Someone asked me recently how long I'd been birdwatching. It's a hard question to answer, because birdwatching isn't usually something one acquires passively. In my case, the knowledge of birds -- the desire to know about them -- seems comparable to knowing your parents are your parents, or that your feet are your feet. You had to discover these things at some point, yes, but those discoveries were made before memories were being recorded. And as such they just seem...natural. Inevitable. Obvious.
Of course, if this were true everyone would be able to identify birds, and enjoy identifying birds. So it has to come from somewhere. For me, it came gradually at first. My mother was an avid birdwatcher, and judging by her parents' house she inherited this from them.
My grandparents lived in a semi-forested area on the edge of a tiny town in central Oklahoma. They had a big picture window looking over a yard that backed onto unkempt woodland, and near the window there was a pair of binoculars and a bird book. There were birdfeeders, three different bird baths out back (and two in front). The yard, fields and forest were dotted with little birdhouses that Grandpa made himself. They were all identical - smallish, grey-blue all over with a red roof on top. Most of them were on poles unceremoniously strewn about the property, and as memory serves they were almost exclusively occupied by phoebes. Year after year.
So I knew a bit about birds. I couldn't help it. I was surrounded by people that would point to something at the feeder and identify it, so I knew the names of certain birds. But I didn't understand how profound Mom's gift was until one day when I was about five or six. We were sitting out on the back deck and Grandpa's in the morning. Something flew over our heads and into a tree. She mentioned in passing what it was, and I was stunned. How could she know that? It passed by so fast!
This was before I knew about tell-tale flight patterns, or distinctive songs (nothing but a jay sounds like a jay, with those loud, raspy cries), or that a flash of red in Oklahoma is almost certainly a cardinal, particularly if there's a pair of them that have been hanging around the feeders all morning. All I knew is my mother had some sort of magical powers of observation. And I wanted those powers.
I went inside for a piece of paper and pencil and asked her to list all of the birds that she saw. I wrote down the name of everything she said, and put a tally mark next to subsequent sightings. Cowbird, phoebe, sparrow, purple martin, blue jay, cardinal, chickadee, scissor-tail flycatcher, house finch... I'd had no idea there could be this many different kinds of birds in a place at once. I have been an avid amateur ornithologist ever since.
I suppose it's the artist's eye that lends one so easily to this sort of thing -- wanting to see something in the blink of an eye. To know what it was, record it in your mind's eye, store it, and recall it as needed. And I do get a quiet thrill when a junco flits by with his white-and-black tail feathers identifying him so neatly. Birdwatching (bird identifying, anyway,) is often a game of knowing these little tricks. You very rarely get a textbook view of something, so you have to know a lot of little things about birds. And at long last I have begun what is, for me, the last frontier in birding. At long last I have got my hands on a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Birding By Ear, a three disc set designed to teach that notoriously difficult (for me) practice of discerning birdsong.
Don't get me wrong, I can do the basics. I can distinguish a corvid from a robin, know a chick-a-dee-dee-dee when I hear one, and I now know the trilling beeps of a cedar waxwing. I can distinguish a mourning dove from an owl. (Don't laugh, give it some thought. They both have a lowish "ooo" sound and it can be deceiving for a beginner.) And I know the tiny baby-bird sounds of the bushtits and know if I hear distant honking to look up and find the geese.
But I can't distinguish the wrens, or the sparrows -- really all the "songs" of the songbirds are right out. And that's a pity, because a lot of the more glorious ones (particularly the warblers, which are darting back into town even as we speak) are often impossible to spot -- they'll be flitting in the undergrowth or prefer to sit on the very tippy-tops of trees. There's a bird that lives around the Oregon Country Fairgrounds that has a very distinct call, one I have never heard anywhere else (because otherwise I don't tend to hang out around an inland flood plane). As resident "bird nerd" I was called upon by Anthony to identify this bird and I failed to make the grade. For three years that bird has stumped me, because we never SEE this bird. We only hear him, and his distinctive song, for the entire week that we are out there. I hear a lot of birds when I go for walks around my neighborhood. But I only know a fraction of them, the rest is just joyful noise.
And so Birding by Ear has entered my rotation. Within the introduction there are several suggestions as to how one might go about "facilitating learning", which is possibly my most favorite phrase. I do so love to facilitate the learning. I listen to it in bursts, (too much at once and suddenly they all start sounding the same again,) and already it helped me spot a pileated woodpecker a few weekends ago. High hopes for that 'Fair bird. All I have to do is keep listening...
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