What The Big Year could have been
I guess this thing from the producers of The Big Year is supposed to be funny and go viral?
I’ve gone on the record as saying I thought The Big Year was a nice little movie. I never really expected it to be a blockbuster or a gateway to field ornithology, though in all of our heart of hearts that’s what we may have hoped for. I think we were all pretty happy that it treated birders with respect and didn’t mock us simply for the sake of being mocked. Yeah, there’s an near bottomless well of potentially mockable offenses we subject ourselves too, from wide-brimmed hats to multi-pocket vests to obsession with taxonomical arcana (though I’ll defend that last one to the end), but that’s the easy way out. The more courageous tack is to poke fun while attempting to understand that our eccentricities come from a uniquely authentic and earnest place, and by god isn’t it nice to be unapologetically passionate about something in a world where it’s far too easy to succumb to suffocating cynicism? I mean really, that may be my favorite thing about birding right there. I’m a right cynical bastard about just about everything and, because of that, probably very nearly insufferable on topics of politics, religion, sports, and whatever else normal people talk about.
But, aside from my family, birding may be the single most purely joyful thing I can be a part of, which probably means I’m in it way too deep to be able to watch something like this without getting a little defensive of my Tilly-hatted brethren.
I guess that’s why this above video rubbed me the wrong way. I did laugh, the pronunciation of Columbus is pretty funny and I’m not made of stone, after all. But it’s mockery for no other reason that to point and laugh, which just seems so base, so juvenile, so unfair, to me. The best humor comes from a deeper knowledge, and an affection for, the subject. See any of Christopher’s Guests “mock”-umentarys for some of the best examples of this. The writers and actor at work here seem only to have noted that the bird calls are silly and that people look sort of funny when they look through binoculars and run with that. I see nothing here to suggest that the parties involved have ever met a birder, or even attempted to google “birder” to find out what’s up. But that would probably get in the way of their “art”, right? Anyway, not impressed.
I guess we should all be happy that this wasn’t the direction the screen-writer and director took the movie itself in. Small victories, I guess. See what I mean by cynical?
So do I have this all wrong? Am I completely off base here? Is this a genuinely legitimate take on birding? I’m not sure I can tell. What do you think?
Embracing the Youth Movement
Review: Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America
Learning birds is like learning a language. When you come across someone who’s exceptionally good at it, it looks effortless. But for the rest of us, perhaps those of us whose knowledge of a foreign language is merely cursory, each phrase and word needs to be run through your native language before responding, haltingly, in an often futile attempt to be understood. See, language fluency, particularly in individuals who are fluent in multiple languages, actually rewires your brain such that this awkward middle step is unnecessary. Response is reflexive rather than calculated, and the brain is plastic enough to allow for comprehension without the crutch of translating it twice and more, oftentimes it’s so subconscious that the speaker is not even aware that they’re doing it and is unable to explain how it happens.
Obviously a great deal of effort is required to make this subconscious switch. You have to put in a lot of time with grammar and syntax, and speak with native speakers for hours, before you can be considered truly fluent. It’s the same way with birding. Skilled birders, those who have spent hours in the field and spent lots of time with their field guides, or with the sighting reports in the quarterly journals of their state ornithological societies, or with North American Birds, respond to what they see and hear in much the same intuitive way that language speakers do, and are often equally unable to explain what they just “know”. Their brain is rewired to speak fluent bird, and like the ability to speak a foreign language, anyone, given enough time and effort, can get there even if it seems impossible.
The thing is, this is most relevant to terrestrial birds, those birds that share their land-based ecosystems with human beings. There’s another suite of birds that, by virtue of their rarity, their peculiarity, and, mostly, their inaccessibility, must remain foreign for most birders. And it’s a true shame too, because they are among the most fantastic birds on the planet, true masters of their domain and consisting of some of the most eccentric, formidable, and mysterious species you could hope to find living in a world that very few birders get the opportunity to explore at length. I’m speaking, of course, of the tubenoses.
Few ornithologists are as well-versed in the pelagic world as Steve N.G. Howell, widely considered to be one of the world’s experts on the field identification of this enigmatic family of birds. His widely anticipated photographic guide, Petrels, Albatrosses, and Storm-Petrels of North America, comes at a time when interest in pelagic birds and their distribution into North American waters is at an all-time high. The pelagic realm is often considered to be the last great horizon in the study of North America’s birdlife, and it’s shocking how little we know about these birds’ lives and how many surprises are left to discover. One of the great appeals of pelagic birding, at least in this birder’s opinion, is the fact that nearly every single trip offshore offers the possibility for something completely new and unexpected, there are few places on earth for which one could say the same.
