8

Beyond the List

A FRIGID WIND was keening in the superstructure of the MV Tiglax as it pitched in heavy seas, its bow digging deep into the waves and kicking up spume and spray that was whipped off to port. For several hours David Sibley and I had been on the wheelhouse roof of the 120-foot ship, swaying with the increasing roll, hands jammed in our pockets for warmth between bouts with binoculars.

We were in one of the most remote parts of North America—one of the most remote parts of the world, for that matter—plowing through the North Pacific two-thirds of the way out the Aleutian Island chain. All day the ship had been threading its way among rugged volcanic islands, with names like Kagalska, Little Tanaga, and Umak, beneath heavy clouds pierced by rare shafts of sunlight. From time to time a Laysan albatross would slide across our wake and tack up to the ship on slender wings six and a half feet wide, effortlessly matching our speed. The rough waters around us were alive with other seabirds—horned puffins and ancient murrelets riding the wind-torn whitecaps, fulmars and short-tailed shearwaters coursing back and forth inches above the water.

Then we turned into Fenimore Pass, a turbulent gap in the archipelago twenty miles wide, where the Pacific and the Bering Sea wrestle twice a day as the tides turn—a churning, chaotic seascape. We had to brace ourselves now, hanging on to a stanchion or a railing as the ship lurched among the uneven waves. Soon the surface of the ocean was seething with yet more birds: crested auklets and parakeet auklets in close-packed rafts, or swift-flying flocks whose bumblebee wings blurred as they flew. But as astonishing as the sight was, Sibley was searching for something else—a tiny bird found nowhere else but this far-flung corner of the world, where it revels in the tidal violence of places like Fenimore Pass.

The Tiglax (pronounced TEK-lah, it is an Aleut word meaning “eagle”) is the research vessel of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses virtually all of the Aleutians. We were hitching a ride for a few days, hoping to reach the home waters of the whiskered auklet, a creature that had haunted Sibley’s birding dreams since childhood. Barely eight inches long, the auklet is sooty gray, with a small blood-red bill, a slender crest of dark feathers curling over the forehead, and thin white plumes that angle back over the face like some kind of warbonnet, framing a pair of white shirt-button eyes.

“The whiskered auklet has been at the top of my wish list since I was a teenager,” Sibley had told me some days earlier. “It’s so little-known, and lives in such a remote, exciting place, that I’ve always wanted to see it.”

 

Found only in the lonely, chaotic seas of the western Aleutian Islands, the whiskered auklet is one of the least-known species of seabirds and a prize for avid listers willing to travel that far.

Photo by Scott Weidensaul

 

In the years when he was developing his field guide, David crisscrossed North America repeatedly; by the time he’d finished his book, he’d observed almost every one of the 810 species of birds routinely found north of the U.S.–Mexico border. Only a few of the regular breeding species had eluded him; to illustrate these, he was forced to rely on museum skins and photographs, not his own eyes, ears, and sketches. One was Gunnison’s sage grouse, from a corner of Colorado and Utah—a bird not even described for science until 2000; another was an endemic scrub-jay found only on Santa Cruz Island off the coast of southern California, which he finally saw in 2004.

But the whiskered auklet inhabits some of the roughest, loneliest, most forbidding waters on the planet, and until now, it had evaded him. It was easy to see why; just getting all the way out here had been a challenge that stretched over many days. (I was tagging along to write an article for Nature Conservancy magazine about Sibley’s quest, which would also bring needed attention to the risk facing Aleutian seabirds from introduced rats and foxes that have decimated some colonies.)

First we took a chartered plane heading for Shemya, almost the very last island in the Aleutians, where the Tiglax was to meet us; the eighteen-hundred-mile flight from Anchorage was the equivalent of flying from Nashville to Los Angeles—only in a small, twin-engine plane over empty ocean and uninhabited islands. And through bad weather; a huge low-pressure system had blanketed the region in clouds, rain, and fog, and conditions on the ground at our second refueling stop, Adak Island, were deteriorating. We needed the gas at Adak; without it, we couldn’t go on. The pilot, chewing his lip for long minutes, watched the fuel gauges dropping, then barked an announcement that he was aborting, pulling us in a tight 180-degree turn.

So much for Shemya; the only place to land was far back to the east, at Dutch Harbor on Unalaska Island. We cooled our heels there for several days before catching another flight west, making it to Adak this time. Shemya was no longer an option, but all this time the Tiglax had been steaming east and would meet us that night in Adak’s harbor.

Adak, a rugged, treeless island twenty-eight miles long, used to boast Alaska’s sixth-largest city, a bustling naval base that was home to five thousand people. But in 1997 the military pulled out, leaving the place a ghost town, and today, about the only reason to come to this island is for the birds. As close to Siberian Kamchatka as it is to Anchorage, Adak—like most of the islands of the western Aleutians—attracts a host of vagrant Asian species in spring and fall migration, birds that dedicated listers can add to his or her North American totals only if they make the long, expensive trip out here, to the middle of nowhere; birds that are, to a hard-core lister, worth their weight in gold.

Listing is at once the easiest and hardest part of birding to explain to a nonbirder. Most people have at least a little competitive spirit in them, and so the idea of birding as a game, with the species count forming the score, is a concept that anyone can grasp. Whether it’s a Christmas Bird Count, where the goal is to amass a big tally for a single day, or a birder’s cumulative life list, it makes intuitive sense that birders would enjoy keeping track of what they’ve found.

But serious listing, the kind that empties bank accounts, ruins marriages, and borders on the pathologically compulsive, is another critter altogether. How normal is it to keep a travel bag packed and always ready in the closet, so that you can snatch it up and catch a plane across the country on a moment’s notice at news of a rare sighting? How normal is it to abandon your career and family for a year, ricocheting from one end of the continent to the other as you try to rack up a record-breaking list of birds seen in one twelve-month period? But then, how normal is it to pay sixty or seventy thousand dollars to risk death climbing Mount Everest? Every pastime, if pushed to its logical bounds, becomes peculiar; push it well beyond those limits, and it becomes bizarre. Somewhere, I’m sure, there are extreme bowlers or gonzo stamp collectors who would make the rest of us shake our collective heads as well.

For years the ultimate listing destination was Attu, at the far end of the Aleutian chain, so far west that the international date line has to make a big zigzag around it. The only inhabitants are a few coast guard personnel manning a loran station. In 1972 Joe Taylor became the first birder to spend any time on Attu in the spring, looking for his seven-hundredth species of North American bird.

“It was as close to wilderness as there was in this world,” Taylor told me twenty years later. “There was the loran station with thirty-eight guys and one dog. Most of the guys never left the building unless they absolutely had to. I was totally on my own.

“You look at Attu on a map, and it’s a pinpoint, but when you get there, it’s forty miles long and thirty wide, all mountains and cliffs.” Every morning at five, Taylor made himself breakfast in the station’s mess hall, slipped a sandwich into his coat pocket, and headed out, averaging fifteen or twenty miles a day on foot.

