Between lectures and labs, papers and problem sets, students at the College of William and Mary are notoriously busy. Amidst all of their academics, students engage in clubs across disciplines, which offer a change of pace and sense of balance. Such is the case with the College’s Bird Club.
Founded in 2014, the club’s aim is to provide a space for vaguely outdoorsy people and hardcore birders alike to find common ground through on- and off-campus birding adventures.
“You don’t even have to like birds,” executive board member Charlotte Toomey ’26 said. “You can just enjoy nature.”
This laid-back attitude means that there’s a range of skills and experience at any given Bird Club meeting, building a diverse community that learns from each other.
“We get people who are more casual, like me and Miranda [Parrish] and lots of other people who just kind of go for the social or being outside element,” executive board member Libby Eick ’26 said. “But we also had somebody who was a graduate student in ornithology coming one year. We’ve gotten photographers.”
Every Friday at 3:30 p.m., the club gathers near the Crim Dell to go on a walk together. Venturing through the woods to the Martha Wren Briggs Amphitheatre or the Keck Environmental Field Laboratory, members look at, listen for and try to identify the birds around them, which is no easy feat.
“We have the Merlin ID app, which is an app that we use to listen to bird calls,” Toomey said. “If we hear a bird calling, we can look it up for reference.”
Outside of technology, the club also depends on their own community expertise for help in identifying birds.
“We also have a group chat where we can send in pictures of birds, and then the group can ID them,” Toomey said.
With practice, members slowly start to build up their own skills.
“I’d say I’m pretty good with the birds on campus,” executive board member Miranda Parrish ’26 said. “If we were to leave the state or something, it’s a different story.”
Outside of their weekly walks, Bird Club also hosts special events, giving members with higher affinity for bird watching to engage that passion in a more serious way. They also provide members with opportunities to broaden the range of birds that they see.
Once a year, the club goes on a “Rarity Roundup” adventure to Cape Charles, Va.
“We just bird for 24 hours straight and find as many species as possible,” Toomey said.
The event is a favorite for many club members.
“It’s a day of hardcore bird watching,” Parrish said. “We start at 5 a.m. and end at 10:30 p.m. We get a hotel. It’s pretty serious.”
Planning this year’s trip is a main focus for the executive board right now. Amidst all the logistics, members are looking forward to seeing birds different from the ones they’re accustomed to seeing on campus.
“The American Woodcock is this really cute little bird that literally goes like, ‘meep,’” Toomey said. “I saw it when we went on the Cape Charles trip my sophomore year. But it literally looks like a football and just flies over your head. And I want to see it doing its little worm walk. It’s extremely cute.”
If venturing all the way to Cape Charles isn’t up your alley, Bird Club also hosts special events on campus.
“We also do Owloween, which is when we go out on Halloween and look for owls, which for the past two years have been very successful,” Parrish said. “We get great views of barn owls.”
The barn owl on campus is particularly special to Bird Club.
“We have such good memories as a club of seeing that bird right when we need it most,” Parrish said.
The club also isn’t solitary. Their executive board is working on potentially collaborating with Student Environmental Action Coalition and College faculty for other special events.
“I want to make a Bird Club tree tour mashup happen, because I know SEAC does tree tours,” Toomey said. “I think Doug DeBerry usually leads it. He’s one of the environmental professors on campus. He identifies trees, and you go on a little nature walk.”
If Bird Club activities sound interesting, it’s not too late to join them. In fact, the later in the semester you join, the more birds you might see.
“We’re kind of in the dead time right now,” Parrish said. “The hotter it is, the less birds. When it gets colder, we’ll start seeing more.”
This might seem counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense to birders.
“Since we’re going in the afternoon, we’re actually going in a pretty dead part of the day, because it’s really hot at 3:30 to 4pm, right?” Eick said. “So the birds are like, ‘screw this, I don’t want to be here.’ So they’re usually out in the morning or right when the sun is setting. But when it gets colder, more birds come out during the day.”
From campus walks to Cape Charles adventures, barn owls to cardinals to Great Herons to American Woodcocks and everything in between, the culture of excitement that Bird Club has fostered has been extremely valuable to its members.
“Sometimes I tell people that I’m into bird watching, and they’re like, ‘that’s a grandma thing to do,’” Toomey said. “So it’s very nice to find a community of people who also like bird watching, that you can yap to about birds and they’re not going to be bored. I think it’s just cool to have a community of people.”
If joining this community sounds interesting to you, follow @wmbirdclub on Instagram for updates.
