There are as many different kinds of birders and birding histories as there
are birders. I suspect that for many of us who have birded for a long
time, our birding history IS our autobiography. Mine is the story of an
action junkie, always involved, never a spectator, and the story isn't as
poetic as some people's, but here it is:

Grew up in Midland, Texas, the starling capital of West Texas. Family had
to cover our heads when walking from the car to Agnes's Cafe on our rare
dinner-out treats, creating a little group of walking Starling poop
decks. Sometime in the 50s, a Baltimore oriole made migration stopovers in
our backyard for several years, completely fascinating me. I can still see
it in my mind and the bush it sat in. Early 60s at University of Texas in
Austin, my boarding house window overlooked a birdbath that was always
covered with blue jays, distracting me from studying. Soon thereafter got
completely consumed by sports car racing until 1971.

Early 70s, I moved into an apartment up in the canopy over a creek in South
Austin and became fascinated by the bird sounds and flashes of color in the
leaves. Bought binoculars and a bird book. Identified house sparrow,
cardinal, and blue jay, and then the book and binocs sat by the deck
sliding glass doors and proceeded to collect dust for a year.

A little later in the 70s, it started. I saw a "community events" listing
for a beginning birder course and signed up, just to learn what the birds
in the canopy were. Halfway through the course, there was a bird census of
Austin's Town Lake the same day as our field trip, and the instructor
wanted go to on it. So she fixed each of us up with a good birder to go on
the count instead of having a separate field trip. My guide/tutor was Ed
Kutac. Now if you've every met Ed Kutac ... there's one of a kind and a
birding story in his own right. He virtually never birded outside of
Texas, but he probably knew (knows?) more about Texas bird and bird
distribution than anybody else walking, particularly Central Texas. That
day he showed me the ruby crown on a ruby-crowned kinglet, just for one
example of an astonishing sight to a new birder.

Afterward I had to buy him pie, as did every new birder in the Austin area
who was shown a new bird by Ed Kutac. Over pie and coffee, he told me all
about birding - ABA, life lists, year lists, big days, risking one's life
on a cliff to get a glimpse of a lifer, Ken Kauffman eating dog food to
afford his record Big Year (urban legand or not), etc. I was just coming
off a 10-year period of highly competitive sports car racing. We're not
talking autocrosses, but Sports Car Club of America club racing, lots of
cars together on a track. I had no outlet for that pent-up competitive
energy, and besides that, the birds were SO COOL!

So I got really active in the Austin area and learned all the birds
there. I was barely out of school (slow learner) and couldn't afford
tours, but I discovered ABA weekends, and over the next year or two, I
birded in ... let's see ... Florida, Maine, Colorado, Monterrey, Cape May,
Arizona, and other hot spots, and ran my list up to well over 300, maybe to
400, very quickly. I bought a Toyota Chinook so that I could be ready to
go a moment's notice and chased every rare bird that landed in Texas. I
became one of the "Oh, hi, we met at the Jabiru Stork" crowd. And I really
learned these birds, it wasn't always just a "got it, check it off, move
on" deal.

There were a number of other "regulars" on this circuit and I became close
friends with several of them. One was Dick Brownstein from Buffalo, NY,
criminal attorney and infamous bird chaser who once almost got disbarred
for getting a murder trial adjourned because of "urgent personal business"
and was on national news the next night from the scene of the first U.S.
record of ivory gull, telling how he got a murder trial adjourned to come
and see this bird. (Hm, googling, I see my timing from memory is about
right - the first U.S. record shown is Green and Janssen, 1975.) Later
Dick himself was murdered, allegedly in the course of a drug deal gone bad.

Anyway, I think it was on the ABA Weekend in Colorado, I lost track of Dick
and finally found him just sitting on a log in the woods. I asked what in
the world he was doing, and he said, pointing, "I'm watching this
flycatcher. I think he knows something we don't know." And that was the
moment when I started thinking of birds as something other than cool little
puffy colorful things to chase and list. That quickly escalated into
awareness of the whole environment, ecology, and all it entails.

I was working as a contract programmer in Austin and work was very slow. I
discovered a goldmine of work in Houston, but by then I didn't want to give
up my birding and connections in Austin. Worse, I had heard that the
Houston bunch was cliquish and hard to break into. I talked to Ed Kutac
about it and he gave me some words of wisdom: "You can break into any
group you want to. Just offer to do their dirty dishes."

Sure enough, I moved to Houston, joined the fabled Ornithology Group, took
some job nobody wanted, and before I knew it I was birding with Ben
Feltner, Dave Dauphin, Ted Eubanks, and the rest of the hotshots, learning
at record speed. One time Ben, Dean Fisher, and I were out birding the
Hale Ranch, after the state bought it but before it became a state park. I
was pretty intimidated. Partway through the day, Ben pointed at me and
said to Dean, in his inimitable manner, "I can't tell whether she knows
anything or not because she never speaks." Later that day, the three of us
saw a female hooded merganser fly into a nest hole. There was no hooded
merganser nesting record for Texas, so we gave it a decent amount of time,
and a few weeks later, the three of us went back out. They hoisted me up,
and I fetched a grand prize ... a cold, unhatched hooded merganser
egg. Dean, who was on the Texas Bird Records Committee, was supposed to
write it up and submit it, but the last I heard, he never did it, depriving
me of my rightful place in birding history, that cockroach! I continued
chasing rare birds - Ben and I made a fabled mad dash to the Rio Grande
Valley one afternoon after the Bahama pintail, among others.