“I got my seven-hundredth species, a gray-spotted flycatcher. I got a couple of smews, a greenshank, common sandpipers, and wood sandpipers,” all Asian birds that were priceless to a lister. The word got out quickly, and Attu became the must-see spot for serious listers. Six years later, when Taylor came back, he and his wife found three birding groups on the island, and people everywhere. “It was nowhere near as much fun, even though I did see more birds,” he complained. Nor was it a holiday for the birders; for a steep fee they got to hunker down in abandoned, leaky old military buildings (birders could no longer stay in the active base housing) with sporadic electricity and limited hot water, hiking, or riding decrepit bicycles around the perpetually rainy, perpetually windy island, looking for such treasures as Oriental greenfinch and narcissus flycatcher.

Since 2000, however, because of changes in military regulations, Attu has been accessible only to those who charter an oceangoing boat from Siberia, as one or two bird tour operators have done. Adak has become the fallback choice these days for Aleutian birding, although it has seen better days, too. When the military left, it abandoned more than a thousand homes, offices, and businesses; it is the only place in the world where I’ve ever seen a boarded-up McDonald’s restaurant, the golden arches crumbling. A handful of residents remain, many working for the local Native corporation, which is trying to build a tourist industry based in part on hunting for introduced caribou, although the recent arrival of a ballistic missile–defense radar unit promises a few more government jobs.

A spotting scope on his shoulder, Sibley walked through an abandoned neighborhood on Adak, heading for the beach. In the distance loomed the hulking white cone of the Great Sitkin volcano. The windows on many of the oddly angular modular houses were broken, the siding peeling away in the constant wind, tufts of pink insulation strewn for miles across the surrounding tundra. The front yards were rank with high grass and dandelions, grown enormous in the mild, damp climate, on whose seeds flocks of gray-crowned rosy-finches fed.

“Well, that completes the twilight-zone effect,” Sibley said. “Rosy-finches feeding on giant dandelions in a ghost town near a boarded-up McDonald’s.” Actually, it felt disquietingly like a scene from one of those postapocalyptic movies, like On the Beach.

It was early June—late for Asian migrants and, in fact, that morning in the tiny airport, we’d passed the last birding group leaving as we arrived. We did soon locate a terrific find—a Far Eastern curlew, a shorebird with an astoundingly long, deeply decurved bill, one of only a few dozen that have been seen in North America and a first for David, who filled page after page in his sketchbook. Later we had dinner in the smoky VFW post, where a bunch of hard-looking guys—maybe a quarter of the island’s population—cracked pool balls and drank, and by midnight, we were down at the harbor, watching the Tiglax ease up to the dock.

The following day was a long and fruitful one, accompanying refuge biologists in inflatable Zodiacs, to explore neighboring islands and hidden coves, and discussing their work removing foxes and rats from some of the Aleutians. But now, as we moved into the maelstrom of Fenimore Pass, we were looking sharp for the auklets that had brought David all this way.

And we found them—at first hundreds, then thousands of whiskered auklets, sliding up and down the steep-sided waves in flocks so tightly packed they looked like black carpets thrown on the water. “I’ve seen a few parakeet auklets, and some crested auklets a little while ago, but otherwise, it’s just been thousands and thousands of whiskereds,” David said. “Maybe tens of thousands. I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”

Exciting as all this was, that stormy evening on the Tiglax wasn’t actually the first time Sibley found his long-sought auklet. A few days earlier, during our forced layover in Dutch Harbor, we’d managed to hire a boat to take us out to the Baby Islands, just north of Dutch Harbor. There we found a few small flocks at the easternmost edge of the species’ range.

Months after we got home, I was telling the story of Sibley’s auklet hunt to an acquaintance of mine who’s a fairly enthusiastic lister. He heard me out, cocked his head, and asked, “Why?”

Not, why would someone travel to a remote and frozen part of the world to find a single small gray bird; he understood that part perfectly well and would do it himself in a heartbeat if he had the chance. No; he meant, why go looking for a bird we’d already found, instead of focusing on finding something new? “I mean, getting that Far Eastern curlew was great, but that was the only new bird you had there. If you’d spent your time on Adak instead of out on the boat looking for auklets, I’m sure you could have scraped up a few more species. There had to be a couple more Asian strays left on the island.”

Here, in a nutshell, are the twin polarities of modern birding. At one extreme you have birds as a source of inspiration and awe, as objects of curiosity, whether intensely scientific or at the layman’s more general level. At the other extreme, you have birds as tick marks on a list, as inventory, treasures in a scavenger hunt that may encompass one’s backyard or the planet, a single day or a lifetime.

Roger Tory Peterson was only the most famous writer to observe that birding can be many things to many people, and for most of us, the lure of birds lies somewhere between these two poles, incorporating elements of each. But there’s no denying that, just as bird study in the nineteenth century focused almost exclusively on the ornithological—taxonomy, field studies, life history—the twentieth (and now, the twenty-first) have been dominated by birding as a competitive pastime, one that places a premium on challenge rather than knowledge.

I’ll confess that I’ve always been uncomfortable with this modern approach. I like the rush of a good CBC as much as the next birder, but there is a shallowness about list-mania that I find off-putting. So, I suspect, does David Sibley; for him, finding the whiskered auklet represented more than just a penultimate notch on his belt; the real attraction was seeing an almost legendary bird in its wild and beautiful habitat, and the more (and more often) the better.

Stories abound of hard-core listers who spend a small fortune tracking down a single species they need to flesh out their North American list, only to ignore it mere moments after they’ve seen and identified it. Every field trip leader knows the type, the person who sees nothing but fresh numbers in each new excursion, whose acquisitive streak seems to blot out all other pleasures afield. To such birders, everything else—the ability to assess field marks, recognize songs or “read” habitat, among much else—exists merely to service the list, and a bird, once ID’d, has no more value.

Sometimes, even this minimal hurdle—identifying the bird yourself—is ignored. Leading a trip once in Central America, I was tailed for days through the forest and savannahs by a tour member who scarcely raised his binoculars to look at the birds we found. Instead, he was forever scribbling in his notebook, asking me to spell the names of birds I’d found, which he hadn’t bothered studying in his field guide; in fact, I’m not sure he’d even brought his own copy. After all, why else would you pay for a guide? At the end of each morning’s excursion, he’d run through his tally and ask if there’d been anything else we’d seen. Of course, “we” hadn’t seen much of anything, because he hadn’t been looking.

One day we found a male violaceous trogon, an eyepopper of a bird with an iridescent green back, brilliant yellow belly, and a chest of stunning purple-blue, lit up like neon by a shaft of sunlight. We got a scope on it, and the sight left everyone breathless.

Almost everyone. “But we’ve seen this one already!” the lister kept whining. “Why are we messing around with a bird we’ve already seen?” Where’s a hungry jaguar when you need one?

But it’s easy to beat up on such boors. There are plenty of other listers who never incite homicidal thoughts. Lists can be a tool, a means as well as an end, and the well-balanced birder uses them as such. If nothing else, they are a wonderful memory prod; leafing through the stacks of old checklists I’ve amassed over the years, I find myself transported back—to Hawk Mountain on a humid late-August day in the early 1970s, when I was in high school, the single immature bald eagle we saw a sight worth celebrating in those DDT-era years when the entire fall count might be only a dozen and a half eagles. Or my first trip to Monterey Bay, where the wealth of seabirds (and sea mammals) left me openmouthed. Or a trip up the Maine coast during college, catching the late-May migrants as they streamed into the spruce forests.

