Ethno-ornithology Sunday: birdwatchers

I started this last Friday to have it posted Sunday. Then we had a HUGE storm (wind gusts at one hilltop weather station recorded at 70mph) come through and I was without power for a good 50+ hours.

Frog-o-rama

Image from the Northern Pacific Treefrog USGS fact sheet

I have never been much of a frog person. I mean, I like them, like what they do in the ecosystems they are found in, but they've never topped my "favorite animals"

chart. Being that it is almost spring and their circadian clocks are telling them it's time to make themselves known I've been giving them more notice than usual. Tonight, as I have for the last several nights, I listened to the chorus of frogs "singing" all around my home. Tonight they seem to have reached a more frantic, urgent rhythm. Their little croaks giving the night a different kind of pulse than it usually has. I drink in the sound, allow it to seep into my skin, my bones, my veins, until I can feel the rhythm playing out in my own being. If I were a frog I'm sure I'd be aroused by all of these boisterous males proclaiming their sexual prowess and genetic superiority. Sometimes, like the undulation of the ocean, their volume decreases until it is almost silent. Then their voices raise, in volume and in number until they are virtually shouting for attention and by force of sheer numbers their cacophony crashes around me, wave after wave of glorious little frogs "songs."

This, of course, makes me think of birds. Even males that procure a territory before they procure a mate sing of their own sexiness in order to attract a mate. In all honesty there are many, many ways that birds actually attract their mates but right now, be

cause of the frog song I'm thinking of male birds and their boisterous, glorious singing. One lonely marsh wren has the same affect on me as the scads of Northern Pacific treefrogs that are out singing right now. The wrens get to really singing and I feel like their song is all that matters, because in that moment it is all that matters. These little birds that sing, and sing, and sing, at risk of being discovered and consumed desperate to attract a mate. Marsh wrens, among many other species, create new songs in a constant effort to "one up" their neighbors. I rather enjoy walking along areas that have several wren territories in a row and listening to the increasing complexity of their songs. And that is just at the frequencies and decibles that I can hear, I'm sure that if I could hear like their intended audience I'd be even more exhilarated. Or I'd think they were unexciting and move on to find a more suitable male.

Bird songs, of course, make me think of birdwatchers. What self-respecting birder doesn't know at least a handful of songs with which to identify the birds they can hear but not see. More specifically, I am thinking about the waste we create in our continuing efforts to learn to identify birds or to add one (or 100) new birds to our life lists (which I don't keep and don't quite understand keeping). Books, cds, computer programs, binoculars, scopes, bird feeders and an ever expanding array of technological gadgets. I recently learned about applications, BirdJam being one of them that seems fairly popular (at least when I did my online search), for ipods and iphones that help identify birds. Mark at "Birds in Your Backyard" talks about tech-savvy birders and the inroads that technology is making into the birding world. While I understand the appeal of technology in birding (how many times would I have really appreciated a recording of a bird call when out birding) I just can't support increasing the amount of disposable, breakable and toxic material goods being produced, used and disposed of in this country every day. Now, that isn't to say that there aren't advantages to having technology in the field, home or office. And it isn't to say that there aren't ways of making technology less harmful (borrowing cds from the library or buying bird guides as mp3's to forgo shipping and packaging for example). I just think that it is our responsibility, as consumers of nature, as "collectors" of birds, to protect them and the land that they (and we) depend on. If the ultimate goal is to know more birds, by sight and by ear, than anyone else. If the goal of finding birds is to outcompete, out ID, out do every other birder/birding competitor how much better are we than the people that raced against each other and time to kill ivory-billed woodpeckers for their collections/collectors. We may not be directly killing them, but maybe slowly killing them through habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species, nesting disturbance and by polluting their homes is worse. Maybe we too are loving birds to death. To extinction. To finality. Maybe it is time to get back to basics. To live, and bird, simply. To realize that if our presence in an area is threatening a species…maybe we don't need to add them to our life lists. I know for me, birding is best done with (at most) a pair of binoculars, a bird book and my own curiosity. Oh, and sometimes a little help from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology All About Birds guide when I have a bird song stuck in my head that I can't seem to identify.

*When you click on the All About Birds link you will be directed to their page about brown creepers. This is because these little guys have a delightfully melodious song that "plagued" me about two springs ago. I'd walk around singing the song in my head trying to pair it with the birds that I knew would be here. Then, one day when the song was filling the air around me, I saw a brown creeper in one of the ponderosa pines near my house. I immediately ran up to the house, logged onto All About Birds, looked up the brown creeper and discovered that this often shy and seemingly quiet nuthatch-like (the reason I had skimmed over them originally) birds, are really quite wonderful singers.