Real West Virginian of the Week: Wil Hershberger turns a childhood spark into decades of bird recording

By Vanta Coda III, RealWV

The first bird to spark Wilbur Hershberger’s curiosity was the Baltimore oriole in his backyard. It made him take notice of birds when he was 10. The oriole was building a nest in his parents’ backyard, and he could see it through the back door windows. 

Hershberger graduated from Shepherd University in West Virginia and went straight to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture office in Kearneysville, W.Va., where he spent almost four decades as a lab technician. In the late 1980s, Hershberger did contract work for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, where he studied the ecology of declining loggerhead shrike populations. 

The loggerhead shrike project prompted him to think about recording birds, and in 1994, Hershberger found an article about the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library sound-recording workshop in California. Intrigued, Hershberger signed up and was instantly hooked on sound recording. 

Hershberger has archived more than 6,200 recordings in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library. Many of his recordings are featured in the Merlin Bird ID app, on All About Birds, and on eBird’s Explore Species pages. If you listen to bird songs of eastern North America in Merlin or on the Explore Species pages, you will hear many of Hershberger’s recordings. Locally, Hershberger has been president of the Potomac Valley Audubon Society, based in the Eastern Panhandle, and of the Frederick chapter of the Maryland Ornithological Society, fostering the love and wonder of birding in West Virginia and Maryland communities for all generations.