But it’s also undeniable that listing is a slippery slope, something that birding’s pioneers sensed very early on. Competitive listing seems to have gotten its start in the urban East, where both the Christmas Bird Count and what’s become known as the Big Day began. As early as 1898, bird-watchers in Ohio were recording up to one hundred species in grueling full-day hunts. “This all-out May-day tournament was something I had never heard of before I came in contact with the birdmen of the big cities along the East coast,” Roger Tory Peterson wrote in his 1948 book, Birds Across America. “New Yorkers and Bostonians call it the ‘Big Day’; the New Jerseyites the ‘Lethal Tour’; Philadelphians the ‘Century Run,’ and Washingtonians the ‘Grim Grind.’ One museum man, with a note of scorn, dubbed it ‘ornithogolfing.’”

That unnamed scoffer might well have been Witmer Stone, the editor of The Auk, who in 1936 lambasted the idea of competition and listing, from CBCs on down.

 

The really unfortunate feature of the “Christmas Lists” is the element of competition which naturally creeps in. Even the most careful individual observer will, more or less unconsciously, give a record the benefit of a doubt if it adds one more species to his team score. Such lists if confined to a limited area and repeated for a number of years with counts of individuals as well as species have a definite value but we have absolutely no sympathy with the so-called “century runs” extending from 3 A.M. to 10 P.M. and covering a hundred miles or more. They are purely endurance tests for the participants.

 

Peterson’s old mentor, Ludlow Griscom, did much to cement the popularity of listing—which was, ironically, known as “birding” in the old days, as distinct from the more serious, scholarly approach known as bird-watching. (The evolution of these terms is interesting; Florence Merriam’s A-Birding on a Bronco first used the word in its modern sense, but then it faded away as “bird-watcher” gained ascendancy. Today, of course, many serious birders cringe if they’re described as “bird-watchers,” that term being most often associated with beginners and the old-lady-in-tennis-shoes stereotype. “Are you a bird watcher, an ornithologist, an ornithophile, an aviphile, a bird lover, bird fancier, bird bander, birder, bird spotter, lister, ticker, twitcher—or what?” Peterson asked rhetorically in a 1984 article.)

Griscom was sensitive to the criticisms of listing, especially the purported inaccuracies of sight records versus collecting, and did whatever he could to keep the results above reproach. One older chap who was a regular on Griscom’s Christmas count had a habit of going off by himself and then reporting the most improbable birds. So one year Griscom assigned a young man to shadow the gent and keep him under constant observation—but the old fellow slipped his leash for just a moment, and that night at the compilation dinner (to Griscom’s frustration and his young keeper’s chagrin) he announced yet another unlikely discovery.

Griscom also casts a long and formative shadow among those who keep life lists, as almost every birder does to one degree or another. Some of us simply put a little checkmark (along, perhaps, with the date) beside the species in the index of our field guides, then forget about it; I’m one of these lackadaisical listers and probably couldn’t say within fifty or a hundred species how many are on my North American list. (By custom, such lists include only birds seen north of the Mexican border.) Others, not surprisingly, obsess about their totals, using sophisticated computer programs to track them, and keep a keen eye on those birders whose North American lists place them at the top of the standings, published annually by the ABA.

Keeping track of one’s list is made more complicated by the ever-evolving state of ornithological science, and the fluid concept of what constitutes a species. When I started birding, in the 1960s, one of the common late-fall songbirds was the myrtle warbler, so named for its fondness for wax-myrtle berries. Its western counterpart, the Audubon’s warbler, was similar except for possessing a yellow, not white, throat. All well and good, except that in a narrow zone in British Columbia, where the two species’ ranges overlapped, they sometimes hybridized—something that well-behaved species aren’t supposed to do.

Nor were they the only ones coloring outside the lines; hybrids could be found in the overlap zone between pairs of oriole species, flickers, and other birds. In April 1973 the AOU lumped many of these formerly separate species; myrtle and Audubon’s became the yellow-rumped warbler, Baltimore and Bullock’s orioles were conjoined in the northern oriole, and no fewer than three species of juncos were subsumed into the newly minted “dark-eyed junco.” Gone were the yellow-shafted and red-shafted flickers, now merged into the colorlessly named “northern flicker.” Likewise lost were the great white heron and the blue goose, the American green-winged teal and Harlan’s hawk, to say nothing of the black-eared and common bushtit, and the Ipswich, dusky seaside and Cape Sable sparrows.

There were a few splits—alder and willow flycatchers from the old Traill’s, great-tailed grackle separated from the boat-tailed, and Thayer’s gull from the herring gull, but it was a pretty lopsided affair, with lumps far in the lead. There was general confusion among birders, whose field guides were now hopelessly out of date, but real anger and consternation among zealous listers, some of whom were set back to a considerable degree by the net loss of countable birds. Some talked without irony about “the great April massacre.” (Ironically, with the rise of DNA and song analysis in the last twenty years, the pendulum has lurched back the other way, and splitting rather than lumping is now in vogue—to considerably less nay-saying from the listers, as you can imagine. Towhees, plovers, sparrows, vireos, flycatchers, jays, and thrushes are just some of the groups where wholesale splits have occurred; it now appears that the red crossbill alone may comprise as many as nine species in North America [and more in Eurasia], identifiable only by call note and minute differences in bill size. Even some of the 1970s lumps, including the Baltimore and Bullock’s orioles, have been reversed, and rumors of further resplitting abound.)

In Griscom’s day, it was customary to count both species and subspecies, which accounts for his amazing life list of 980 birds seen north of Mexico. Because of the difficulty in separating subspecies, Griscom himself later advocated counting only full species, but even shorn of these, his list was still a remarkable 650. His company at the top was limited. By the 1960s Audubon magazine profiled what Stuart Keith had dubbed “the 600 Club,” the small group of birders like him who’d seen more than six hundred species. As late as 1970 Joe Taylor was wondering whether it was possible to see seven hundred species in North America, but only two years later, Taylor himself proved that it was, becoming the first member of what inevitably became known as “the 700 Club.” Since then, only a few hundred of the most ardent, zealous birders have broken that ceiling, and an elite handful have cracked the eight hundred mark. In 2005 the ABA’s top lister—a Michigan birder, poet, and university prof named Macklin Smith—had seen 873 species, and people were taking bets on when someone would break nine hundred.^*

Globally there are about ten thousand species of birds—a fertile field for listing if one has the time and means to travel. The yardstick here isn’t seven hundred species, but seven thousand, a total that fewer than a dozen people have achieved. Interestingly—given that big-time listing is an overwhelmingly male pursuit—the all-time champ remains a midwestern housewife named Phoebe Snetsinger, who started birding in 1965, at age thirty-four, and who had, by 1981, seen more than two thousand species around the world. That year, however, Snetsinger’s doctor found that a malignant melanoma she’d been treated for five years earlier had recurred; the cancer was removed, but the prognosis was for three months of fairly good health, then a rapid spiral to death within the year.

