The Vancouver parks couple is now finding different birds across the city
The Vancouver couple that spent 2020 visiting over 250 parks in the city is now searching for different bird species.
And so far they are doing a bang up job.
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Steven Smethurst and Lori Schlechtleitner have been bird-watching for a personal project and documenting it on their blog.
Schlechtleitner purchased a high-resolution camera as a Christmas gift to herself, and Smethurst has been using it on his days off to photograph birds.
The original goal was for Smethurst’s deck of cards project. He aimed to make a deck of playing cards with all of Vancouver’s local birds for his friends and family.
The face of the card has the bird’s photo, name, and information for their loved ones to identify it when exploring the outdoors.
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The project is now done, but the couple has made it their new goal to see how many birds they can spot in Vancouver throughout 2021.
Smethurst said this is another “gotta catch them all,” project.
“We were done the park, but we were still looking for a reason to leave the house. I don’t do well unless there’s a goal in mind, so we decided to do a bird project this year,” he said in an interview with Daily Hive.
Schlechtleitner is a biologist and has been enjoying partaking in this project as well.
“It’s one of my personal specializations so it’s been actually kind of cool. If you want to meet a good nerd, meet a bird nerd .. there’s so much to continually learn and explore,” she said.
Bird-watching has also been a socially distanced pandemic pastime for them.
“It’s a platform that we can share together and again it has allowed us to steer clear of other people for the most part, because we’ll be up at weird hours just going to little spots around the city, even for a walk in the neighbourhood,” Schlechtleitner said.
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The couple said a 20-minute walk from Main Street to Fraser Park in Vancouver allowed them to see 20 different species of birds.
Since December, they have captured 169 species and taken 70,000 photos with around 2,000 different instances across Vancouver.
Aside from their blog, Smethurst will be posting pictures of the birds they spot on his Instagram and this website.