29.95 I'm still laughing ...... whilst doing some more
research Hilary sent me this, I think it might
interest many BA emailers? Is it time to start
singing?
Over there,
Over there,
Here they come, the son of a gun,
>From over there,
Yes the Yanks are coming,
The yanks are coming,
Their coming from over there,
Giggle have a great day.
John
wrote:
Date: 29-MAR-2000 18:32:55
From:
Subject: All that jizz; don't look now, but birding is
in. (bird watching)
To:
Full content for this article includes illustration
and photograph.
Source: Time, May 25, 1987 v129 p72(3).
Title: All that jizz; don't look now, but birding is
in. (bird watching)
Author: John Leo
Subjects: Bird watching - Recreational aspects
Birds - Observations
Organizations: American Birding Association management
Magazine Collection: 40D0409
Electronic Collection: A4833047
RN: A4833047
Full Text COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1987
Bird watching. Noun (archaic). A form of harmless
staring, conducted in woody areas, by genial
eccentrics often named Matilda or Chauncey.
Birding. Noun (neologism).
Dynamic, addictive and highly contagious behavior
combining hunting skills, aesthetic delight,
intellectual analysis and the dreamy withdrawal from
normal life, especially during spring migration.
Every spring, billions of birds, increasingly restless
from the secretion of seasonal hormones, mass into
flocks, burst into the sky and pour up the great
flyways across the U.S. and Canada. Millions of
birders, just as restless but without hormonal
justification, compulsively pour outdoors in search of
vireos, tanagers, flycatchers, hawks and the stars
of the season, brilliantly colored warblers.
In these fleeting weeks, birders head for one or more
of the nation's famous migrant hot spots such as High
Island, Texas, Big Morongo Wildlife Reserve in
California, Point Pelee in Ontario and the Ramble in
Manhattan's Central Park.
Some will bird in a local park or simply settle into
a backyard chair. Says Jerry Sullivan, a Chicago
nature writer: ''The nice thing is that you don't have
to go some special place. You can do it just about
anywhere.
During migration, birders tend to show up late at
the office, or seem to need a day or two extra to
complete out-of-town business.
Even a Saturday trip to the dry cleaner's has been
known to take two hours or more. In spring, Nature
Writer Lola Oberman carries binoculars around her
Maryland house all day, just in case a good bird
appears at a window. And bumper stickers saying I
BRAKE
FOR BIRDS had better be taken seriously: on the
highway, birders have been known to lose control when
a good bird flies over.
Pete Bacinski, one of New Jersey's best-known birders,
totaled his Chevy Nova when he took his eyes off the
road to look for his bird guide.
Once the genteel pursuit of an esoteric minority,
birding is evolving into a mass sport. A 1980 study
for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that some
2 million Americans were highly committed birders,
meaning that they watch regularly, use a field guide,
keep a life list and are able to identify a hundred or
more species of birds. About 7 million Americans are
fairly interested birders (able to identify at least
40
species), and 60 million, or one American in four, are
at least casual watchers.
Veteran birders, such as L. Hartsell Cash, a retiree
in Winston- Salem, N.C., are pleasantly surprised by
the sport's new respectability. ''In the '40s and '50s
it was still a little embarrassing to be a bird
watcher,'' he says.
''Now there's no doubt about it -- birding is In.''
An estimated 600,000 guides are sold each year in the
U.S., and Roger Tory Peterson's classic Field Guide to
the Birds of Eastern and Central North America, first
published in 1934, has topped 3.5 million in sales.
Birders account for most of the $14 billion spent
annually on the appreciation of wildlife. That
includes
binoculars, spotting scopes, cameras, records and
tapes of bird sounds, computerized software for
keeping bird lists, and bird tours that reach any
corner of the world, from Siberia and Mongolia (23
days, $3,595 from Wings, Inc.) to Madagascar,
Mauritius and Reunion (25 days, $3,775 from Field
Guides Inc.). Though some birders regard their hobby
as a naturalist rejection of high-tech culture, the
rebuke often requires frequent jet trips, Leitz 10 x
40-B Trinovid field glasses, Bausch & Lomb or Questar
spotting scope and a Sony TCM-5000 tape recorder,
especially souped up for birding by Saul Mineroff of
Valley Stream, N.Y.
