http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/22/science/life/22SIBL.html
October 22, 2002
13 Ways (at Least) of Looking at a Sparrow
By JAMES GORMAN
PLUM ISLAND, Mass. ? David Allen Sibley is standing at the edge of a pond on
this coastal island off northern Massachusetts, peering alternately through
binoculars and a telescope at a mixed bag of shorebirds and ducks in the shallow
water.
It is high tide and the extensive mudflats at the Parker River National Wildlife
refuge are covered in water, so the birds congregate at the brackish Bill
Forward Pool, and it has consequently become a favorite of birders.
To the uninitiated, the dipping and dabbling birds in the wind-ruffled shallows
are a kind of impressionist wash of color and movement, a tableau to be enjoyed
but not parsed.
For Mr. Sibley, it is certainly a source of pleasure, but also an object of
study. In fact, the pleasure and the analysis are inseparable. Mr. Sibley has
made a big impact in the past few years in the birding world with several books,
including a much-praised guide to bird identification. (He and two colleagues
also write a weekly column on birds, supplied to newspapers by The New York
Times Syndicate.) His most recent book, published this month, is a slim volume
called "Birding Basics," a kind of crash course in how to find, see and
identify birds.
What characterizes Mr. Sibley's approach to birds is a love for detail, and a
downright passionate interest in taxonomy. His guide to identification is a
544-page distillation of his life's work that can be read at home with pleasure,
and carried into the field with some difficulty. In it and in his other books,
he revels in the fine distinctions that make taxonomy an intricate puzzle.
Asked what moves him most in the study of birds, he pauses and answers slowly
and softly. But his conversational diffidence does not obscure the intensity and
singularity of his desire. "Finding order," he says. In this, he is not
different
from most devoted birders, except in skill and dedication.
There are bird lovers, certainly, who are satisfied to savor the flight of a
hawk without knowing whether it is a buteo or an accipiter, content to enjoy the
upside-down, staccato progress of a nuthatch on a spruce without knowing the
name of bird
or tree.
But true birders, who used to be called bird-watchers, occupy, with other
amateur naturalists, a small bywater of the scientific mind in which the naming
of things is an overriding hunger. It might better be called bird-naming than
bird-watching. The more names, the more finely the distinctions are drawn, the
better.
As an exercise in "Birding Basics," Mr. Sibley suggests sharpening one's sense
of observation by noting 10 differences between a summer tanager and a northern
cardinal, both red birds with black trim.
There is a section in the book titled "Understanding Feathers" with illustrative
drawings. One, of the head of a song sparrow, labels 13 details, including the
lores, supraloral, supercilium, as well as the more familiar throat, breast,
crown
and nape.
Mr. Sibley is not immune to beauty; he simply finds it in the details. His color
illustrations are exquisite, but he is not drawn much to other forms of visual
artistry. "I do some other painting," he said, "but it doesn't interest me the
same way."
Before he ever began work on a book, he said, "I would spend an hour sitting
here with the sketchbook looking at dunlin and white-rumped sandpipers." He
would enumerate and draw the many differences. "The dunlin look bigger-headed,"
he said. "The eye stripe is a little bit darker. The back is paler and grayer.
The wings are shorter."
Birding, as Mr. Sibley describes it, is an interplay of detail and gestalt. Over
time, the birder's knowledge of feather patterns, bill length and feeding
behavior inform the kind of quick, unconscious pattern recognition that humans
do so well.
The birds on the pond, for example, are immediately separable from one another
in some obvious ways, he says, indicating three dowitchers, "the bigger ones
that are keeping their heads down and just jabbing their bills into the mud." To
the left of the dowitchers is a lesser yellowlegs and behind it is a bunch of
semi-palmated sandpipers.
Behavior is a tip-off, he says, explaining: "You can watch the way they feed.
The yellowlegs walks around sort of daintily placing its feet and picking things
up with its bill. The dowitchers are just head down, barely moving, sticking
their bills way down into the mud, and they're actually finding prey by feel.
