AOS is all about birds and connecting people to them. We offer a growing list of free resources for birders to learn about birds and places to see them throughout our area. Browse and enjoy!
AOS Local Field Trips Program
Visit Google Calendar The Alabama Ornithological Society offers a program of free field trips throughout the year across our area (initially in Alabama, later northwest Florida). These will be led by some of the most experienced birders in the region volunteering their time to share their knowledge and love of birds. Everyone seven years old…
AL Birds Discussion List
https://groups.io/g/ALbirds
Alabama Birding Trails
Alabama’s Birding Trails highlight the best public locations around the state for watching birds year-round. Alabama provides critical habitat for hundreds of bird species, from the Endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker to the now flourishing Bald Eagle. The birding trails give you a chance to explore our amazing biodiversity, which makes us second only to Florida in the Eastern…
Blakeley Island
IMPORTANT NOTE: This notice only applies to the Blakeley Island Mud Lakes Disposal Areas. The Mud Lakes are former industrial waste treatment sites and the waters in these dredge material management ponds can be extremely caustic. The ponds are currently used for the disposal of dredge materials by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and…
Dauphin Island
Spring and fall migration on Dauphin Island, a Globally Important Bird Area, are the stuff of birding legend, and hotspots like Pelican Point, the Audubon Bird Sanctuary, Cadillac Square, the Goat Tree Reserve, the Shell Mounds, the Airport Marsh, and the West End are stops on the Alabama Coastal Birding Trail (ACBT) and are well…
Checklist of Alabama Birds
This checklist of Alabama birds was updated as of September 2025, and is available online in Adobe Acrobat format. View and download the checklist at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kKmPkWxhJetiItCzgX63hlJgVcy5EaEE/view?usp=drive_link When printing using Adobe Acrobat, for optimal page sizing select either “Actual size” or “Custom scale” (in the range 100-102%), not “Fit.” This checklist uses the taxonomy of…
Weather Websites
Bob and Lucy Duncan, long-time AOS leaders from Gulf Breeze, Florida, presented a workshop on Weather and Bird Migration at the 2017 Fall AOS meeting on Dauphin Island. The presentation showed how to use weather patterns to predict the appearance of birds along the northern Gulf Coast in Spring and Fall. Here is a brief…
Pelagic Birding
Historically, pelagic birding in Alabama waters consisted of jumping on a short range fishing boat or sea watching from shore. Even the few offshore trips organized specifically for birding usually only found a jaeger or Bridled Tern, but were considered successful for even that! Around 1991, the first long-range, deepwater Texas pelagic trips were organized…