“I never doubted I would die, but I wasn’t actually sick, and I was determined to make good use of the time available,” she wrote later. She threw herself into birding, first in Alaska, then, as her health seemed to be holding, ranging much farther afield. She saw her three-thousandth bird, a diademed sandpiper-plover, in Peru, about the time doctors had predicted she would die; a bit more than a year later, she broke four thousand in India. The cancer had gone into remission again, but by now, Phoebe Snetsinger had found her calling, and nothing—not a confrontation with machete-armed villagers on the South Pacific island of New Britain, not the sinking of the outrigger she was on in Indonesia, not even a brutal gang rape in Papua New Guinea—seemed to deter her. She eclipsed eight thousand in 1995 and kept traveling (and listing, although she stopped publishing her totals after reaching eight thousand) until her death in a bus crash on Madagascar in 1999.

But life lists are only one variant—call them a subspecies—of what Peterson termed “the lure of the list.” There are trip lists, county lists, state lists, park lists, and yard lists. Friends of mine are mad for a tradition known as the Big Sit!^*: one counts all the birds seen in a single day from a circle seventeen feet in diameter; it is the ultimate in sedentary birding, a sort of tailgate party for birders. If you think that’s odd, I’ll introduce you to another birder I know, who kept a list of all the birds she’d seen copulating.

Then there’s the notion of seeing how many species one can identify in a calendar year—a Big Year, akin to the Big Day that Peterson encountered when he moved to New York. Here again, Griscom was a motive force behind the idea. Having once declared that it was impossible for even the best birder to see two hundred and fifty species in the New York City area in a year, he went on to rack up annual totals far in excess of that mark, inspiring others to set local records of their own.

Inevitably, some birders tried this game on a grander scale. A New York banker named Guy Emerson—a birding companion of Peterson’s, and a longtime board member of National Audubon—combined his business travels with his hobby and, in 1939, chalked up a continental Big Year total of 497 species. Through the war years, no one was able to touch it, but in 1952 an up-and-coming birder named Bob Smart (later an ABA founder) bumped the mark up to 510 species.

The following year, Peterson and his friend the English ornithologist James Fisher were preparing a three-and-a-half-month expedition across North America, a journey they described in their book Wild America. That old benchmark of Emerson’s and Smart’s beckoned.

“It occurred to me that we might as well do things up brown and try for a record,” Peterson wrote—this despite Fisher’s initial distaste for mere listing, a sport once known as “tally hunting” in Britain. But as the pair got underway—starting in Newfoundland and, largely hugging the coast, traveling to western Alaska by way of central Mexico—Fisher caught the spirit of the enterprise, shouting “Tally ho!” at each new bird. Not including Mexican species, they trounced Smart’s total, with Fisher winding up with 536 species—a few more than Peterson, who missed two days of birding in Alaska. But it was only July when they finished, and naturally, Peterson kept birding for the rest of the year, long after his friend had returned home. By December 31, 1953, he’d seen 572 species.

Peterson and Fisher triggered something among the newly active birding community. The year after their book came out, a young Englishman named Stuart Keith and his brother Anthony came to the United States and did their own Big Year. They had the advantage of Peterson’s and Fisher’s advance work—scouting, if you will—and the newly published Pettingill bird-finding books, and they were able to beat Peterson’s total by twenty-seven species. (Keith, of course, went on to help found the ABA.) In 1971 Ted Parker, a college freshman from Pennsylvania, had trumped that with an astounding 626.^* Lists that had once taken a lifetime to accumulate were now the work of a single, frenzied year.

But perhaps the strangest Big Year of all began in 1973, when a Kansas teenager named Kenn Kaufman stuck out his thumb and started hitchhiking across the country, a pair of binoculars in his pack. Two and a half years earlier, at sixteen, he’d dropped out of high school despite good grades, and—with his parents’ understandably agonized permission—hitchhiked across the country to chase birds. Picked up as an unsupervised minor in California and shipped home, he sold his blood for money and took temp jobs until he had enough cash to head out again; about fifty dollars a month was all he needed, sleeping outside and eating the cheapest food (including dried cat food) that the grocery stores carried.

His ramblings were at first aimless, propelled only by his desire to find the birds and places he’d been reading about, but in late 1972, Kaufman decided to break Ted Parker’s record, a story he tells eloquently in his memoir The Kingbird Highway. He began New Year’s Day 1973, in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona, and hitched maniacally back and forth across the country, finding cave swallow in the Dry Tortugas in Florida, great cormorant in New Hampshire, and gyrfalcon in Vancouver. Picked up by a driver who offered him the wheel, Kenn almost wrecked the car trying to avoid a rabbit; another vehicle in which he was riding caught fire. He tagged along on a Big Day in Texas with Stuart Keith, Joe Taylor, and Jim Tucker, and caught up with Roger Tory Peterson at the first ABA convention in North Dakota. (A photo of the two of them—Peterson looking patrician, Kaufman with a thick beard and hair halfway to his shoulders—appeared on the cover of Birding‘s next issue.)

Kaufman hitched all the way to Fairbanks, then used his carefully hoarded cash to fly to Nome and Gambell Island, where he found rare seabirds and gulls. When he heard that a Eurasian spotted redshank had appeared in New Jersey, he thumbed for five rainy days from Arizona, only to discover, upon arriving, that it was just a greater yellowlegs with oil on its feathers. A friendly game warden in Oklahoma, responding to calls about a suspicious-looking character, gave him a tip on finding prairie-chickens. Toward the end of the trip, he was washed off a frigid winter jetty by storm waves, losing a borrowed spotting scope and only just escaping with his life.

 

At the 1973 ABA conference in Kenmare, North Dakota, Roger Tory Peterson hunts for a bird with Kenn Kaufman, who was halfway through his yearlong hitchhiking attempt to set a new Big Year record.

Courtesy of the Stuart Keith estate

 

When the year ended, Kaufman had broken Parker’s record—but he was nudged out by a grad student from Michigan named Floyd Murdoch, who had been doing his own Big Year and wound up with 669 birds, three more than the young hitchhiker. In the end, for both men, it was the process and not the results that counted. “The Big Year had been a great excuse to go birding,” Kaufman later wrote. “To both Floyd Murdoch and me, that had mattered more than the numerical outcome. All along, Floyd had been more interested in the protection of birds and their habitats than in the accumulation of checkmarks. As for me, my own passion for list-chasing was dwindling fast, while my interest in the birds themselves was becoming ever stronger. So the contest was coming to matter least of all to the contestants.”

Others have continued to set new Big Year records, but as the mark climbs higher and higher, the only way to best it has been by relying on increasingly hefty bank accounts. In 1979 a Mississippi forest manager and self-confessed “routine” birder named Jim Vardaman performed the equivalent of engaging a guide to carry him up a mountain—he hired a number of top birders (including Kaufman) to create a Big Year plan, contacted hundreds of other birders across the country for tips, and spent lavishly to see 699 species, most of which he was led to by others who had staked out the birds. His visits were sometimes measured in minutes, if that. He figured that the publicity—and there was plenty—could only help his business. Birders were aghast; Vardaman was unrepentant. “I didn’t need anybody to like my project,” he told Birding. “If someone was interested, fine; if not, well, I’m not going to poll the delegation to find out if there’s sufficient support.”

Kenn Kaufman, on the other hand, went on to become one of the most respected birders in the country, a teacher and prolific writer I’m grateful to call a friend. But Kenn is no longer a lister; he doesn’t even keep a life list anymore. That long-ago Big Year refocused his attention on the joy of birds for their own sake, not as inventory. But he’s also keenly proud of his youthful accomplishment, especially the one record that I’m sure will never be broken. Kenn spent less than a thousand dollars on his yearlong journey (and most of that getting to and from northern Alaska). This works out to about a buck and a half per species. I’d like to see some hot-shot break that one.