That said, identification of pelagic species is notoriously tricky, with a constantly moving platform, cryptic species, and uncertain taxonomy conspiring to overwhelm even the most ambitious seabirder. Worse, most identification of pelagic species is not done by close examination of salient field marks – a rocking boat often makes that difficult – but by more esoteric criteria. Flight style, frequency and buoyancy of flaps, distance of glides, among others, are of paramount importance. These are the sorts of things that are not impossible, but very very difficult for most birders to grasp in the few hours per year allotted to them offshore. And too often these clues to identification are given the short shift in traditional field guides. Birders deserve better, and in Howell’s new book, they’ve finally got it.
So much has been left unsaid and unknown with regard to tubenose identification that Howell has a lot of catching up to do. And catch us up, he does. This, beyond the amazing and comprehensive species accounts, more than the stunning photos of even the rarest birds, in addition to the exhaustive treatment of the very latest in tubenose taxonomy (and trust me, there’s a lot there), is worth the price of admission, so to speak. Howell’s introduction is perhaps the most critical and useful piece of writing at the fore of any bird guide in the past few decades because, before this, so little was written on what it means to be able to identify pelagic birds.
Howell explains in great detail concepts like “wing-loading” and how it pertains to the different species flight styles. He breaks down dynamic soaring, the process by which so many tubenoses get around the oceans. He illustrates, clearly and concisely in simple line drawings, the flight manners of several species of shearwater in both calm and strong winds. He even explains how to orient yourself on the boat relative to the wind to best take advantage of passing birds. It’s truly a treasure chest full of incredible information, none of it self-evident, on best experiencing the open ocean. And, it must be said, none of it is dry reading. The prose is eminently engaging, written by someone who is very clearly thrilled to have an outlet for this wealth of knowledge. It’s immediately clear that this is useful information too, as you’d expect. I’ve been on several trips offshore here in North Carolina, and while I consider myself to be a passable pelagic birder (and really only the last couple times I’ve been out have I felt more or less comfortable), I’m struck by the realization that I’ve been seabirding with a handicap. In reading this book I feel as though a veil has been lifted from my eyes and I can’t wait to get out again to put into practice what I’ve learned in only the week I’ve had it.
If I have any complaints, it’s that I wish some of the photos were larger. There are a few plates throughout that feel as though there is wasted white space that could have been better filled by enlarging some of the photos to better see some of the subtler aspects of plumage, and subtle plumage aspects is the name of the game a lot of the time. With the profusion of high quality photos throughout, however, this lament seems a bit petty. Larger photos would necessitate a larger book after all, and this one is already very substantial as it is.
It would be easy to pigeon-hole this book as one just for pelagic enthusiasts, and make no mistake, every birder with even a passing interest in offshore birding needs this book in their library; there is simply nothing like it. But pelagic birds are an invitation to a world few birders are aware of, and even fewer know well. This book offers the best opportunity to learn about these incredible birds short of spending the sort of time at sea that Steve Howell does.
Howell, a man who is truly fluent in tubenose, has produced the something essential here. I could not possibly recommend it more enthusiastically.
Thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy
Salt in a Big Year wound (or, a story I nearly forgot)
I didn’t write much specifically about the end of my Triangle Big Year when the calender flipped over to January a couple weeks ago. That was a little intentional, in that I almost hate to delve into the mind-numbing minutia of Big Year stat checking and would I haves-should I haves that rehashing a Big year can be. I’ve said before that the biggest insight I’ve picked up from my two attempts at Big Yearing (this Triangle one and my state-wide run in 2008), and one I think Big Year accounts fail to emphasize, is that these things are as much about the birds you miss as the birds you get. Particularly towards the last quarter of the year, the run is less about finding unexpected birds and more about making sure you don’t miss expected ones. Or maybe I’m just a terrible Big Year birder, I don’t know, but the frustration of missing Eastern Screech-Owl is one I don’t care to relive, nor the multiple failed attempts to nail down Wood Stork late in the summer into November, nor the inconceivable lack of Black-belled Plovers in the area, nor the dipped Nashville Warbler, Sooty Tern, Red-necked Grebe, etc etc etc.
Once the year is over, the mania can subside and you can find yourself birding just to bird again. And like the cliche about love, the birds seem to find you when you’re least expecting them.
I started the year 2012 birding. I had drawn a choice spot for the Jordan Lake CBC, with long-time Triangle birder Tom Krakauer as my companion for the morning. The first bird of the day was Ring-billed Gull, calling out on the water, and as the light slowly opened up the lake, thousands upon thousands of roosting gulls slowly emerged from the fog in clouds of white wings. Now that the new Wake County (Raleigh) landfill has opened not more than a few miles (as the gull flies) from the largest lake in the region, this is where they come every night. And with the increasing light, they began passing over us in flocks hundreds at a time. Ring-bills mostly, but impressive numbers of Herring Gulls, nearly one for every 50 of the smaller birds. We estimated a conservative 50,000 gulls, which made for about 1,000 Herrings. Lots of birds. Literal tons of them.
