Great discussion. I read as many of the postings as I could and found it
refreshing to see the various philosophies of birding. Here's a not so short
story about my life as a birder including my thoughts on birding alone vs.
in groups. I break my birding life down into two phases. Phase 1 (the early
years) and Phase 2 (getting back into it). Upon reflection, I realize that
my approach to birding has changed significantly from Phase 1 to Phase 2.



PHASE 1

I was lucky enough to get into birding at a young age (about 11), live in a
birding Mecca (Marin County, California) and was mentored by some great
birders. I and a small group of friends lived near what is now called the
Tiburon Audubon Society (www.tiburonaudubon.org
<http://www.tiburonaudubon.org/> ). The manager of the sanctuary was a guy
named Phil Schaeffer who later went on to senior positions in the National
Audubon Society and currently runs a bird guiding company (www.caligo.com
<http://www.caligo.com/> ). Phil and his wife and others in his circle spent
untold hours with us teaching bird identification, ecology and appreciation
for natural things in general. By the time we were 12 or 13 we were guiding
visitors around the sanctuary, identifying the common local birds and the
occasional rarity. Through Phil we met many other experienced birders - some
of whom are fairly famous these days - who also took us under their wings.
With great mentoring and plenty of time on my hands I became very good at
identification by sight and sound.



By the time I was in high school I had become what at least one Tweeters
posting referred to as the "alpha male" birder. A small group of us "young
Turks" became locally famous for our identification skills and general
tenacity. We were the guys who would drive hundreds of miles to see a cool
bird at the drop of a hat. I generally birded with a small group (1-2) of
good friends. We spurned larger groups because (1) they often made it harder
to find birds (2) they often moved too slowly for us and (3) they were often
filled with people who didn't contribute a lot in terms of finding and
identification. My buddies and I enjoyed everything about birding but got
the most excited about finding RARE BIRDS FIRST rather than going to see
birds that others had found. In retrospect we probably bordered on the
obnoxious at times. Birding had become almost like a competitive sport. By
the time I finished high school I had seen more than 500 species in North
America but I lost interest when life intervened.



The Non-Birding Years

Then I went to college, started a career, get married, had kids and before I
knew it 25 years had passed since I had been a hardcore birder. Although I
never stopped looking at birds, I did stop birding. I never carried a field
guide and rarely carried binoculars when I was out and about. Looking at
birds became something I did while doing others things like backpacking or
hiking or being a tourist. Yes, I know this seems unimaginable to some of
you (Michael Hobbs) but it happened.



PHASE 2

Then last January I caught the bug again. For the first time in years I had
a little more time and a renewed interest in learning more about birding.
When I first headed off on my own last January - the lone wolf re-born - I
quickly learned a painful lesson: birding is not like riding a bicycle.
After so many years away from birding I had forgotten a huge amount. I was
constantly reminded of my deteriorated skills. I recall walking around John
McDonald Memorial Park in Carnation and spending several minutes identifying
a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. Could it be a Hutton's Vireo? Or maybe even an
Empidonax flycatcher? Do they ever winter here? Where to begin!? This for a
bird that I had seen hundreds if not thousands of times before. I spent
dozens of days last winter on my own S L O W L Y trying learning how to bird
again but with mixed results. The pivotal moment came while I was on a short
trip to Arizona last winter. I was down there for a family vacation but
"slipped away" for a day of birding near Fort Huachuca and the Sulpher
Springs Valley. Although I ended up seeing about 75 species, there at least
another 10-15 that I couldn't definitively identify.



I I decided to start fresh as if I had never birded before. I
unceremoniously "dumped" my old life-list, resetting it to zero. Note:
starting over wasn't too hard except for "losing" a few birds that will be
impossible or hard to replace (California Condor before they were
re-introduced, Eared Quetzal and few other vagrants). C'est la vie. I opened
up those bird guides that I hadn't touched in years. Most important, I
realized I was going to need some serious help to become a skilled birder
again.



Fortunately for me I work near Marymoor Park and, from lurking on Tweeters,
noticed that Michael Hobbs leads a weekly walk. Throwing away my "Phase 1"
bias against birding with groups, I started tagging along with Michael and
crew early last spring. I started seeing dividends in by bird identification
skills. Perhaps more important, I started to develop a new perspective on
birding in general. The Marymoor Park bird walk has a core group of 8-10
people with a pretty big range in skills. There are a few experts, a few
intermediates and a few newbie's. The nice thing about birding with this
group is that I can learn from the experts but also appreciate the simple
pleasures of seeing the "same old birds" over and over again. We're excited
to see an unusual bird but we also spent a lot of time studying common
birds. Just yesterday we spent 5-10 minutes looking at a beautiful Lincoln's
Sparrow (or two) even though we see them every week. I heard Brian comment
on a particularly nice looking Golden-crowned Sparrow - not exactly a
glamour bird. Birding with this group of people has not only helped me with
my identification skills but has also given me a renewed appreciation for
the simple pleasures of birding. It's not all about chasing the next rarity.
Although that's fun too.



The Dark Side of Group Birding

I have had some less positive experiences with groups in other places.
During one trip to SE Arizona I decided to hire a local guide take me
around. I had never hired a guide before and had mixed feelings about it. It
didn't fit with my "lone wolf" approach to birding. Although I didn't have
any particular "target species" that I was looking for, I did want to have
the opportunity to learn more quickly than I could on my own. So my deal
with my guide was that I wanted to learn as much as possible, not just see
as many species as possible. I wanted to focus on quality rather than
quantity. I didn't want to rush around from place to place.



While out with my guide we want across several medium to large sized guided
groups that, quite honestly, made my stomach turn. They'd drive up in their
vans, jump out and basically rush the birds. Quick! There's an Elegant
Trogon over there! Better "get" the bird! Not to name names but one Victor
Emmanuel group was particularly aggressive. The guides were basically
yelling at me and my guide to tell them where their "target" birds have been
most recently seen. And then there are the camera people. On a recent trip
to Phoenix I witnessed a small mob of about 8 camera wielding birders chase
a Streak-backed Oriole from tree to tree to get the best photo they could.
Ugh. I quietly backed away.



So I guess what I'm saying is that birding with groups is highly valuable
both from an educational and a social perspective. I expect that I'll still
spent a lot of time birding on my own but I chalk my renewed interest in
birding partly up to the positive experiences I have had with the
Marymoorians (or Marymoorons as they're sometimes called).



Hope to see you all out in the field. I'm the guy birding alone but maybe
tagging along with your group. :-)



_____

From: tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu
[mailto:tweeters-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Guttman,
Burt
Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 9:19 AM
To: tweeters at u.washington.edu
Subject: [Tweeters] Thoughts about birding (kind of long)



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