In today's New York Times
SCIENTIST AT WORK
13 Ways (at Least) of Looking at a Sparrow
By JAMES GORMAN
PLUM ISLAND, Mass. - David Allen Sibley is standing at the edge of a pond on
this coastal island off northern Massachusetts, peering alternately through
binoculars and a telescope at a mixed bag of shorebirds and ducks in the
shallow water.
It is high tide and the extensive mudflats at the Parker River National
Wildlife refuge are covered in water, so the birds congregate at the
brackish Bill Forward Pool, and it has consequently become a favorite of
birders.
To the uninitiated, the dipping and dabbling birds in the wind-ruffled
shallows are a kind of impressionist wash of color and movement, a tableau
to be enjoyed but not parsed.
For Mr. Sibley, it is certainly a source of pleasure, but also an object of
study. In fact, the pleasure and the analysis are inseparable. Mr. Sibley
has made a big impact in the past few years in the birding world with
several books, including a much-praised guide to bird identification. (He
and two colleagues also write a weekly column on birds, supplied to
newspapers by The New York Times Syndicate.) His most recent book, published
this month, is a slim volume called "Birding Basics," a kind of crash course
in how to find, see and identify birds.
What characterizes Mr. Sibley's approach to birds is a love for detail, and
a downright passionate interest in taxonomy. His guide to identification is
a 544-page distillation of his life's work that can be read at home with
pleasure, and carried into the field with some difficulty. In it and in his
other books, he revels in the fine distinctions that make taxonomy an
intricate puzzle.
Asked what moves him most in the study of birds, he pauses and answers
slowly and softly. But his conversational diffidence does not obscure the
intensity and singularity of his desire. "Finding order," he says. In this,
he is not different from most devoted birders, except in skill and
dedication.
There are bird lovers, certainly, who are satisfied to savor the flight of a
hawk without knowing whether it is a buteo or an accipiter, content to enjoy
the upside-down, staccato progress of a nuthatch on a spruce without knowing
the name of bird or tree.
But true birders, who used to be called bird-watchers, occupy, with other
amateur naturalists, a small bywater of the scientific mind in which the
naming of things is an overriding hunger. It might better be called
bird-naming than bird-watching. The more names, the more finely the
distinctions are drawn, the better.
As an exercise in "Birding Basics," Mr. Sibley suggests sharpening one's
sense of observation by noting 10 differences between a summer tanager and a
northern cardinal, both red birds with black trim.
There is a section in the book titled "Understanding Feathers" with
illustrative drawings. One, of the head of a song sparrow, labels 13
details, including the lores, supraloral, supercilium, as well as the more
familiar throat, breast, crown and nape.
Mr. Sibley is not immune to beauty; he simply finds it in the details. His
color illustrations are exquisite, but he is not drawn much to other forms
of visual artistry. "I do some other painting," he said, "but it doesn't
interest me the same way."
Before he ever began work on a book, he said, "I would spend an hour sitting
here with the sketchbook looking at dunlin and white-rumped sandpipers." He
would enumerate and draw the many differences. "The dunlin look
bigger-headed," he said. "The eye stripe is a little bit darker. The back is
paler and grayer. The wings are shorter."
Birding, as Mr. Sibley describes it, is an interplay of detail and gestalt.
Over time, the birder's knowledge of feather patterns, bill length and
feeding behavior inform the kind of quick, unconscious pattern recognition
that humans do so well.
The birds on the pond, for example, are immediately separable from one
another in some obvious ways, he says, indicating three dowitchers, "the
bigger ones that are keeping their heads down and just jabbing their bills
into the mud." To the left of the dowitchers is a lesser yellowlegs and
behind it is a bunch of semi-palmated sandpipers.
Behavior is a tip-off, he says, explaining: "You can watch the way they
feed. The yellowlegs walks around sort of daintily placing its feet and
picking things up with its bill. The dowitchers are just head down, barely
moving, sticking their bills way down into the mud, and they're actually
finding prey by feel. They're feeling it with the tips of their bills. So
they're just moving along slowly and dipping their bills into the mud
thousands of times to locate prey. And the little tiny peeps are just
smaller and more active than the dowitchers."
