Dear Tweeters,

One of the reasons I am returning to Washington at the close of the current school year is this whole "birders are spies" concept. If you think the Camanoites are cautious, try the Saudis! Over the past few years living in Arabia, I have had to develop the commando birding approach to the max.

Coastal birding is the toughest. Saudi Coast Guard guys continuously patrol the shores of the Kingdom in 4x4's, looking for who knows what. About the only time they don't show up is when someone is drowning, or when Saudi boys start shooting gulls or breaking into scuba divers' cars.

The method that works best for a birder is to drive around on the beach with binoculars, or maybe a discrete, window-mounted scope. It is important to have the windows open so you can hear the Coast Guard coming. You stay in the vehicle, because if they see you out there with optics, you are obviously a spy.

You learn their routines, how long it takes them to do one circuit of a particular coastal stretch, and bird maybe ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch. Sometimes there is a really cool bird out there on a sandbar, but here come the guys with the machine guns, and you have to move on before they get close enough to see the optics. If they do catch you, they haven't a clue. Half the time they cannot even read the Arabic bird book you carry just to clarify things. At best, they have to get on the radio and find the one commissioned officer in the area who has enough education to know that people do look at birds, and that no, you are not jotting down information about that refinery over there--the one that the US and Britain built and which the spy satellites have already photographed down to the last phillips head!

Well, my message to Tweeters is, be thankful that you live in a democracy and that you don't have to deal with Big Brother as much as people do in so much of the world.

Sincerely yours,

Gary Bletsch



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