Normally a birder starts in the backyard or a nearby
wood, sees all the local birds, then graduates to more
and more travel in search of new species. Next come
vacations in the states with the most
birds(California, Texas and Florida), followed by
forays onto the bigtime
birding circuit: southeast Arizona for Mexican
specialties, the Dry Tortugas for noddies and boobies,
Alaska for arctic and Asian species. The final step
is the long trip to see a single bird: Michigan for
Kirtland's warbler, Calcasieu County in Louisiana for
the black francolin, a grueling five-mile trek up the
Chisos Mountains in Texas for the Colima warbler.
Most birding zealots are at a loss to explain this
lavish expenditure of time and energy. ''It's just
something I have to do,'' says Richard Turner, a
professor of fine arts at New York University, falling
into the familiar language of helplessness that marks
the committed birder. The backyard and occasional
fanciers should consider themselves lucky, according
to Pete Dunne of the New Jersey Audubon Society.
''Those people are still in control of their lives,''
he says. ''For the rest of us, birding controls us.
We're
addicts.''
High-level birding requires hunting skills such as
tracking ability and a knowledge of habitat and
weather, plus a knowledge of bird behavior, sounds,
plumages and the pattern of small clues, sometimes
called jizz, that can even reveal the identity of a
distant, backlighted bird. A single bird may produce
more than a dozen different songs and calls, and
plumage may vary widely by sex, age, region and
season. Even if a species is seen for only a second, a
top birder can sift through all the clues and come up
with the right identification most of the time. ''In
part, birding is a mental challenge,'' says Dunne.
''It attracts a disproportionate number of doctors and
engineers -- people whose jobs involve the same kind
of deductive reasoning birders use.''
Many birders get started in their preteen years.
''They may get wide-eyed seeing their first
'Baltimore' oriole,'' says Turner, a birder since age
six.
''That aesthetic component gets mixed quickly with
the urge to collect -- the baseball-card factor -- and
the hunting instinct, which is probably in the
genes.''
In fact, the sport is sublimation posing as innocent
fun: hunting without killing, collecting without
avarice. ''You can collect birds without worrying
about a place to store them,'' says Claudia Wilds of
Washington, an expert on shorebirds and a rising star
in the birding world.
''There's an awful lot of adventure in it. It allows
grownups to do things they thought they had put behind
them when they grew up, like sloshing around in the
mud and getting up in the middle of the night and
going out looking for things.''
For many, the experience becomes primarily a listing
game, with lists for most birds seen in a day or
lifetime, a county or a season. Peterson, 78, once
kept a list of birdcalls he heard on movie sound
tracks. Some feel compelled to list birds seen during
a single minute, or those seen while sitting in one
chair for a full day (the ''Big Sit'').
Though birding is a hobby, watchers are quickly drawn
toward environmental issues. DDT nearly wiped out the
osprey and the peregrine falcon. On April 19, the last
California condor was taken from the wild.
''We have to convert interest in birds into backing
for conservation,'' says Arnold Brown of the
Massachusetts Audubon Society. ''It's one thing to
admire a loon and another to realize that it's our
oldest bird, 70 million years old, and in trouble from
acid rain.''
But some watchers are dedicated nonactivists who enjoy
birding largely for the companionship it brings. A
birder can travel a thousand miles into the wilds
of another state and find instant rapport with local
birding fanatics, who are busy collecting new species,
along with mosquito bites and ticks.
''Camaraderie is what birding is all about,'' says
Benton Basham, a Chattanooga, Tenn., anesthetist.
For Basham, it is also about hunting and listing.
He is currently at the top of the big-time birding
tree, holder of the records for most species seen in a
lifetime (777) and the most species seen in a single
year (711) in the American Birding Association
checklist area -- Canada, Alaska and the Lower 48
states. The world of listing is presided over by the
approximately 8,000-member ABA and its magazine,
Birding, which ranks birders by species seen, prints
erudite articles on how to distinguish different birds
in the field and sets rules for the listing game. One
such rule is that birds reaching North America through
human assistance cannot be counted, touching off
speculation on whether the Western Reef heron that
drew hundreds of birders to Nantucket, Mass., in 1983
actually came over from Africa as a stowaway on a
boat.
The ABA checklist committee voted to accept the bird.
The ABA also rules on Big Days, which are competitions
to see as many species as possible in 24 hours. The
association once removed a species from the total of a
Texas team, thus costing it a tie with California for
the national title. The team, while standing on the
banks of the Rio Grande, had sighted groove-billed
anis. The ABA decided that although the eyeballs of
the Texans were indeed on U.S. soil, the birds were in
Mexico, outside the official area of the game, and
could not be listed. The birding world, particularly
at its highest level, has a reputation for scrupulous
honesty in listing.
