When you notice a beautiful or unusual bird, do you wonder if it's always been here?

With more time on our hands these days, some are taking up new hobbies like bird-watching. And, since this week is Canadian Environment Week, we spoke with a national bird expert on ways we can learn more about the birds in the area.

Adam Smith with the National Wildlife Research Centre, for Environment and Climate Change Canada, works closely with the e-Bird database through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He said we can we can participate in helping contribute to bird mapping and other databases being collected worldwide while learning about local birds.

Smith suggests identifying birds in the area using an app called Merlin, which draws on the e-Bird database in a simpler way. Or, we can go fully into birding, and use e-Bird.

Contributors of e-Bird are almost entirely everyday people who began by simply wanting to identify the birds in their backyard feeders. It is considered a citizen science project, allowing users to find more birds, share their sightings and track lists, while also contributing to hundreds of conservation decisions and peer-reviewed papers, and informing bird research worldwide.

In springtime, we all are most likely to notice the birds, but do we know what kinds of birds we're seeing?

For those who just want to snap a pic to identify, Smith says the Merlin app does that and even customizes your own list of the species you're most likely to see in that particular time and location.

Birding is fun and educational for all ages, it can be enjoyed lifelong, and it also has a way for everyone to contribute to biodiversity statistics and the overall breadth of knowledge about our littler feathered friends.

Find the Merlin site HERE. The e-Bird site can be found HERE. There is also a Facebook group called Sask Birders.