The Reluctant Twitcher (2 page)

W
ITH EACH NEW REVELATION
about our human assault on Nature, more people become birdwatchers. Richard Pope's observation that there are now over fifty million bird enthusiasts in Canada and the United States alone is remarkable. However, it doesn't seem out of line when you consider that BirdLife International's Global Partnership has 2.5 million members and ten million active supporters.

It didn't used to be like that. When I started out, more than forty years ago, birdwatchers were pictured as an eccentric minority wearing odd hats, sensible raingear, and sturdy shoes: a nutty kind of tribe united by an inexplicable enthusiasm for birds. It was this fusty image that prompted some Audubon enthusiasts in the 1950s to describe themselves as “birders,” so as not to be mistaken for wimpy oddballs. Ironically, early birdwatchers had chosen their name specifically to distinguish themselves from traditional “birders,” who were commercial bird-catchers, or fowlers; in some places a wild cat was also called a “birder.”

It was Rachael Carson's 1962 book
Silent Spring
that first focused public attention on birds. Its enormous success and influence is credited with inspiring one of the first public outcries over pesticides, pollution, and environmental destruction. Carson's readers began to recognize that birds in general played the same role on earth as the proverbial canaries did in coal mines. Which is to say, in dying they warned the miners.

Humans were fascinated by birds long before we'd begun to threaten their continued existence. We came to consciousness as a species surrounded by them, when they would have been present in unimaginable numbers. As late as 1866, a legendary flight of Passenger Pigeons was recorded in Southern Ontario. More than a mile wide, with an estimated two birds to the square yard, it took fourteen hours to pass overhead. There were an estimated three billion birds in that assemblage. Nor was it just Passenger Pigeons whose flights darkened the sky: Eskimo Curlews and Golden Plover also gathered in enormous flocks. John James Audubon reports that forty-eight thousand of the latter were gunned down one day near New Orleans.

It isn't difficult to imagine the sense of wonder that our distant forebears felt in the presence of birds. Apparently free from the dictates of gravity, birds soared easily on the wind. Hunter-gatherers moving laboriously over the land must have envied the freedom with which birds flew on ahead, much in the same way as we do now when watching them from a traffic jam. In
Grass, Sky, Song
, Trevor Herriot describes how the indigenous Siouan people, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, believed that the holy is “the air flowing within and around all living things. As masters of the realm that is the source of spirit and the medium of all spiritual transactions, all birds are spiritual teachers and messengers â¦” Or as we find it in Ecclesiastes: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.”

Although birds hover near the centre of most mythologies and religions, there are very few, if any, of them in Hell. From the Christian dove to Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec plumed serpent), and from Raven Man to Plato's description of the soul growing wings and feathers, birds are generally associated with creativity and the human soul, with the spiritual communications between the gods and man.

At the same time, there's something very personal in our relationship with birds. As I've noted elsewhere, a great many birdwatchers â from those who simply maintain feeders in their gardens to those who wander the world in search of new, often more exotic species â have stumbled onto a seductive truth: paying attention to birds is being mindful of Life itself. We birders seldom think of our pursuit this clearly, but sometimes, unexpectedly, we are overtaken by a sense of wonder and gratitude. Surely it is the encounter with a force much larger than ourselves that moves us.

Their omnipresence, along with the richness and variety of both species and numbers, helps to explain why we relate to birds in such remarkably varied ways. Pigeon fanciers race them, while others develop exotic breeds of roosters out of what was once a Jungle Fowl. There are fighting cocks, caged singing birds, and parrots who speak languages other than their own. I once gave my partner a pair of Peacocks for her birthday, which in retrospect seems a peculiar thing to have done. Thirty-five million pheasants are bred each year in Britain for the gun â far more than could ever be eaten, thus confirming there are still many among us who find it amusing to kill. In contrast, a ravaged old woman regularly feeds stale bread to gangs of pigeons, Ring-billed Gulls, and sparrows at the edge of a parking lot around the corner from my house. Smiling beatifically with pigeons on her shoulders and gulls between her boots, she might be St. Francis returned as a bag lady.

Finally, of course, there are birdwatchers and/or birders, many of whom are fiercely competitive, both with themselves and others. I once travelled with a fellow whose preoccupation with shorebirds and waders made him utterly scornful of the “dickey-birds” living in the forest. Nevertheless, I suspect most bird enthusiasts simply maintain well-stocked feeders and bird baths, conducive to a more relaxed form of watching, though an increasing number go a step farther and contribute information about population trends by acting as volunteers at field stations, or by recording their sightings for projects such as Feeder Watch or the annual Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. True amateurs have made a hugely important contribution to our knowledge of birds and their behaviour.

I first met Richard Pope because of our shared enthusiasm for Pelee Island and its birds. Just off the tip of the more celebrated point of the same name, Pelee Island is a great place to welcome passage migrants. The local community hosts a SpringSong Festival in May, the focus of which is a bird race in which teams strive to see as many species as possible in a twenty-four hour period. A unique feature of this event is that competitors cannot use any form of motorized vehicle in their search. The winners and runners-up are celebrated at a banquet on the Saturday night.

Over the years, Richard and I have often found ourselves wandering about together in search of a reported Yellow-breasted Chat, an Acadian Flycatcher, or perhaps the Prothonotary Warbler. I must say that Richard's patience and persistence is humbling; he often remains in the gathering dusk well after I've abandoned the search. Thus, I wasn't surprised to learn that he'd committed himself to seeing three hundred species in Ontario, during what birders call a Big Year.

We humans seem to need challenges. In the realm of birds and birdwatchers, these challenges are generally focused on “listing,” or keeping a record of all the birds seen in a day, a year, a life and/or in a backyard or a bird race on an island. The considerable challenge that Richard set himself was nothing more than a marginally insane extension of Pelee's Green Bird Race, except that he was mostly racing against himself. Or perhaps against the void that would have probably loomed, were he not to have achieved his goal of three hundred species.

All races are against time. The birds themselves are racing time during their migration. Too soon or too late and they'll die or be unable to breed. So, in his counting and his self-imposed time-limit, Richard Pope is in some ways imitating Nature itself. His engaging account of his Big Year could well be called One Man's Migration.

Finally, I ask myself: How much easier would it have been to achieve Richard's goal forty years ago? And how much harder will it be to count three hundred species during a year in Ontario thirty years from now. Will it even be possible?

G
RAEME
G
IBSON

Twitch Not Lest Ye Be Twitched.

â T
HE
M
INOR
P
ROPHETS

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