It also has a reputation for hard-nosed competition
in listing. Fifteen years ago, only about 75 people
had seen 600 birds in North America. Now more than 500
have topped that figure, and 75 have seen 700. James
Vardaman, a forest-management executive from Jackson,
Miss., spent $45,000 and 170 days trying to see 700
birds during 1979. Vardaman, who called himself an
amateur, paid guides and tipsters, jetted off after
almost every rarity and ended the year listing 699
birds. Basham broke the 700 mark in 1983, and many
birders dream of pushing the total higher. Like other
addicts, birders can let their work slip. Don
Roberson, a well-known California birder, dropped his
law
practice at the age of 29 to follow the birds, though
he has since relapsed and returned to work. Like ski
bums, some talented young birders take low-level jobs
as clerks or night watchmen, thus saving their major
energies for the chase.
Bob Odear of High Point, N.C., traded down in life to
be a full-time part of the birding world. Once the
president and general manager of Wrangler jeans, Odear
quit to make ''one-third the money'' running a birding
company called Bob-O-Link and its phone service, the
North American Rare Bird Alert. For $25 a year,
subscribing birders are given a code name and the
right to dial into a tape, changed as often as three
times a day, listing the whereabouts of all known
rarities in North America. The phone service has
cranked birding competition up a notch. Sandy Komito,
55, owner of a construction company in Haledon, N.J.,
blames Odear for turning him into a chaser. ''Before
Bob started the service in January of 1985, I was
relatively passive,'' he says. Komito says he hunts
rarities by tacking on a
day or two of birding to a legitimate business trip.
But when the ruddy ground dove was reported in Texas
last November, he was there the next day, with no
business trip as an excuse. He expects to fly 300,000
miles on birding trips this year and does not want to
tot up the costs. ''It would scare me if I found
out,'' he says. Birders have a rough rule of thumb for
distinguishing between normal and obsessed watchers:
the obsessives dream of going to Attu, a bleak
Aleutian
island 100 miles from Soviet waters and about 1,500
miles from Anchorage. Attu vaguely resembles a penal
colony, but it is paradise to birders pining for a
flyby of the Siberian rubythroat or other Asian
rarities. ''We have people who go without any hope of
seeing new birds,'' says Larry Balch, the
ABA's president and head of Attour, a service that
brings about 65 birders to the island each spring for
three weeks. ''There's something magic and very
relaxing about being at the end of the earth.''
Even the most driven birders seem to harbor a few
doubts about the chasing> game. ''It's ridiculous --
it costs more money than booze and takes more time,''
says Thompson Marsh, a professor at the University of
Denver College of Law. Marsh, 84, who began listing
birds in 1918, still hunts with the pack and is ranked
fifth on the North American list. If someone wants to
start a
Birdwatchers Anonymous, says Marsh, he is ready to
join. ''I experience recurring intervals of
lucidity,'' he says. ''When a chaffinch turned up in
New Brunswick, I stayed right here and I felt fine.
Maybe there's hope for me yet.''
Top birders often fly hundreds of miles only to find
a bird that cannot be officially listed. Last winter
Marsh and other top birders went to Charleston, S.C.,
to see a rare bird, said to be a gray-headed gull but
that could be ruled a hybrid. ''It's always a
crapshoot,'' says Paul Sykes, a Georgia ornithologist.
''The bird can also leave just before you get there.
That's why we try to get there as quickly as we can.''
''That's not my idea of bird watching, never finding
anything on your own,'' says Colorado Birder Jack
Reddall, who travels to see birds but refuses to
chase. ''Real birding is getting to know your own area
and turning up good birds at home.'' California Birder
Jon Dunn admits to mixed feelings about birding in the
fast lane. ''Competition taken to an extreme can lead
to bad
birding, too much pressure to tick off one more
species.''
Hotshots draw regular fire from purists for turning
an aesthetic goal into a macho, competitive struggle.
But even superlisters have been known to speak of
birds with awe and wonder. Explanations for the appeal
of birding proliferate, says Joseph Kastner, author of
A World of Watchers, because it is hard to explain
what the beauty and freedom of birds can do to the
human
psyche. At the heart of birding, he writes, is the
''astonished awareness that comes in some unguarded
moment when the watcher is left oddly vulnerable to
feelings that only nature can provoke.''
-- End --
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