The world is in deep freeze right now. Supercooled snow on the sidewalks creaks underfoot, and fingers of cold start prying their way through cracks in windowsills and door jambs the moment the furnace stops blowing. It was slightly below zero last night, remarkable weather for this early in the winter.
Last Saturday was the annual Christmas Bird Count, my own personal Saturnalia that not even the Ward Christmas Party, inevitably scheduled on the same day, could induce me to forego. For the uninitiated, Christmas Bird Counts are carried out across the United States and Canada (and in a few other countries as well), some time during the Christmas season and wherever enterprising birdwatchers have created a "count circle," a 15-mile diameter area where, for 24 frantic hours, amateur and professional (mostly the former) birders comb woods, fields, mountains, watercourses, and any other habitats for birds. Both numbers and species are tallied and, although the CBC isn't a competitive sport, there's often an element of competition between different count circles. There are four different counts in our immediate area, and the one I and my parents always participate in is usually second banana (except for last year, when we got the highest species total of any of the local counts -- a glorious first).
Counting birds is not particularly glamorous in my neck of the woods. Since we're far from any ocean or other large body of water, the likelihood of turning up anything really exotic is practically nil. But over the many years that I've been counting in this part of the world, I've had occasional moments that are the stuff of lifelong memories. There was the time I saw the first ever golden eagle for our count, a late migrant that sailed overhead one crisp sunny December morning more than two decades ago. There was the last time I saw an evening grosbeak on the CBC, that obstreperous yellow and black north woods finch, once a common winter visitor in these parts and now nearly extirpated from the north woods. The locals used to call them "mustard birds" but they are, apparently, going the way of the passenger pigeon, and no one knows why. It is many, many years since I last heard their ringing calls, here or anywhere else.
This year we awoke to a fresh glaze of ice from a storm the previous day. Nothing was falling from the overcast sky, and the trees and bushes looked like finely-spun glass. My brother Mark, up from Mississippi to help with the count, play Scrabble with yours truly, and pass the holidays, was out before dawn. Just as I was sitting down to a hasty breakfast of eggs and cereal, my trak phone jingled. It was Mark, who had just walked into the middle of a flock of around twenty roosting turkeys. Two species of owls were calling, he added, the subtext unmistable: Get off your posterior and hit the trails, big brother!
All things considered, it was a very good day. My first nice bird was a yellow-bellied sapsucker (a type of smallish woodpecker) that I called up only five minutes after setting out. Not long thereafter, I managed to summon a wintering hermit thrush from a dense grape thicket in one of the more inaccessible niches of my parents' mountaintop property. Later in the morning I located a male purple finch, which turned out to be the only one found that day.
In spite of the ice, the woods were busy and full of evidence of activity. I found a set of fresh fisher tracks along one puddle-pocked trail (aptly named "Ten Springs Trail"), and also found prints of raccoon and opossum. The woods pullulated with roving flocks of pine siskins, hundreds and hundreds of them, small brownish relatives of the goldfinch that hail from the northern coniferous forests. This year is shaping up to be a good year for so-called "invasions" of northern finches like redpolls and crossbills, and the abundant pine siskins may be harbingers of things to come when the winter deepens.
Down by the Little Juniata River, I scoured a river bottom woods of river willow and sycamore, and hit the jackpot: a great blue heron, a reclusive belted kingfisher, a ruby-crowned kinglet (also the only one seen this year) amid a large flock of more common golden-crowned kinglets, and a cheeky winter wren that popped from his place of concealment to scold from a broken snag.
Mark and I teamed up for the afternoon, and drove to a nice marsh near another section of the river. Here were sparrows in abundance and a small flock of bluebirds. Here also we saw a single kestrel (a tiny falcon) buzz-bombing a much larger Cooper's hawk that had breached its territory.
Together we tallied 46 species for the day, a new high for us in this locale.
After dark we drove to the "compilation dinner," where the other birders who'd been out all day were gathered to report their finds. This is usually the best part of the count, as birders affect friendly rivalry to find out who saw the "best" birds of the day. This year, the best bird was probably a short-eared owl, along with a golden eagle. My purple finch and ruby-crowned kinglet were our party's two unique contributions. All in all, our count tallied 69 species, a new high.
I have never understood why bird watching is not more popular among the LDS people. It is a completely innocuous yet challenging activity, and, probably more than any other outdoor activity, is conducive to appreciation of nature. I did the Christmas Bird Count in Provo a time or two, with wonderful results; my assigned area included a slice of the Wasatch Mountains as well as the marshes around the old Novell headquarters south of town, and the cross-section of birdlife was spectacular. Many of the other birders, including the compiler, were obviously fellow LDS, but I've noticed over the years that the activity is viewed with vague suspicion in some church circles. It smacks of such heresies as environmentalism, unlike more wholesome forms of outdoor recreation like ATV riding and hunting.
Yet it is possible to harbor a love of the outdoors and of the natural world without succumbing either to the extremes of modern environmentalist politics nor to the impulse to ravage and degrade God's creation. I have hunted and ridden ATVs in the desert, and enjoyed both activities, but I mostly enjoy the outdoors without attempting to modify it. I've nothing against progress, only against dogmatism in any form.
In any case, I've been a bird watcher since the age of five or so. Some of my best memories are from far-flung birding expeditions -- finding the rare bearded lammergeier in the French Pyrenees at the impressionable age of fourteen, going eyeball to eyeball with giant (and very tame) Magellanic woodpeckers in the cold rainforest of the southern Chilean Andes, spotting my first great pied hornbill in the leech-infested jungles of southern India, seeing my first king vulture over Pico Bonito in Honduras, counting puffins, murres, and other seabirds off Seward, Alaska, and revelling in rare birds like reddish egrets and magnificent frigatebirds blown ashore after a storm on Galveston Island. I've forgotten the names of most of the roommates, friends, missionary companions, co-parishioners, classmates, and fellow employees I've known over the years, but I remember most of the good birds and where and when I saw them.
Birdwatching allows one to enjoy almost any corner of the world, no matter how dismal it may seem. India's teeming, poverty- and disease-ridden cities, for example, are birders' paradises: one need only lift one's eyes from the depressing human squalor to almost any banyan tree to enjoy a wondrous banquet of urban birdlife, from the ruby-eyed koel to tiny glittering sunbirds. Birds may been seen almost anywhere on the face of the earth except deep underwater, their powers of flight providing a subliminal fillip to our own spirits which, once upon a time, may have enjoyed such freedom of movement.
Once, a very long time ago (at least, it seems so), I went to Argentina as a junior in high school on a one year Rotary exchange program. A large part of my motivation was to see new birds, although I was careful not to tell that to the panel of interviewers screening the applicants. No sooner had I arrived in my new digs in a small town in the middle of the boundless pampas than I began combing the surrounding countryside for birds. At about the same time, I met the LDS missionaries living in the town (Maipu was its name) and before long, was taking them on guided birding tours of the surrouding countryside, where I introduced those two bemused young men to the Chimango Caracara, the Monk Parakeet, the Southern Screamer, the Fork-tailed Flycatcher, and other exotica. They in exchange introduced me to a new religion and the rest is history.
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