bicycles. They cite a combination of factors, from a desire to reduce their carbon footprint to the benefits of the exercise, as well as being able to stop on a dime and tune into a noteworthy bird song, while covering more ground than walking allows.

Upstate New York birder and cyclist Cullen Hanks, who has lived in California and Texas, said he’s seen growing interest in birding by bike, especially on the West Coast where there’s “a confluence of critical mass in both birding and biking cultures.” There, topographical diversity lends itself to covering multiple habitats and seeing – and hearing – lots of birds during the course of a ride. “It’s such a great way to move across the landscape,” he added.

In Minneapolis, naturalist Sharon Stiteler, a cyclist and writer known by the pen name, Birdchick, interprets an uptick in interest as a response to both an increase in traffic in cities and more awareness of the impacts of driving cars. “If you can find a way to get some exercise and avoid being stuck in a car in rush-hour traffic, you’ll do it,” she said.

It helps that Minneapolis is one of the country’s most bike-friendly cities, said Gregg Severson, who is currently pursuing a “big green half year” by only counting birds he sees while venturing from home using human power. “If people don't feel safe biking, they won't go birding by bike,” Severson noted. “Many of the city’s bike paths pass through parks or near lakes that offer prime migratory bird habitat,” he added.

Cycling offers other benefits too; it can be more affordable than driving, and it provides transport for kids and adults who can’t drive or, like Severson, don’t own a car. Beyond the cramped interior of a sedan and the frustration of traffic jams and parking lot queues, bikers can listen while they travel, quickly turn around, take their bikes onto trails, all while making almost no noise themselves. “While cyclists usually move more slowly than motorists,” Clark said, “each mile traveled can be more productive from the saddle, especially in dynamic landscapes.”

California birder Genna DeVries was already a seasoned cyclist when she joined one of Clark’s guided birding bike rides at the Point Reyes National Seashore. By the end of the trail ride they’d seen more than 100 bird species, and she realized how much she was missing. When compared to birding in a car or the slower pace of walking, there was much to be gained by sight and sound while biking. “I thought, ‘This is a much better way to see a lot of birds,’” DeVries said.

Since then, she’s added mounts and racks to one of her mountain bikes to hold her spotting scope, camera, and binoculars. She now leads monthly trips of her own and finds that biking is the perfect compromise between driving and walking. “If nothing’s happening in one place, we’ll just zip to the next hotspot,” she said. On the other hand, taking your time is sometimes still the point, such as Audubon California’s 1.6-mile “Slow Ride” along the Los Angeles River.

The World Series of Birding now offers a prize category to the team that sees the most birds by bike. Similarly, the Great Texas Birding Classic promotes a “green” tournament category in which birds cannot be counted when seen from motor vehicles – birders must be biking, walking, or canoeing instead. In Oklahoma, the Payne County Audubon’s Big Day prize for non-motorized transport suggests birding by bike or even horseback.

Going carbon free was part of Dorian Anderson’s goal when he started out on his pedal-powered Big Year around the United States. Overall, he cycled 18,000 miles and tallied 618 bird species! More than a scoresheet of birds, though, his trip was meant to be a deviation from the standard vehicle-centric approach to Big Years. Anderson says he hoped his endeavor “would rub off on people.” Five years after his green Big Year, Anderson still does all his near-home birding without driving.

To refer to the original Audubon Big Days by Bike article and associated links, see https://www.audubon.org/news/birders-are-discovering-secret-better-big-days-bicycle

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