Burt,

You started something that should really become a book in itself.

My friend, Donald Tucker of Maine, lurked onto this topic and sent me this
wonderful version of his story.

Diane Yorgason-Quinn
Gig Harbor, WA
Avosetta at hotmail.com


"Why do you watch birds?" Several weeks ago a reporter writing about the
Christmas Bird Count asked me this question. Since I have been watching
birds for nearly 60 years it would seem that I should have had a ready
answer. Alas, I fear that I gave only a very rambling and unsatisfactory
reply. Since then I have spent much time thinking about it. It strikes in
some ways as being a question much like: "What is the meaning of life?"
There is no one correct answer and I guess that depending on whom you ask
the replies could be quite different, though there are undoubted many shared
reasons. Try answering the question yourself? You may be surprised at your
own answer.

I believe I have many different reasons depending more or less on my current
mood and interests. I have been a sport birder for most of my life. By that
I mean that I keep a list and I try to see as many birds in a year as I can.
I keep a life list, various state lists, a yard list. I also enjoy finding
the rare bird that shouldn't be where it is or when it's there. I enjoy
seeing the birds that are scarce enough that they are seen only after much
searching. I enjoy the challenge of the Big Day when you try to see as many
species as possible in a day.

Of course I watch birds because they are beautiful. The goldfinches, the
blue jays, the orioles, even the common robins are handsome. We can see them
daily in our own yards. Of all the living creatures in our world birds are
perhaps the most easily seen and enjoyed. They delight us with song; and who
of us has not thought at some time: "I wish I could fly like a bird."

However, even though I could say I watch birds for all of the above reasons,
the real reason is much more spiritual for me. I had the good fortune to
grow up in area where I began to wander the fields and woods at a very early
age. When I read as a child an Audubon pamphlet by Roger Tory Peterson in
which he expressed his wonder in the sounds and life of a marsh in his
childhood I was hooked. By 8 years I was keeping a notebook of my
observations. The arrival in the spring of red-winged blackbirds, their
calls filling the marshland were exhilarating. I have seen many bitterns
over the years, but I still remember as a teenager the first time I was
wading deep in a marsh far removed from any human activity and the oong ka
choonk of a bittern began throbbing around me, almost more easily felt than
heard. For a moment I felt like the first primitive man. Who does not look
forward to that first robin in the spring or experience a thrill to look up
on a frosty October morning, the foliage golden and red, to see a chevron of
geese flying south, their loud honking calls still heard long after you can
still see them. There is a response in your soul. I have seen many gannets
over the years but none can compare to that first bird more than 50 years
ago on Bonaventure Island at the tip of the Gaspe. At that time there were
still a few families living on the island and I had stayed with one the
evening before. Early in the morning I headed for the cliffs on the far side
of the island, passing through dense spruce and fir stands. As I walked
along I passed carpets of bunchberry, twinflower and clubmoss. The pale
yellowish flowers and white bracts of the bunchberry had mostly given way to
clusters of red berries. About me the zi-zi-zi-zi zi of blackpoll warblers
was everywhere. Hidden in the dense spruce, magnolia warblers frequently
gave out with a rapid weeta-weeta-weeto. There was an occasional
black-throated green warbler and the high clear notes sweet Canada Canada of
white-throats came from every quarter, along with the trills of juncos and
chipping sparrows. A Swainson's thrush greeted the day with a song and
another flushed from the path to disappear into the shadows of the spruce
tangles. Occasionally, flocks of white-winged crossbills flew over,
sometimes alighting in the conifers nearby, affording fine views of their
distinctive bills. Pushing on, the blue waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence
were soon visible through the trees. I stepped out into a meadow of daisies,
astoundingly beautiful as thousands of yellow and white flowers waved in the
breeze, bejeweled in the morning dew. Suddenly, barely 15 feet overhead, a
gannet with glistening white body and black wingtips goes by, then another
and another. It was breath taking! Every gannet I have seen since evokes
that memory.

I watch birds because it has allowed me to experience those perfect moments
when you become one with our natural world: the slurring cry of a Eurasian
buzzard (Buteo buteo) late one afternoon high overhead when after a dismal
rainy day the gray clouds suddenly parted and the golden light of the
setting sun illuminated the tops of the distance snow covered peaks in the
Austrian alps, the call echoing up the valley as a lone swallow headed for
its evening roost; hearing a high kleeep and turning to see the blood red
bill of an oystercatcher disappearing into the fog as our boat left a rocky
harbor on the coast of Norway; the cascading song of a winter wren echoing
through the rain forest of the Olympic peninsula while I walked through a
cathedral of towering fir and spruce bathed in such a golden and greenish
glow that not even a fairy tale imagination could have conjured up. One June
day I stood on the edge of a cliff on the island of Runde off the coast of
Norway. The winds were nearly gale force, but there at the top hundreds of
puffins were playing. They hung facing into the blast, wings tight into
their bodies using their feet as rudders, barely moving, sail gliding,
clearly just enjoying themselves. I gazed down more than a thousand feet to
the sea, the whole cliff teaming with kittiwakes, alcids and gannets. I felt
a primal joy.

Many of you have probably seen the movie "Dances With Wolves." At one point
in the movie the post commander asks John Dunbar why he came to the
frontier. He answers: "I wanted to see it before it was gone." A few years
ago I stood beside a narrow gravel road in the sand hills of western
Nebraska. I had not seen another car or another person all day. At this
particular point there were no fence posts, no dwellings, no other roads, no
manmade sounds, no contrails, as far as I could see in every direction.
There were only the flute-like notes and calls of western meadowlarks.
Horned larks rose up out the short prairie grass and lark sparrow sang atop
a dry stalk. An orchard oriole flew into a nearby grove, and I looked up to
see a long-billed curlew with its astounding bill heading away over the
prairie. At that moment I think I felt: "what it was like before it was
gone."

On our own Maine coast in August, when the returning shorebirds appear I see
not only just the hundreds of birds, the plovers, the sandpipers, the
godwits. If I focus my vision enough there is just the pulse of the waves on
the shore and the birds. The houses, the boats, are gone and it is much the
same, as it would have looked long before any man walked our shores. I am
comforted that there still is a spot far to the north where some of these
birds nested, perhaps in a spot never viewed by any person. The snowy owl I
see at Back Cove or Nubble Light may have come from the furthest points of
land in the Canadian arctic where even the most intrepid of travelers have
never trekked. I think of a gray January day deep in the northern New
Hampshire forest behind my home when it was so quiet I could hear the snow
falling and a chickadee flitted nearby uttering a faint dee dee. I hope that
these experiences will not cease, that future generations may also have
them, but it will require much resolve on the part of us all if they are to
continue.

Why do I watch birds? I think ultimately it is to refresh my soul. Thoreau
described the feeling beautifully:
"We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a
meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before
setting, after a cold grey day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and
the softest brightest morning sun-light fell on the dry grass and on the
stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the
shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the
meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a
light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so
warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow.
When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen
again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of
evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was
more glorious still."

"The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all
the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance, as it has
never set before, -where there is but a solitary marsh hawk to have his
wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there
is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning
to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and
bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and
serenely bright-I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without
a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground
gleamed like the boundary of Elysium and the sun on our backs seemed like a
gentle herdsman, driving us home at evening."

Thoreau also said: "In wildness is the preservation of the world."

Donald Tucker/Maine
dtucker at gwi.net