Weidensaul - Of a feather: a brief history of American birding

Copyright 2007 by Scott Weidensaul

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E. B. Whites A Listeners Guide to the Birds, is from Poems and Sketches of E. B. White, copyright 1981 by E. B. White. Used by permission of HarperCollins, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Weidensaul, Scott.
Of a feather: a brief history of American birding/
Scott Weidensaul.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. OrnithologyUnited StatesHistory. 2. Bird watchingUnited
StatesHistory. I. Title.
QL682.W45 2007
598dc22 2007007364
ISBN 978-0-15-101247-3

e ISBN 978-0-15-603518-7
v3.0716

To Amy, with love

I T WAS A COOL, lightly foggy day along the midcoast of Maine, the cries of herring gulls mixing with the throb of lobster boat engines out in Muscongus Bay. A dozen and a half birders were strung out along a beaver pond, spotting scopes perched atop tripods, their binoculars focused on a tangle of blueberry bushes and scraggly, head-high tamaracks that poked up from the boggy mat of sphagnum moss spangled with tiny pink orchids.

Bonnie Bochan, an ornithologist who splits her time between Maine and the Ecuadorian rain forest, stared intently at the thicket, from which a thin, slow trill emerged. Thats a swamp sparrow, Bonnie said quietly. It sounds a lot like the pine warblers and juncos weve been hearing, but its trill isnt as musical as the juncos, and its not as fast as the pine warblersyou can almost count each syllable. As though on cue, the sparrow itself hopped into view, tipped back its head and sanga dusky bird with bright rufous wings and a dark brown cap, the feathers of its white throat quivering in song.

A little sigh rippled through the group; for most of them, this was a new species, a life bird, and some had come from as far away as California to see it. A few were experienced birders, most of the others complete novices, but all were dressed, as birders are wont to do, with more of an eye toward practicality than fashionnylon pants tucked into socks, wide-brimmed Gortex hats snugged under chins, outsized vests with pockets big enough for field guides, bug repellent, and water bottles. They wore mismatched rain pants and coats of differing vintage and color, but always mutednothing so bright that it would scare the birds.

I glanced down at myself: shabby green rain pants, a dark blue raincoat that had seen better days, a scruffy ball cap, and worn boots. Except for the expensive binoculars around my neck, I looked a bit like a hobo. I fit in perfectly.

Every summer, I help teach a course in field ornithology on this surpassingly lovely part of the Maine coast, at an Audubon camp on Hog Island, a 330-acre sanctuary near the town of Damaris-cotta. For more than seventy years, birders have been coming to this spruce-clad island, including some of the greatest names in birding and bird science. When the island was donated to the National Audubon Society in 1936, NAS director John Baker dispatched a young grad student named Olin Sewall Pettingill Jr. to inspect the place, with an eye toward turning it into an educational camp for adults. Pettingillwho later became the director of the famed Cornell Lab of Ornithologygave it an enthusiastic thumbs-up, so Baker turned to the question of staffing. He had just the fellow to teach about birdsa chap named Roger Tory Peterson, who had published a revolutionary field guide two years earlier, and had just been placed in charge of Audubons education program. Petersonin his twenties, single and good-lookingcompeted for birds (and for the attention of the young women campers) with Allan Cruickshank, another Audubon staffer who would go on to fame as a writer and bird photographer.

The list goes on and on, from John James Audubon, who passed through the area in 183233, to Rachel Carson, who lived just down the coast and wrote about the old ships chandlery on Hog Island. Kenn Kaufman, who has lifted Petersons mantle as one of the great popularizers of birding, is an instructor. Audubon scientist Steve Kress worked in the camp kitchen one summer as a college kid, in his spare time reading accounts of the old seabird colonies in the Gulf of Maine and wondering if the birds could somehow be brought back to places like lonely Eastern Egg Rock, nine miles offshore. Today, he is a pioneer in seabird restoration, and thanks to him, puffins again nest on Eastern Egg and many other Maine islands.

Kids keep coming to Hog Island, and dreaming. Along with the thirty-five adults, we had more than a dozen eager teen birders in camp that week, including Eve, whose bleached, bobbed hair had been dyed pink and orange, and Raymond, intense, focused, and mature beyond his seventeen years. Two years earlier, Id taught Raymonds best friend Ryan, and I was shocked when, the following summer, Ryan had been killed in a car crash while the two boys were on a birding trip. The wreck had almost killed Raymond, too, but hed survived, and was following through on plans he and Ryan had made, continuing with a sophisticated research project theyd begun together to study the rosy-finches of the New Mexico mountains.

Birding and ornithology; sport and science; amateur and professional. The gulf between the two seems pretty wide today, but in fact its a fairly recent phenomenon. For most of the history of bird study, there was no such division; the ornithologists were all gifted amateurs, and the science of studying birds was enmeshed with the joy of watching them. Even today, as Raymonds project shows, the threads that link hobby and profession are thick and entangling. Citizen-science is the buzzword for public participation in all manner of censuses, surveys, and field research projects, but it goes deeper than that. One friend of mine, the man who knows more about ruby-throated hummingbirds than almost anyone in the world, is a retired electrician, and hes hardly alone. Every fall, I oversee an owl migration study, one combining banding, genetics, and radiotelemetry. Among the nearly one hundred people helping out are, not surprisingly, several wildlife biologists donating their timebut my crew also includes a plumber, a math teacher, a retired soft-drink executive, and a former music teacher who repairs pianos.

And its hard to find an academically trained ornithologist with a string of initials after his or her name who isnt also an avid birder. I dont know many structural engineers who devote their free time to visiting highway overpasses for fun, but there is something about birds that makes even those whose nine-to-five jobs are ornithological pick up their binoculars as soon as the workday is finished. Thats because in almost every case, the job followed the passion, not the other way around. Call it all bird study, and forget the distinctions.

The number of people with that passion keeps growing, too. Just as the birders keep swarming to Hog Island each year, so do they jam the trails at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in south Texas looking for chachalacas and whistling-ducks, or the scrubby thickets of Cape May, New Jersey, when the warblers are dropping from the sky and the merlins and peregrines are hurtling past the dunes. They come to Point Reyes on the northern California coast, to Point Pelee in Lake Erie, and Whitefish Point in Michigan; they know that the rocky man-made islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel attract the damndest rarities, like western rock wrens and Asian black-tailed gulls, and they made an obscure roadside rest stop near Patagonia, Arizona, so celebrated for the exotic Mexican birds that turn up there that the phrase Patagonia picnic-table effect entered the lexicon.