 

AMID ALL THE HUBBUB that surrounded the publication of David Sibley’s guide in 2000, many birders overlooked the fact that it was actually one of two important field guides released almost simultaneously that autumn. The other was an intentionally slender book, about half the size and a quarter of the weight of Sibley’s—the Focus Guide to Birds of North America, by Kenn Kaufman.

In the years after his teenaged adventure, Kenn’s star continued to rise as one of the premier birders in North America. He guided for WINGS and Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, two of the best birding-tour companies in the world. A prolific writer, he became an associate editor of American Birds, then the scholarly journal of the National Audubon Society, and was a frequent contributor to Birding and virtually every other bird magazine, always pushing the envelope of what was possible in terms of field identification. In 1990 he broke into the big time in a big way, authoring a guide in the Peterson series on advanced birding—how to distinguish immature accipiters, confusing peeps, and diabolical Empidonax flycatchers, among other feathered puzzles.

After Advanced Birding was published, though, Kenn had a change of heart. “I decided we didn’t need more serious birders who could discuss the molt sequences of third-year Thayer’s gulls,” he said. “Instead, we needed a lot more people who had maybe seen a yellow warbler and who understood that there was a connection between this attractive bird and its need for habitat.”

That’s when he turned from creating guides for ever-more-skilled birders whose main focus is field identification to ways of popularizing bird study. Surveying the guidebooks on the market, he saw an increasing specialization, a rising technicality that made the hobby less and less accessible for newcomers. The original Peterson guides—first for birds, then for so many other facets of the natural world—had been an entry point for millions to whom nature had once been unknown; they were detailed enough to be useful, but not so Gordian as to be intimidating. Today, the sight of a thick, complex field guide—like the one he’d just written—was more likely to befuddle beginners than to inspire them.

So Kenn set about creating a guide specifically for new and intermediate birders—a basic field guide in the classic Peterson mold, one designed to help people having trouble telling a warbler from a finch, instead of those trying to distinguish the relative width of the wing stripe between eastern and western willets. One way to simplify, of course, is to leave out some of the birds; Peterson himself did this with the eastern and western versions of his guides, but omissions inevitably frustrate users when they find a species not in the guide. Kenn covered all the North American species, but he pared everything down to the minimum; instead of the dozen or so song sparrows in Sibley’s guide, for instance, there were just four of the most widespread or distinctive forms.

Kaufman accomplished this back-to-basics guide, however, in a decidedly high-tech way. Although he’s an accomplished artist, he opted to use photos instead of paintings—but he sought to overcome the drawbacks that had plagued photographic guides for decades, by applying digital technology. Taking a photograph of a bird, Kenn first isolated it from its background, then tweaked the colors, corrected shadows and highlights, sharpened contrast, and accentuated certain field marks—thus making it look like the idealized image of that species. Then correcting for scale, he arranged the enhanced photographs for easy comparison in groupings like “brown ground warblers” or “huge aerial waterbirds.”

The response from birding’s elite? Surprisingly vicious; many of them treated Kaufman like a traitor to the cause for “wasting” his time on beginning birders, instead of applying his considerable skills to thorny identification issues. Others sniped at the book, dismissing the way he grouped similar but unrelated birds, like hawks and owls, instead of following the dictates of taxonomy (even though avian taxonomy is a confusing mystery to newly minted birders, who don’t care a fig that owls are more closely related to nightjars than to hawks and just want to find a bird without a lot of paging back and forth). Still others berated him for digitally altering photographs, implying that this was somehow inherently dishonest—as if he’d been doctoring the Zapruder film instead of simply crafting identification plates.

It was a strange and inexplicable reaction to a man who was just trying to make a good, basic field guide. It must have hurt, but Kenn shrugged it off as small-minded and kept his eye on what he’d realized was important—bringing new people into birding, as a portal not to competition, but to appreciation.

On the face of it, birding would hardly seem to need the help. Surveys routinely show it as one of the fastest-growing outdoor activities, and depending on who’s counting, the number of birders has been pegged as high as 67.8 million Americans—which is almost certainly bogus, given that such surveys count as a birder anyone who tosses sunflower seeds for the juncos. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which also takes a liberal definition of “birder,” put the number at 46 million, with 24 million making trips away from home to watch wild birds.

If you look at just those who can identify more than twenty species of birds, however—itself a pretty generous definition of a birder—that figure drops to just 6 million, and those able to ID one hundred species number a few hundred thousand at best. That’s a lot of people, but not when viewed through the lens of 300 million Americans. While one national survey found that participation in birding had jumped 232 percent between 1983 and 2001, other studies have shown the growth curve for birding flattening out or even falling in recent years. (The same survey showing such dramatic growth in birding is also the one that put the number of birders at nearly 70 million, or almost a quarter of the nation’s population, so I take their conclusions with a grain of salt.)

Other measures continue to show upward signs; the number of participants in Christmas Bird Counts has risen steadily, for example, from 15,000 in 1970 to more than 57,000 in 2005, and those are generally reflective of the most serious slice of the hobby. But birding festivals, which tend to attract beginners, have exploded in number and popularity, from just 12 in 1993 to 140 in 1999 and more than 260 in 2005, ranging from the Sandhill Crane Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Yucatan Bird Festival in Mexico, with the number continuing to grow so rapidly that it’s impossible to find a truly comprehensive list.

Who are birders, for the most part? The majority of them are middle-aged, economically comfortable, and have higher-than-average education. They are also overwhelmingly white; there are surveys to document this last point, but if you simply look around the hawk-watch or refuge-loop road, it’s starkly obvious.

It’s also a sore issue. In 1999 a transplanted Brit and ABA member named Martin Reid started a firestorm in the pages of Birding with a letter to the editor. “Why Are We So White?” Reid asked, wondering if birders, by their inaction and their comfort with the status quo, were allowing birding to become what he called a “White Preserve.” Reid said he wanted to encourage debate—and boy, did he ever. The magazine ran a lengthy string of responses, many of them expressing anger at the implication of at least passive racism. The respondents ranged from a young black birder recounting his experiences, good and bad, as a minority in the sport, to those who compared Reid and his supporters with “race-obsessed, guilt-ridden, high priests of liberalism.” One letter writer who agreed with Reid said part of the problem stemmed from what readers of magazines like Birding see—“white Americans writing about white American topics in a white American language . . . you will see white Americans modeling the latest in birding fashion, and white Americans demonstrating the more recent developments in optical equipment.”

Interestingly, among those who reacted favorably to the letter were prominent borderlands birders like Father Tom Pincelli, who started the Rio Grande Birding Festival in Harlingen, Texas—an event that includes beginning birding sessions in both English and Spanish. Kenn Kaufman, who lived for years in Tucson, called the subject of ethnic homogeneity an “obviously real one,” and suggested that the solution lay mostly at the local level, through the work of nature centers and environmental educators already connected to minority communities.

But though he didn’t say so in his letter, Kenn also believed there was a more direct solution. More than 28 million people in the United States speak Spanish at home; of those, only half speak English “very well,” according to the U.S. Census Bureau—so even if the rest have an interest in birds, navigating through an English field guide presents a fundamental obstacle. So why not, Kenn wondered, create a Spanish-language version of his new guide?