I had sort of joked at the possibility of a Lesser Black-backed Gull in that mass, noting that I wouldn’t be able to tell it on the wing even if it was in there and resigning myself to a cursory study of the Herring Gulls just in case something obvious jumped out at me. Nothing doing. After all, I had spent an inordinate amount of time exactly one year hence looking through this flock of gulls for that Lesserback for my official Big Year with absolutely no luck. I didn’t expect anything different.
After 90% of the birds had headed for breakfast, there was still a large flock of gulls that hadn’t headed towards the dump, now loafing on the swimming beach of the nearby park. Expecting nothing in the much smaller flock of merely 500 gulls, I pulled out my scope and did my CBC duty, trying to estimate the numbers of Herrings in this group when a dark-mantled bird practically jumped out at me. Even tucked into its wing, there’s no denying that slate gray mantle and that smudgy eye. My Lesser Black-backed Gull, and an adult too. Turns out I didn’t even have to work too hard at it.
I considered, for a second, the irony of the situation. I’d spent nearly every weekend from January 1 to December 31 looking for birds just like this one. Even the night before this CBC, the eve of 2012, I spent a couple hours driving the backroads of Orange and Durham Counties trying to whistled up that infuriating missing Screech Owl with no luck. And yet, not nine hours after the official end of my Big Year, I was staring into the smudgy yellow eye of one of my primary targets for last year. The birding gods certainly have a sense of humor.
But that’s the way it goes. Regardless of whether the Lesserback counts on some arbitrarily dated list, it’s still a great bird. A county bird, yes. An auspicious start to this year of normal birding, of course. A sign that we shouldn’t take these little games we play too seriously? Absolutely. One I, at least, would probably do well to remember.
The Black Hole of Birding
Inspired by a recent message from the folks at eBird encouraging birders to get out and do some mid-winter birding in some counties where there are some gaps in the data, I decided to throw caution to the wind and head to the eBird frontier. My destinations were the twin counties of Caswell and Person, north of the triangle only 30 miles or so, but the point at which eBird data collection drops off a cliff. There were possibilities there. Possibilities of good birds, unknown hotspots, eBird top 100 championships and the fame and fortune that comes along with that. Or there might be a dearth of data for these counties for a good reason. Neither of the counties had any eBird hotspots, though a little searching produced a couple locales that birders have visited before, if not in the very recent past. Besides, the birding around here is pretty slow this time of year, even the regular birds would be new. What did I have to lose?
It's the white one in the middle north
Nothing but time, apparently. The first stop was Caswell Game Land in Caswell County where I found the 25 or so species you’d expect to find just about anywhere in the southeast United States in the winter. The so-called “Wildlife Road” was mostly quiet pine-hardwood forest with a couple logged over grassy areas where I found sparrows, including a Fox, which was a nice surprise. Despite the fact that I was less than an hour from home, I quickly found myself out of cell phone range so my plan to follow my iPhone’s map function to find little ponds and marshes was a bust. So out came the DeLorme map which led me, well, back to the highway, but not before a stop at a fishing pond netted me a Pied-billed Grebe and a Swamp Sparrow for my burgeoning county list.
I was intrigued, the whole time I was up this way, by a massive swath of blue over by the Person County line. We all know that open water in the winter is the key to a good day list, and I had hoped that a little lake action was just what I needed to pull in some serious numbers. You know, like 35. It was labeled Hyco Lake, and I saw no reason why it wouldn’t be the centerpiece of this impressively average day in the field. The back parts of the lake, however, were surprisingly bereft of life. A single Pied-billed Grebe at the first, a couple crows at the second. No gulls, no herons, no ducks of any kind. There was no apparent reason for this until I got closer to the main part of the lake and saw, towering over me, the largest power plant I had ever seen.
Not my photo, but this is what the Roxboro Plant looks like
It was truly massive, with twoenormous (and I later learned, 800 foot tall) smokestacks belching the effluent of West Virginia’s finest into the cold, blue winter sky. It turned out, once I’d returned home and done a little research, that this plant, officially called the Progress Energy Roxboro Steam Electric Plant, is the 10th largest coal-fired power plant in the United States, and one of the dirtiest, with a laundry list of broken regulations and a Wilt Chamberlain sized carbon footprint. In fact, the entire lake was created specifically to be a cooling reservoir for this power plant. Whether or not that had anything to do with the absence of birdlife, I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if didn’t.
