When you go out to your secret spot, which are the bravest birds, and how do you know? Well you know the bravest birds because they’re the ones who either a) don’t fly away from you, or b) they’re the first ones that come back after you’ve sat down next to your tree.
Are all birds equally brave or equally fearful? No. Definitely certain species are very fearful and mistrusting and so they’re going to avoid you all the time. Other species don’t seem to care that you’re there at all. You’ll get to know this over time. Things like chickadees don’t seem to really care at all whether you’re there or not, whereas with birds like the ovenbird, even though you might be hearing it all the time, you almost never see it. What’s going on with that?
Well let’s look at that. Who are the bravest animals? That’s the other question. You go to your secret spot everyday and you’ll start to notice that you see more and more animals. Is it more are moving in, or is it because there’s a level of trust evolving?
When you’re first at your secret spot on that very first day, you might notice that gray squirrels seem to move about whether you’re there or not. They seem to be among the bravest animals. Groundhogs, you see them early on in your secret spot career, seem to be fairly brave, as well. The same is true with rabbits.
If you’ve been out at your secret spot for five minutes, you might notice that there’s nothing around you. After ten minutes you might notice some chickadees or you might notice some birds moving in the treetops. After fifteen minutes you might notice that there’s some birdsong starting around you, but not close by.
It’s not until you’ve been there for twenty full minutes sitting perfectly still that you start to notice the birds right around you singing and feeding again. It takes at least twenty minutes in the beginning, if you’re not practicing the routine of invisibility. It takes at least twenty minutes in the beginning for baseline to return, once you’ve settled into your secret spot.
So even in the beginning, you’re going to have twenty minutes to wait at your secret spot. So you might ask yourself, ‘how long should I stay at my secret spot?’ If you stay any less than twenty minutes you’re not going to learn anything and that’s the bottom line. So you’re bound to stay there for at least a half an hour if you want to see baseline at all. My recommendation is you get used to staying there for 45 minutes to an hour. That’s a regular routine.
You’ll notice that after twenty minutes, the bravest birds appear. After about a half an hour, once those brave birds have settled in and shown enough comfort, you have your medium species, they start to return. At that time you might notice the ground feeding sparrows start to show back up again. Then the last birds that show up are things like towhees that will come close to you while you’re at your secret spot. It might take a full 35 or 40 minutes for the towhees to show up.
So there is absolutely a progression. There are those bravest birds that go out there, and it seems like there are other species who are hiding in the shadows saying, “let’s watch and see what happens to them, and if they live, then we’ll come out.” The same thing happens, they go out and now you have the medium and brave birds out there and then the really shy birds are watching. There is a progression over hours.