That's the easy part. Try to distinguish a long-billed from a short-billed
dowitcher, or a greater from a lesser yellowlegs, and you have to start
seeking out details. "Birders use these handy little mnemonics," Mr. Sibley
says, to keep in mind specific distinctions. One of his favorites, he says,
laughing sheepishly, has to do with bill length in yellowlegs.
"If you take the bill of a greater yellowlegs and hit the tip of the bill
with a hammer to drive the tip of the bill back through the head, it will
stick out the back of the head. On a lesser yellowlegs, if you did that the
bill would just reach the back of the head." This is an imaginary exercise,
of course.
These are easy to spot, well-known details. For Mr. Sibley, it is the
discovery of all the many differences between similar species, including new
and unknown ones, that is most satisfying. He points to the ducks on the
pond, female teal in drab feathers, and describes a small triumph.
"I struggled with trying to tell the difference between the blue-winged and
green-winged teal, in this brown female plumage. The thing that I noticed
after many hours of study is that every one of them has a clear bright buffy
patch on the base of the tail, on the side of the base of the tail, a very
distinct little buffy streak. The blue-winged teal don't show that. They
just have the plain brown pattern continuing unbroken down the side of the
tail.
"I knew of a lot of other differences," he said, "but I wasn't all that
comfortable with any of them and I felt that I was still finding birds that
I couldn't place, that I couldn't put in one species or the other. And then
one day I noticed that buffy streak on the green-winged teal.
"Those are the moments that I went birding for, that moment of recognition
when you see something and you know absolutely that this is one species and
this is another," he said, describing it as like fitting together a jigsaw
puzzle. You hold a piece and turn it and turn it and turn it until finally
you see where and how it fits.
It is almost, but not quite ornithology, says Mr. Sibley, whose father, Fred
Sibley, was a well-known ornithologist at Yale. David Sibley briefly flirted
with higher education (he spent a year in college) but never seriously
planned to do anything with his life other than what he does: watching
birds, studying them, painting them and writing about them. He has done this
all over North America, and now lives about an hour from Plum Island, in
Concord, Mass.
His study is reflective of the growing sophistication of how birders watch
birds, he says.
"What birders are doing now is a lot of what was being published in
scientific journals 50 years ago," he said. "You go back to the
ornithological journals of the 1930's, 40's, 50's, it's papers on
distribution of species and the birds that are found in a certain region,
how to identify species, how to tell the difference between males and
females of different species. All that was ornithology 50 years ago. And now
it's all amateur bird-watchers. The ornithologists are doing the more
technical laboratory work and really highly refined field studies."
Mr. Sibley says he finds that each new detail leads him to a deeper
understanding of the birds he studies. It is a kind of pleasant paradox that
the smallest discovery can lead to thinking about development, behavior,
migration, the whole balance of the natural world. Just on this day, he
thinks he has caught a difference in the timing of migration in the two
species of dowitcher here, based on a visit he made the week before.
Furthermore, he said, he noticed in the previous visit to this pond a
difference in overall body shape of juvenile and adult long-billed
dowitchers. Why, he wondered, and when did the body shape change.
"When they lose their juvenile plumage over the next six or eight weeks and
molt into their first winter plumage," he went on, "will they then develop
the shape of the adult long-billeds or will they still be juvenilelike in
shape or something in between?"
Asked if he might possibly run out of questions, he laughed. "No," he said,
"no."
Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, he does occasionally run out of answers,
a refreshing moment for an interviewer. Asked what the dowitchers were
feeding on, he said:
"You got me. Whatever is an inch or two down in the mud. It's probably
little worms, or maybe there's some kind of little clam or shrimp or
something."



Lauren Braden
Advocate for Wildlife Habitat
Seattle Audubon Society
8050 35th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98115
206-523-8243 x14
laurenb at seattleaudubon.org