Easier said than done; the publisher was decidedly cool to the idea, worried that the market wasn’t large enough, the demographic not attuned enough to nature to make it worth the financial gamble. Kenn kept making expensive concessions. He agreed to pay for the translation costs, including recruiting Mexican ornithologist Héctor Gómez de Silva to create Spanish transliterations of bird voices (since, for example, Oh dear me, the usual description of a golden-crowned sparrow’s song, doesn’t work in Spanish). He agreed to pay another round of copyright fees to all the photographers and to do all the pre-printing preparation work himself—an exorbitant expense for any author to shoulder.

In late summer 2004, I was birding in southeastern Arizona with Kenn and a couple of mutual friends. After a morning up in the Huachuca Mountains, with the Mexican border just a few miles away, we were eating lunch and rehydrating ourselves with huge lemonades when Kenn quietly mentioned that he’d finally won his long, expensive struggle; the Spanish guide would soon be re-leased, and we offered our heartfelt congratulations.

There are other glimmers of growing diversity as well. A National Survey on Recreation and the Environment conducted in 2000–2001 found that Hispanics were the fastest-growing ethnic group among birders, making up almost 40 percent of the growth in birding since 1995. The hobby is getting less middle-aged, with a big jump in the number of teenagers and twenty-somethings entering birding, and both median income and level of education are coming down. It isn’t just white, college-educated, affluent Americans who are lifting binoculars these days—and more and more often, the sight of a dazzling spring warbler will elicit a whispered “Hermosa.”

In taking on all these challenges, I think Kenn resembles no one so much as his childhood idol, Roger Tory Peterson. Peterson, too, tried to push a birding community more and more focused on lists and sophisticated ID to something more holistic—a greater focus on conservation, a greater commitment to preserving birds instead of just ticking them off on a list, and an attempt to make bird study as accessible as possible, to as many people as possible. He was, at best, only partially successful, but the fight isn’t over. So as we sat, tired and dusty, in that border town diner, we raised our lemonades—¡Salud!—and toasted Guía de campo a las aves de Norteamérica, a book that was long overdue. I suspect that somewhere, in a place where you can still find passenger pigeons and great auks, Roger Peterson was toasting Kenn, too.

 

IN 1943 Joseph Hickey—a friend of Peterson’s from their old Bronx County Bird Club days, a former student of Aldo Leopold’s, and by then a professor of wildlife management at the University of Wisconsin—published a book called A Guide to Bird Watching. Old though it is, it remains one of my favorite bird books, not only for its elegant scratchboard drawings by Francis Lee Jaques, but for Hickey’s devotion to bird-watching in its original sense—the careful, awestruck study of the birds themselves.

Identification (by sight and sound) took up barely more than six pages of this thick volume. Instead, Hickey devoted the rest to instructing his readers on how to observe the ways in which birds live their lives—how to study their migration and habitat selection, their diets, the changes in local bird populations. He enumerated the many ways a bird student could become involved in research, through banding and color-marking, or through breeding-bird surveys; he even outlined a model life-history study that anyone could undertake in their own neighborhood. Over and over again, he showed how little we still knew about birds, and the contribution that any serious amateur could make.

It was a more ornithological approach than the competitive path on which his old mentor Ludlow Griscom and others had set the pastime, something Hickey acknowledged. “The art of bird watching has different meanings among different people,” he wrote:

 

To some it is the art of identifying birds in the field, or of recognizing their songs year after year. This is the Field Card School of Ornithology, which measures success in terms of the rarity, the first migrant, and the big list. At its best it is a sport, testing the eye, the ear, and one’s legs. At its worst, it is a mad rush to the next oasis, with birds ticked off on the run, and a great reliance placed on both gasoline and brakes. Birds are scanned, but it can scarcely be said that they are watched—especially when one has an eye incessantly searching for a rarity in the next tree.

Bird watching is much more than this. It is the art of discovering how birds live. Through it the naturalist can cross the frontier of knowledge and explore an unknown world. His reward is more than a mere check on a field card; although personal and intimate, it can still be a contribution to science.

 

Hickey was pushing his boulder up a steep slope, and I think he knew it. Even then, “bird-watching” was morphing into “birding,” and today, it’s clear that the Field Card School has swept the field. As Birding‘s former editor Paul Baicich pointed out more than a decade ago, Hickey’s approach represents a road not taken, a path along which bird study could have evolved, into something more than a mere identification challenge and a numbers game. Today, though, there are a few tentative stirrings that suggest this missed opportunity in birding’s past could eventually represent birding’s future.

 

IT IS, AS I WRITE THIS, a frigid late-October night in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania. A cold front roared through yesterday, and this evening, there are snow flurries drifting down through the last rattling brown oak leaves.

I slip on a headlamp and, with two companions, walk through the chilly woods. The night air is pierced by a sound that resembles nothing so much as a garbage truck stuck in reverse—a monotonous, mechanical tooting loud enough to be heard half a mile away.

No truck, this is a recording of the territorial call of a male saw-whet owl, a small and mysterious species of the northern forests, which migrates south each autumn across much of North America, including along the ridges of the Appalachians where we are. Our station is one of about a hundred across Canada and the United States, mostly small, volunteer-run operations, that monitor the movements of saw-whets. Under the wan light of a half-moon, I can just make out a line of fine mist nets strung through the forest, each one gauzy as an old lady’s hairnet, but forty feet long and eight feet high. The nets run for more than fifty yards in a giant L among the trees, with a small cooler sitting at the apex of the array, wires running from a battery-powered MP3 player and a juiced-up amplifier to two bullhorn speakers that broadcast the owl toots loudly enough to make my ears throb.

Painful as it may be for me, it is a siren song for migrating saw-whets. Hanging cradled in the nets are five of the small raptors, each the size of my fist, and weighing about as much as a robin. My companions and I quickly untangle the birds, pop each into a cloth holding bag and cinch the drawstring tight, then hike back down the hill to a cabin. There, I affix a lightweight numbered band to each owl’s leg, take a series of measurements, and release all back into the dark forest.

Some autumns, we may catch as many as nine hundred owls at this and two other locations, showing how important the eastern ridges are as a migratory flyway—and showing how little we still know about the continent’s birdlife, since this phenomenon was overlooked for centuries. Secretive and nocturnal, saw-whets were always considered rare, and no one even knew that they were migratory until about 1900, when they were reported crossing the Great Lakes in small numbers. In the 1930s, Bent’s Life Histories account said only that the species “evidently migrates to some extent, or at least wanders widely.” As late as 1993, when its regular and widespread migration had at last been noted, the most authoritative account of the species identified just two routes in the East—through the Great Lakes region or down the Atlantic seaboard.

 

On a cold autumn night, a newly banded northern saw-whet owl is measured before its release—the kind of “citizen science” project that is increasingly common and might offer a new avenue for birding, one fusing the science of birds with the joy of chasing them.

