Birding with baby and toddler- adjust your expectations

Be prepared to adjust your expectations about a lot of things when you have a kid. The same is true of birding with one.

You can totally go birding with your young one starting within weeks of birth and through the terrible twos. As it was for me, it may require you to be flexible in expectations of what a birding excursion looks like, what your attention will be spent on, and how you actually go about finding birds.


Especially in the first year, all-out birding adventures were not happening. Super early starts to seize the day’s first light became less possible and less desirable. I started valuing sleep a lot more, when it could be had.

When she was one and put everything in her mouth, playing on a grassy knoll required serious attention on her, not so much on birds. I learned to let go many little feathered specs of possibility that were in the treetops, and I learned to appreciate the birds I did observe so much more. Even starlings.

As we got to age one-and-a-half and two, longer trips started being possible. She was able to walk more, although I still often carry her. I previously wrote that carrying the kid, at any age, forces you to slow down. Slow birding has its benefits, of course, and being slow is definitely a shift in expectation and strategy, perhaps most easily explained as the difference between covering a large of amount of ground versus covering a smaller patch more thoroughly.

At age two, on that same grassy knoll from above, I still spend a tremendous amount of my attention making sure she isn’t grabbing poison ivy, eating food that someone else littered, or toddling too close to a ledge, but she is also able to explore more with less of my constant attention. As she has gotten older, I have been able to shift some of my focus to the birds and getting her interested in the birds or the habitat around.

I keep learning to let birds go. For example, if a rare gull species shows up at the beach in near-freezing weather, I will not take baby or toddler on this twitch. An uncommon shorebird new for my county list has been reported, seen two hours ago, and is just over a mile away by foot; with the kid in my arms, I need to take it slow or let it go. Does it really matter if I see a certain bird or not? The real value is having a positive experience and the kid having a positive experience.

There will be days when all you can expect are the house sparrows at the playground and maybe a robin that stops in for a drink in the spillover from the water fountain. But changing your expectations as a parent does not mean you won’t be able to chase down some sweet birds with your kid, either. My kid has been present for some wicked birds for our region, like Le Conte’s Sparrow, Prothonotary Warbler, Whimbrel, and Black-headed Gull. It took some time, but “going on adventures” as she calls it, is a thing our kid does and is excited about too!