According to Freya McGregor, a 35-year-old birder and occupational therapist specializing in blindness and low vision, the term “birder” was once reserved for those who were more serious than the hobbyist “bird watcher.”
On an average morning, Susan Glass can sit on the patio at her condominium complex in Saratoga, California, and identify as many as 15 different bird species by ear: a Steller’s jay, an acorn woodpecker, an oak titmouse. For her, birding is more than a hobby. “Birds are my eyesight,” said Glass, a poet and an English professor at West Valley Community College who has been blind since birth. “When I check into a hotel in Pittsburgh, I might remember the rock dove and the house finch in the parkin