I ended with a total of 27 species for Caswell County, and a whopping 16 for Person, and a total of 8 eBird checklists between them. As I said before, it was amazingly average. However, one of the nice little side effects of birding an under covered county is that, even among those 16 species, I had 5 “county firsts”, including such hard to find species as House Finch, Ring-billed Gull, and Red-tailed Hawk. Truly, I’ve contributed crucial data to the scientific community.
Thank you, eBird.
The Single-issue Voter: A birder’s guide to Newt Gingrich (R)
It’s that time again. As civic-minded individuals do, I’m oft interested in how the platforms of those running for president affect my life, that’s as a birder naturally. With so many candidates and elections still more than a year off I decided to do the work so you, dear reader(s), don’t have to. So here’s what I hope will be a regular look as those who would be birder-in-chief. Starting with the long-shots and working my way up so that you all will be prepared when the time comes to cast your ballot. This is the fifth of The Drinking Bird’s however many parts it takes series.
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I’ve been trying to do these Single-issue Voter things in some semblance of an order from least likely candidate to most, but the whims of the GOP electorate have made this increasingly difficult. Take, for instance, the fact that I wrote a primer on Rick Santorum back in November when he was running at about 5% nationally. Now? He’s the flavor of the month for those poor souls who have not yet resigned themselves to the fact that professional jar of marshmallow creme and 2008 also-ran Mitt Romney will be, without a shred of doubt from this bystander, the republican nominee for president this year. Republicans are, if nothing else, slaves to a party hierarchy and Romney, by virtue of his 2008 loss (just like 2000 loser McCain before him) will win because it’s his turn.
That doesn’t mean we ignore the others. At least we try not to. I mean, I didn’t even get to jump on that shooting star that was the Herman Cain campaign (and good thing too, because the man had not discernible platform for anything, let along environmental issues). No sir/ma’am, we’ll press ourselves to the front of the crowd and damn well applaud as the clown parade comes down the street. They may jostle, but we all know the fat man in the sleigh at the end is going to be Romney
Speaking of girthy gentlemen, Newt Gingrich is running for president, having already ridden the crest of not-Romney sentiment and experiencing his steady and inevitable decline into total irrelevance. This look at Gingrich’s credentials likely comes a bit too late, but I’m happy to provide whatever bump The Drinking Bird can provide, because honestly, Gingrich, by virtue of his very very long political career has taken a variety of stances on issues that are of interest to bird people. Some of which are rather reasonable. Take, for instance, his past co-sponsorship of the Endangered Species Act.
Yes, that Endangered Species Act.
He also co-sponsored the Clean Air Act and the Alaska Land Act, which proposed setting aside nearly 80 million acres as a wilderness area. His critiques of the aforementioned Endangered Species Act, having to do with adequate compensation for private property appropriated under the act, are entirely reasonable and concerns I actually share (compensate the hell out of ‘em, I say. How else will they consider protecting that land?). Note, though, that these are positions that Gingrich took more than 30 years ago. His transition from principled conservative to bomb-throwing reactionary says as much about the direction of the Republican Party as it does about Gingrich. Politicians are inherently concerned first and foremost about their own political future. This isn’t necessarily a vice in that it can indicate a politician with his constituents’ interests in the forefront of his/her mind, but with the massive influx of money involved in modern political campaigns, it means now that politicians are courting an ever smaller group of more and more influential (read: rich) individuals. Individuals with interests in extraction industries, individuals with environmental regulations to dodge, and individuals that are not, generally, you and me.
What you get now is the sort of things you see on Gingrich’s own campaign website, presumably the policies Gingrich holds now with regard to environmental and energy policy (there’s that pet peeve again…), which can be summarized as “let extraction industries do what they want and limit peoples’ opportunities for recompense if they’ve been wronged”. I mean, that really is it. He jumps, with both feet, on the train to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, this from the same man who, as a congressman, fought for the inclusion of 15 additional toxins to the list of those regulated by the EPA as per the Safe Drinking Water Act. The man wrote a book called A Contract with the Earth, for pete’s sake. It’s full of business-fluffing BS and so-called “free-market” conservation (whatever the hell that is), of course, but no less a scientific luminary than E.O. Wilson wrote the forward. Really, it well boggles the mind.
So I’m hesitant to go too deep into his record because it’s so completely incoherent. Even by the impressively low standards set by this current field of GOP candidates, it’s a complete muddle, mostly because every single position he’s taken that could conceivably be seen as a net positive for birds and wildlife has been walked back in dramatic, one might even say violent, fashion. He’s playing to a different crowd here, one smaller, wealthier, and uninterested in environmental issues, be they energy or land-use related.
So Newt isn’t either, but he’d sure like it if you bought his book though. So long as you don’t show it to any Republican primary voters, of course.