Photo by Scott Fraser

 

That’s because those were the only two places anyone had bothered to look for them. The owls are so secretive by day that most birders go a lifetime without seeing a live saw-whet, but if you put up nets and play a recording of their call, you can find them almost anywhere during migration—on islands along the Pacific Northwest coast; in the Rockies; in shelterbelt woodlots in the Dakotas, surrounded by an eternity of prairie; in urban parks; and throughout the East. We now know that the Appalachian mountains alone carry vast numbers of saw-whets south each year. Far from being rare, this may be one of the most common raptors in North America—just one example of how little we still know, after four centuries of study, about most of our birds.

For a decade now, I’ve overseen this particular saw-whet banding project, under the auspices of the Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art in central Pennsylvania. It’s a laborious undertaking; the three sites scattered over half the state are manned seven nights a week from the first of October through at least Thanksgiving, from dusk until well after midnight. To accomplish this, we have about a hundred volunteers, who annually contribute about five or six thousand person-hours to the effort.

You’d think that any project requiring people to stay up half the night in cold, unheated buildings would be hard to recruit for, but we have a waiting list of volunteers anxious to join. Part of that is due to the owls themselves—small, elfin, impossibly cute, they are an appealing species with which to work. But I suspect an even greater reason is the chance to connect directly with wild birds, using one of the most fascinating techniques in science.

Hickey devoted a chapter of his book to what he called “the romance of bird banding,” and the charm hasn’t waned in the more than six decades since he wrote it. To do as we do—catch a wild owl, put a numbered band on its leg, and let it go—is (as the naturalist Aldo Leopold once said), to hold a ticket in a great lottery. Each year, about thirty of our owls are recaptured by other banders, while we, in turn, catch a roughly equal number that already bear bands—birds whose travels we can begin to map when we learn where and when they were first marked.

There was, for example, 1353–43820, whom we captured on Halloween night in 2001; she had been banded in 1998 on the Bruce Peninsula of Lake Huron in Ontario, already at least three years old. Or 844–23780, banded two years earlier by friends of mine near Freeport, Maine. Or 614–59986, originally banded in late April 2003 as she crossed Bois Blanc Island in the wintry Straits of Mackinaw, and whom we caught heading south a year and a half later and five hundred miles southeast.

Ours is an all-volunteer crew, and its makeup is, I think, instructive. Not surprisingly, there are a number of professional wildlife biologists in the group—several who work for the state, several more who work for conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy and Audubon, and another who is a private consultant specializing in endangered bog turtles. But the seventeen licensed banders who operate under my federal banding permit also include a plumber, a retired soft-drink executive, two retired teachers, a sewage plant operator and two environmental educators. Of the more than eighty others who volunteer weekly through the fall, but who don’t have a banding permit—well, they run the gamut from teenaged homeschoolers to retirees, a university professor to a massage therapist, a United Way executive to a state museum specialist. A cross section, in other words.

Not only do we band owls, we also put tiny radio transmitters on some of them so we can learn where they’re roosting, what habitats they’re using, and (by collecting their regurgitated pellets and examining the bones inside) what they’re eating. We gently pluck a few small body feathers from each one, so that DNA can be teased from the skin cells that cling to the shaft, allowing us to compare them with the genetics of owls across the continent, building a map of regional saw-whet populations. (We’ve also assisted many other researchers, from the Centers for Disease Control to UCLA, by collecting samples of owl blood, feathers, and even feces for their studies.)

We may be a bit odd, sitting in the woods listening to something that sounds like the alien mother-ship landing, but there are a lot of other people involved in similar projects that allow laymen to contribute to the science and study of birds. Some are homemade undertakings that grow out of one person’s passion. Most, though, are a salubrious mix of academic and amateur—projects with professional guidance that harness the numbers and enthusiasm of average birders. Among the most famous is Project Feeder-Watch, a joint Canadian/American enterprise that began in Ontario in 1976 and is now jointly managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Bird Studies Canada. Every two weeks throughout the winter, more than sixteen thousand participants record the species and numbers of birds at their feeders—creating an unparalleled picture of bird populations.

Feeder Watch tracked the progress of an epidemic eye disease that swept through house finches in the 1990s; it has traced the explosive northward push of formerly “southern” species like red-bellied woodpeckers into eastern Canada; and provides a glimpse of unexpected bird irruptions, like the 2005 invasion of varied thrushes into the East. It permits an annual snapshot of populations of birds like common redpolls and American tree sparrows, which nest in the Arctic—the only way to monitor species with such remote nesting grounds.

But there are thousands of such projects available to birders, from breeding-bird atlases to nesting-loon surveys, bluebird box trails to point counts assessing threatened warbler populations. Hawk migration counts (and now, a growing number of winter raptor surveys) are a common example, but there are now vulture counts, too—and surveys of owls, cranes, seabirds, shorebirds, nighthawks, hummingbirds, and herons, among others. The wildlife ecology unit at UC Davis has organized “Magpie Monitors” to keep tabs on the yellow-billed magpie found only in central California, a bird at significant risk from West Nile virus; the volunteers (many using bicycles) regularly count magpies along routes they devise themselves. Cornell has a suite of projects designed especially for urban students, focusing on city birds, like pigeons, crows, and gulls.

It isn’t only birds; there are Fourth of July Butterfly Counts, sponsored by the North American Butterfly Association; a national amphibian network called Frog Watch USA; bat box surveys and moose monitoring, schemes to keep track of dragonflies, fish, marine mammals, and almost everything else in nature.

This trend has been given the catchy title “citizen-science,” but in fact, this remerging of science and hobby brings ornithology back to its amateur roots in a way that is of immense and immediate benefit to the birds—an integration, all these centuries later, of the many threads that form the tapestry of American bird study: science, sport, and conservation.

The Christmas Bird Count, which started as pure fun, now provides vital data on winter bird populations—while still being a good excuse for some friendly competition. The Breeding Bird Survey, the 1960s brainchild of biologist and field guide author Chandler S. Robbins, has proven to be of immense value for conservation. Every spring, volunteers across the United States and Canada fan out at dawn along thousands of predetermined routes, listening for birdsong and counting what they hear; the BBS has been among the most important pieces of evidence tracing the decline of many groups of birds in the face of habitat loss and fragmentation. Science? Conservation? Yes, obviously; but for many who run those routes year after year, the BBS is also an excuse to enjoy the dawn chorus that makes the breeding season such a joy.

The late Fran Hamerstrom, a pioneer of wildlife research, coined the phrase “birding with a purpose” to describe her lifetime of work, but it neatly sums up most of these emerging citizen-science projects. Here in Pennsylvania, for example, we’re in the midst of a five-year revision of the state’s breeding-bird atlas—a mammoth undertaking that divides up the state into almost five thousand blocks, each of which are then surveyed by thousands of volunteer birders. It’s a reason to explore new areas, hunt down rare species—motivation to get outside.

One reason I love to “atlas” is that it’s more than simply ticking off species; the idea is to confirm whether or not a bird is nesting within that block, and so it becomes a treasure hunt, with behavior as the clues. Why is that female cardinal crouching in front of a male, wings quivering and bill agape while he passes her food? That’s courtship behavior, one level of confirmation. Why is that red-eyed vireo carrying a beakful of caterpillars? Food for its chicks; another confirmed breeder. And that Baltimore oriole that just dropped a large white blob from its mouth? That was a fecal sac, extruded by a nestling and carried (for sanitary reasons) far from the nest by the parent. Bingo—another confirmed species. Atlasing is an excuse to harness the better angels of our listing nature, combine them with an ever-greater understanding of bird behavior, and employ them for the sake of the birds. The information that comes from such an atlas provides a level of detail regarding bird populations that was previously impossible, and absolutely critical if we’re going to preserve vibrant bird populations into the future. And at the same time, participating birders can’t help but learn a great deal about the lives of the birds they’re chasing.