They're feeling it with the tips of their bills. So they're just moving along
slowly and dipping their bills into the mud thousands of times to locate prey.
And the little tiny peeps are just smaller and more active than the dowitchers."
That's the easy part. Try to distinguish a long-billed from a short-billed
dowitcher, or a greater from a lesser yellowlegs, and you have to start seeking
out details. "Birders use these handy little mnemonics," Mr. Sibley says, to
keep in mind specific distinctions. One of his favorites, he says, laughing
sheepishly, has to do with bill length in yellowlegs.
"If you take the bill of a greater yellowlegs and hit the tip of the bill with a
hammer to drive the tip of the bill back through the head, it will stick out the
back of the head. On a lesser yellowlegs, if you did that the bill would just
reach the back of the head." This is an imaginary exercise, of course.
These are easy to spot, well-known details. For Mr. Sibley, it is the discovery
of all the many differences between similar species, including new and unknown
ones, that is most satisfying. He points to the ducks on the pond, female teal
in drab feathers, and describes a small triumph.
"I struggled with trying to tell the difference between the blue-winged and
green-winged teal, in this brown female plumage.
The thing that I noticed after many hours of study is that every one of them has
a clear bright buffy patch on the base of the tail, on the side of the base of
the tail, a very distinct little buffy streak. The blue-winged teal don't show
that. They just have the plain brown pattern continuing unbroken down the side
of the tail.
"I knew of a lot of other differences," he said, "but I wasn't all that
comfortable with any of them and I felt that I was still finding birds that I
couldn't place, that I couldn't put in one species or the other. And then one
day I noticed that buffy streak on the green-winged teal.
"Those are the moments that I went birding for, that moment of recognition when
you see something and you know absolutely that this is one species and this is
another," he said, describing it as like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle. You
hold
a piece and turn it and turn it and turn it until finally you see where and how
it fits.
It is almost, but not quite ornithology, says Mr. Sibley, whose father, Fred
Sibley, was a well-known ornithologist at Yale.
David Sibley briefly flirted with higher education (he spent a year in college)
but never seriously planned to do anything with his life other than what he
does: watching birds, studying them, painting them and writing about them. He
has done this all over North America, and now lives about an hour from Plum
Island, in Concord, Mass.
His study is reflective of the growing sophistication of how birders watch
birds, he says.
"What birders are doing now is a lot of what was being published in scientific
journals 50 years ago," he said. "You go back to the ornithological journals of
the 1930's, 40's, 50's, it's papers on distribution of species and the birds
that are found in a certain region, how to identify species, how to tell the
difference between males and females of different species. All that was
ornithology 50 years ago. And now it's all amateur bird-watchers. The
ornithologists are doing the more technical laboratory work and really highly
refined field studies."
Mr. Sibley says he finds that each new detail leads him to a deeper
understanding of the birds he studies. It is a kind of pleasant paradox that the
smallest discovery can lead to thinking about development, behavior, migration,
the whole balance of the natural world. Just on this day, he thinks he has
caught a difference in the timing of migration in the two species of dowitcher
here, based on a visit he made the week before.
Furthermore, he said, he noticed in the previous visit to this pond a difference
in overall body shape of juvenile and adult long-billed dowitchers. Why, he
wondered, and when did the body shape change.
"When they lose their juvenile plumage over the next six or eight weeks and molt
into their first winter plumage," he went on, "will they then develop the shape
of the adult long-billeds or will they still be juvenilelike in shape or
something in
between?"
Asked if he might possibly run out of questions, he laughed. "No," he said,
"no."
Despite his encyclopedic knowledge, he does occasionally run out of answers, a
refreshing moment for an interviewer.
Asked what the dowitchers were feeding on, he said:
"You got me. Whatever is an inch or two down in the mud. It's probably little
worms, or maybe there's some kind of little clam or shrimp or something."
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