Subject: [Tweeters] Thoughts about birding (kind of long)
Date: Dec 14 09:19:29 2005
From: Guttman, Burt - GuttmanB at evergreen.edu


I'd like to express some thoughts about birding that may inspire some of you to respond. Specifically, I want to write about birding in groups, especially in bird-touring groups, about birding alone or with one or two close friends (spouses included), about learning the basics of birding, and about whatever pleasures and rewards we get from this activity. I'm motivated to do this in part because of my work teaching an introduction to birding; Tom Schooley, whom many of you know, and I have given a Birding 101 course for Black Hills Audubon, and I've been writing up this material with a lot of other material for a book that I hope a well-known publisher is going to pick up soon (all toes and fingers crossed, knocking wood like crazy).

Another stimulus for writing this was a recent field trip. I attended the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival, in Harlingen, Texas, for a few days, with my adult daughter and then went on a week-long birding trip down into northeastern Mexico. On the festival field trips, busloads of us (30-40 people) were taken to local hotspots by teams of guides. We saw a lot of birds, and I managed to pick a few difficult lifers that I'd missed on previous trips to the Valley. For the Mexico trip, there were two busloads of us, about 30 each, again guided by three experts for each bus. These were unusual experiences for me; I've gone birding for a lifetime, well over 50 years now, by myself or with small groups of friends, or with my daughter. The closest I've come to these group birding events was at an ABA convention several years ago in North Dakota, where we were also taken on daily field trips; the principal reason for going there was to pick up some of the prairie birds, especially sparrows, that I'd never seen before, but the trip included several days of solo birding as I drove to and from the convention. Oh, and I've been on some pelagic birding outings, with groups of course, but that's a very different experience.

I'd be interested in reading about your experiences if you've gone on organized tours or on field trips like I've described. I'll tell you about mine. In Texas, the (mostly young) guides were real experts at being able to call birds immediately on sight or hearing, and they were constantly calling birds as we went along. My daughter and I felt that there was a strong air of machismo among them, that being able to identify birds quickly and accurately, especially by ear, was not only a skill to be proud of but also a sign of manliness, of dominance in the social group. The alpha male in these groups is the one with the greatest skill of identification. Now, they were also attentive to their purpose, to the purpose of being good guides and showing people as many birds as they could. They generally seemed to be attentive to pointing out identification points--field marks--to people, to help them learn to identify the birds better, although we were often going pretty quickly from place to place, from bird to bird. I noted an especially strong contrast to them on one trip where one of our leaders was the famous Victor Emanuel, of the touring company VENT. On the bus, before we arrived at the site, Victor got on the microphone and asked particularly if there were any beginners in the group, and he made a special point of trying to talk to beginners and help them. Other guides on other trips might have done the same, but they didn't.

On the Mexico trip, we had excellent guides, including two of the young men we'd met on the Festival trips. Again, we saw a lot of birds; I got about 40 lifers on the trip, and I have great memories of seeing incredibly beautiful, sometimes quite exotic birds in lovely spots. But aside from the direct encounters with these birds, two things stand out in my memory. One is being with a bunch of about 30 people strung out along a road, some trying to stick close to the leaders and snatch that quick look through binoculars or a spotting scope before the bird moved away, others seemingly more interested in chatting or sitting down to rest, and I kept wondering why they had paid so much money to go on the trip. The second memory is of the guides constantly trying to call the birds in, sometimes with pishing sounds of various kinds, but often by playing the calls of small owls . . . over and over and over. I suppose it was often effective, that it allowed us to see some birds that otherwise might have been skulking in the bushes, but it was far different from other birding that I've done, and it sometimes got to be very annoying.

I came away grateful for the opportunity to see so many birds; we went to places I would not have known about and on one occasion were taken on a boat trip that I couldn't have arranged myself. But the contrast with solo or small-group birding was enormous. (I'll use "solo" to include birding with one or a few others, just to avoid the constant repetition.) Those solo experiences have always combined some excitement, the pleasure of adventure, and an air of quiet, of tranquility; that was largely missing from the group experiences. The solo experiences also entailed looking at the birds much more carefully so we could identify them ourselves; the group experience entails the guides constantly calling, "There's a Tropical Parula; Blue-gray Gnatcatcher in the tree there; Red-billed Pigeons going overhead; . . ." Yes, I learned the birds pretty well that way, especially as we were constantly looking them up in our field guides when we got a chance, but the extra effort and the challenge of identifying them myself has always given me greater satisfaction, and my general philosophy of education is that people only learn (or at least learn best) what they do themselves.

My approach to birding for beginners, both in our class and in the book I'm working on, has emphasized doing it yourself, or with one other person; this comes out of my general educational philosophy and also from my sense of the greater satisfaction of the solo experience. In the class, I like to do workshops in which the students work over questions in pairs or very small groups, so they have direct, personal involvement in their learning. The book has much of the same--lots of questions that people can answer themselves, to direct their attention to the points that experienced birders know well and take for granted, plus suggestions for experiences in the field, to observe certain species and note certain things about them.

Now I'd be interested in hearing from you about some of these points. I'd especially like to hear about your experiences with group birding--they may be quite different from mine. I'd like to know whether any of you share my feelings about the superiority of the solo experience, remembering that I'm putting birding with one or two other people in the same category. And I'd be interested in any related thoughts that my musings here provoke.

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503