A little later, Linda Roach (later Linda Feltner) moved to Houston and
lived with me for a little while. She, Ben, and I were going to deepest
Mexico in my Chinook for Christmas bird counts (he was compiler of El
Naranjo), and a vague acquaintance of his called and asked if he could
catch a ride. Well, we were birders, after all, who ever turns down
someone wanting to go birding? So a few days before we were scheduled to
leave, I came home from work one night and found Bob Behrstock asleep on my
front porch, head propped up on his backpack. Two weeks later we were
back, all of us fast friends and neck-deep in plans to start a new birding
tour company, Ben Feltner's Peregrine Tours. Bob moved to Houston from
Eureka CA, and the company was housed in the back room of what was by then
my computer software company.

A few years and many tours later, Ben and Linda decided to move to
Seattle. I kept running the company but a few years after that decided to
move to Arizona, where I continued to do it for another year or so from a
falling-down adobe house on the Buenos Aires NWR, which I got free as a
volunteer on the refuge. I spent a lot of time birding the refuge, writing
things for the manager, and occasionally helping vasectomize bob-white
quail (don't ask). I quickly discovered the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum
and spent a day there as a docent, much of it in the hummingbird
exhibit. By now my list was well over 600 and I had slowed down on the
chasing. Went on a number of member tours to Mexico as the "bird
expert". Eventually I had to move into Tucson in search of revenue and my
birding slowed way down.

Then I found and married my current husband, who was among other things, a
NEW BIRDER! And it was like my birding life started all over again,
because I got to show him all the birds I already knew. But then we moved
to Seattle to live on a boat - a DeFever 48 - and became totally consumed
by that, just enjoying our "yard birds" - Barrow's goldeneye, hooded merg,
kingfisher, the occasional grebe. We did go to see the European Kestrel
and some rare shorebird that was here at the same time (bumping into Ben
and Linda there), but our birding was mainly reduced to birds on, in, and
over the water, though we did always take a look at those.

Now we have a smaller, faster aluminum cabin cruiser and we're back to
land, living in a house. I guess I'm now qualified as "Audubonish", with a
static life list somewhere around 650, with the hummingbird feeder and
solar-powered fountain-in-a-big-planter in the back yard, and never going
in the field just to bird, for now, anyway. Though I do always take binocs
when I travel. My current consuming passion is helping protect the safety
and security of Puget Sound by working in the Coast Guard's homeland
security programs through the Coast Guard Auxiliary. (Do not take that
statement as implying anything about my politics.)

Throughout, I've been amazed at how quickly I could nail the ID on a bird I
saw or heard, that I knew from the old days. Occasionally I have to look
at the book to remember its name, or find out what they're calling it
now. Ben used to say the time to bird, particularly the tropics, was now
or in the past, and it's certainly true. The little birdbath behind my
Austin boarding house in 1961 seldom had less than a dozen blue jays
bathing or waiting their turn. Younger people have never seen that. Now
I'm sure you'd be lucky to have one or two. On an even decent spring day
at High Island, on the Texas coast, you couldn't go more than 60 seconds
without seeing a different migrant, and during "fallouts", you might have
50 of different species in one tree. I haven't been there in years, but I
hear it's never like that now.

An aside: Someone else mentioned swallow-tail kite. I got married once at
the falling-down old house in Smith Woods at High Island during spring
migration. Birders dropped by wearing field clothes to watch the curious
proceedings. It was fairly well known that we had rented a nearby beach
house for the reception. Sometime during the reception, a pickup came
tearing down the dirt road to the beach house. It screeched to a halt in a
cloud of dust and the driver yelled "Swallow-tailed kite at the dike!" At
least half the guests dropped their wedding cake and took off - as many as
could fit jumped into the back of the pickup and others piled into
cars. When the dust cleared, the non-birder guests were staring in
amazement, like "What the hell was that???" I just said, "It's OK, they'll
be back," and eventually they filtered back in, many ecstatic with a new lifer.

As I said at the top, I don't wax poetic about it, but birds have been such
an integral part of my life, I don't even think about it any more. I just
always look, ID them if possible, enjoy them for a moment, and go on. And
I'll never stop. And while you'll never see me rushing out to see a
mockingbird (been there, done that, lost sleep during nesting season with
the damn things perched in my trees, mocking), you might see me at the
scene of a U.S. record or some other bird that I've managed to miss up
'till now. Or, who knows? Maybe you'll end up coming down my alley to see
a green violet-ear at my feeder.

Mary Ann Chapman
Seattle, WA