What I hope will happen—and this is far from a certain outcome—is that as more and more birders become involved in such citizen-science programs, they will develop a greater sense of obligation to the birds themselves. That may seem like an odd thing to worry about; after all, birders would seem to be natural conservationists, dependent upon the birds for their very pastime.

But the sorry truth is, birders as a community have been woefully neglectful of the conservation side of the birding equation. Not all of them, of course; there have always been prominent birders, from Peterson on down, who have lobbied loud and long for avian conservation. But for too many birders, that spirit of listing and competition has overshadowed the more elemental aspects of bird study and diluted what should be a strong and universal voice demanding better care of birds and the natural world on which they depend.

This was brought home to me forcefully several years ago at a birding festival in the Great Lakes. On the last day, I and the other speakers were taking part in a panel discussion and the subject arose of adding a small excise tax to the cost of birding gear like binoculars, feeders, field guides, and seed. It’s an idea with a long and successful history; an 11 percent federal tax has been levied on sporting arms and ammunition since 1938, and 10 percent on fishing tackle since 1950; together, they raise hundreds of millions of dollars, mostly for game species conservation, every year.

Yet proposals for similar taxes on birding materials, with the proceeds targeted specifically for non-game-bird conservation programs, were dead in the water. Much of the resistance was coming from retailers, and the panelists were arguing about how to break the logjam. But in the midst of the discussion, my colleague Scott Shalaway asked a question that sliced to the core of the issue.

Addressing the three hundred or so birders in the audience, Scott said, “Let’s see a show of hands—how many of you would be will ing to pay 10 percent more for sunflower seed and binoculars if you knew the money would be going straight to bird conservation?”

At most, a quarter of the hands went up. “Okay,” Scott asked, “how many of you would not want to pay any kind of tax, regardless of the amount, to fund bird conservation?” More than half the audience raised their hands. No wonder the funding idea was eventually killed—even the group of people who would most benefit from it wouldn’t shoulder the responsibility.

There is among American birders today a residual sense of entitlement—pervasive though obviously not universal, and something that I think is often almost unconscious. Hunters and anglers have had it drummed into their heads for generations that conservation is expensive, and that if they want to enjoy the benefits of healthy wildlife populations, they have to pony up the money. Hunters (and I am one myself) are fiercely and justifiably proud of the money they’ve contributed over the years—the federal waterfowl stamp funds that buy national wildlife refuge lands, for instance, or the donations to organizations like Ducks Unlimited that have conserved millions of acres of habitat.

Birders, on the other hand, have long enjoyed a sport that is almost entirely free. You need buy no license, take no special training, buy no equipment beyond field glasses and a guide; it can be done anywhere, anytime, with whatever degree of intensity you wish to bring to it. It seems blissfully free of strings.

But, of course, there are strings—the ones that bind us to the birds upon which our joy and excitement depends. No habitat, no birds; it’s as simple as that. There may not be 70 million birders in the country, but there are a lot of us—a huge and potentially effective bloc if we raised our voices (and our votes) in unison, demanding better of society and ourselves on behalf of birds.

It needn’t be strident activism; you needn’t wave placards or storm City Hall. But birders need to become far more vocal on behalf of the things they care about. Work with local conservation groups, and join national organizations like Audubon or the American Bird Conservancy that campaign hard for birds. Buy a federal (and if your state has them, a state) waterfowl stamp, since the money goes straight into land protection and habitat enhancement for many species. If you can, become involved in local land planning, to help steer development in ways that are less destructive to wildlife. Buy shade-grown coffee, to support winter habitat for neo-tropical migrants. Plant your yard with bird-friendly shrubs; eliminate pesticides and herbicides; and if you have a cat, keep it indoors. These are small changes with big impacts.

But most of all, make a conscious decision to work for the birds. One of the biggest steps we can make is to simply recognize that in a world of burgeoning population, diminishing natural habitat, changing climate, and shrinking resources, we cannot take birds for granted.

If you’re a birder, I’m willing to bet you’re reading those lines and shaking your head, tsk-tsking that anyone could be so shallow and self-centered as to ignore the wider issues of bird conservation. But ask yourself this question: Can you name a single, concrete action you’ve taken in the past week to better the world for birds? In the last month? The last year? If you had to think about it for more than a moment, then I gently suggest you rededicate yourself to doing more for the creatures on which our hobby is based.

Bird study has changed over the centuries, from the earliest days of a few eccentric visionaries tramping through the wilderness, to the rise of stuffy academicians smelling faintly of moth balls; it grew from amateur roots to become a profession, then split again into a vigorous hobby with an increasingly general appeal.

Now bird study is poised to enter what could be a fresh and, I hope, golden age. My hope for the future is a fusion of the science of birds with the love of chasing them, the best of the ornithologist and the lister, with a vehement commitment to avian well-being binding these approaches together.

Will that happen? I don’t know. But I hope—and more on some nights than others. Like this one.

The temperature has dropped a few more degrees, but the clouds have rolled out, and with them the flurries. The electronic saw-whet still broadcasts its song to the night. We make another trip up the mountainside, walking among the newly leafless oaks. Four more owls in the nets, four more twitching cloth bags dangling from our wrists as we come back to the lodge.

We are not alone; a group of students from the local elementary school are waiting for us with their parents and teacher, third and fourth graders on a rare nighttime field trip. The kids are positively thrumming with excitement, like plucked wires; they jam around me as I pull the first owl out of the bag, a ripple of oohs and ahhs as they take in the wide yellow eyes that can make the coldest heart melt. As I band the bird, I am peppered with questions: How does it feel to hold an owl? Can it hurt me? What does it eat? How long will it live? I spread open the wings and explain that it takes an owl several years to replace all its flight feathers; the molt pattern we see means this one is at least three years old. We talk about the dangers that face so small a hunter, the hurdles this female has overcome; the babies she’s borne in a hollow tree in Quebec or Maine, the mice whose lives she’s ended. The kids touch her reverently, their fingertips just brushing the downy feathers of her head. I finish the measurements, then process the next three birds as I answer a million more questions.

Then, mobbed by the kids, we walk outside, our breath streaming in white clouds. We stand beneath vivid stars, waiting for our eyes (and the owls’) to adjust to the dark. At last, we reach into the bags one final time and place the owls on proffered arms and shoulders—where, instead of bolting in fear, they remain contentedly perched for long minutes, these small, winsome birds that seem to have little innate fear of humans.

The kids are breathless; those with owls clinging to their coats tremble with delight. No one speaks; I doubt they could. Then, one by one, the small birds look up at Cassiopeia and Orion wheeling overhead, and on soft, fluttering wings, launch themselves up into the night—and take a bit of us along with them.

I let out a long-held breath and look down; perhaps a seed has been planted, and I can only wonder if the next age of American bird study—one that unites the joy and science, the excitement and commitment, the majesty and responsibility—is reflected somewhere in the delighted faces I see around me in the moonlight.