The Reluctant Twitcher
THE RELUCTANT TWITCHER
THE RELUCTANT TWITCHER
Richard Pope
Foreword by Graeme Gibson
NATURAL HERITAGE BOOKS
A MEMBER OF THE DUNDURN GROUP
TORONTO
Copyright © Richard Pope, 2009
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Pope, Richard
The reluctant twitcher : a quite truthful account of my big birding year / by Richard Pope.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-55488-458-2
1. Pope, Richard. 2. Birds--Ontario. 3. Bird watching--Ontario--Humor. 4. Bird watchers--Canada--Biography. I. Title.
QL677.5.P66 2009 598.072’34713 C2009-902460-8
1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my
father and great friend, Ernie Pope, and to the
memory of Charlie Molony and Ott Devitt
Contents
ILLUSTRATIONS AND PHOTOGRAPHS
FOREWORD BY GRAEME GIBSON
MAP 1 SOUTHERN ONTARIO
MAP 2 NORTHERN ONTARIO
PREFACE
1 I Am Committed
2 The Pecking Order
3 The Rules
4 Pish and Chips
5 Algonquin Grand Slam
6 To the Barricades
7 Pelee Madness
8 The Numbers Build
9 Rainy River
10 Making It Happen
11 Revelations
12 The Big Sit
13 Closing the Gap
14 Floating Jaegers
15 No Peace for the Wicked
16 So Close, and Yet So Far
17 299 and 300 — Sort Of
18 299 and 300 — In Sooth
19 Gravy Birds
20 The Big Dipper
21 Go Figure
APPENDIX 1: LISTS OF BIRDS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
List of Illustrations and
Photographs
Front Cover: Northern Wheatear.
Painting by David Beadle.
All maps and illustrations by Neil Broadfoot.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Pileated Woodpecker (male).
Sam Barone
Blue Jay.
Jean Iron
Grasshopper Sparrow.
Sam Barone
Blackpoll Warbler (male).
Barry S. Cherriere
Mourning Warbler (male).
Sam Barone
Hermit Thrush.
Carol M. Horner
Black-backed Woodpecker (male).
Andrew Don
American Three-toed Woodpecker (male).
Mark Peck
Spruce Grouse (male).
Andrew Don
Barrow’s Goldeneye (male).
Jean Iron
Snowy Owl.
Jean Iron
American Woodcock.
Sam Barone
Yellow-throated Warbler.
Andrew Don
Worm-eating Warbler.
Barry S. Cherriere
Henslow’s Sparrow.
Stephen T. Pike
Yellow-headed Blackbird (male).
Jean Iron
Green Heron (juvenile).
Andrew Don
Upland Sandpiper.
Andrew Don
Golden-winged Warbler (male).
Sam Barone
Least Bittern.
Mike Burrell
Le Conte’s Sparrow.
Jean Iron
Buff-breasted Sandpiper.
Mark Peck
Eastern Screech-Owl.
Andrew Don
Ross’s Goose.
Jean Iron
Sabine’s Gull (juvenile).
Barry S. Cherriere
Sabine’s Gull (adult).
Mark Peck
Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow.
Barry S. Cherriere
Sora.
Sam Barone
Pomarine Jaeger (juvenile).
Carol M. Horner
White-faced Ibis.
Barry S. Cherriere
Bohemian Waxwings.
Andrew Don
Pine Grosbeak (female).
Sam Barone
Yellow-breasted Chat.
Sam Barone
Hoary Redpoll.
Sam Barone
Purple Sandpipers (juveniles).
Doug McRae
Northern Hawk Owl.
Mark Peck
Dickcissel.
Jean Iron
Black-throated Green Warbler (male).
Sam Barone
Foreword
WITH EACH NEW REVELATION about our human assault on Nature, more people become birdwatchers. Richard Pope’s observation that there are now over fifty million bird enthusiasts in Canada and the United States alone is remarkable. However, it doesn’t seem out of line when you consider that BirdLife International’s Global Partnership has 2.5 million members and ten million active supporters.
It didn’t used to be like that. When I started out, more than forty years ago, birdwatchers were pictured as an eccentric minority wearing odd hats, sensible raingear, and sturdy shoes: a nutty kind of tribe united by an inexplicable enthusiasm for birds. It was this fusty image that prompted some Audubon enthusiasts in the 1950s to describe themselves as “birders,” so as not to be mistaken for wimpy oddballs. Ironically, early birdwatchers had chosen their name specifically to distinguish themselves from traditional “birders,” who were commercial bird-catchers, or fowlers; in some places a wild cat was also called a “birder.”
It was Rachael Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring that first focused public attention on birds. Its enormous success and influence is credited with inspiring one of the first public outcries over pesticides, pollution, and environmental destruction. Carson’s readers began to recognize that birds in general played the same role on earth as the proverbial canaries did in coal mines. Which is to say, in dying they warned the miners.
Humans were fascinated by birds long before we’d begun to threaten their continued existence. We came to consciousness as a species surrounded by them, when they would have been present in unimaginable numbers. As late as 1866, a legendary flight of Passenger Pigeons was recorded in Southern Ontario. More than a mile wide, with an estimated two birds to the square yard, it took fourteen hours to pass overhead. There were an estimated three billion birds in that assemblage. Nor was it just Passenger Pigeons whose flights darkened the sky: Eskimo Curlews and Golden Plover also gathered in enormous flocks. John James Audubon reports that forty-eight thousand of the latter were gunned down one day near New Orleans.
It isn’t difficult to imagine the sense of wonder that our distant forebears felt in the presence of birds. Apparently free from the dictates of gravity, birds soared easily on the wind. Hunter-gatherers moving laboriously over the land must have envied the freedom with which birds flew on ahead, much in the same way as we do now when watching them from a traffic jam. In Grass, Sky, Song, Trevor Herriot describes how the indigenous Siouan people, the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota, believed that the holy is “the air flowing within and around all living things. As masters of the realm that is the source of spirit and the medium of all spiritual transactions, all birds are spiritual teachers and messengers …” Or as we find it in Ecclesiastes: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.”
Although birds hover near the centre of most mythologies and religions, there are very few, if any, of them in Hell. From the Christian dove to Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec plumed serpent), and from Raven Man to Plato’s description of the soul growing wings and feathers, birds are generally associated with creativity and the human soul, with the spiritual communications between the gods and man.
At the same time, there’s so
mething very personal in our relationship with birds. As I’ve noted elsewhere, a great many birdwatchers — from those who simply maintain feeders in their gardens to those who wander the world in search of new, often more exotic species — have stumbled onto a seductive truth: paying attention to birds is being mindful of Life itself. We birders seldom think of our pursuit this clearly, but sometimes, unexpectedly, we are overtaken by a sense of wonder and gratitude. Surely it is the encounter with a force much larger than ourselves that moves us.
Their omnipresence, along with the richness and variety of both species and numbers, helps to explain why we relate to birds in such remarkably varied ways. Pigeon fanciers race them, while others develop exotic breeds of roosters out of what was once a Jungle Fowl. There are fighting cocks, caged singing birds, and parrots who speak languages other than their own. I once gave my partner a pair of Peacocks for her birthday, which in retrospect seems a peculiar thing to have done. Thirty-five million pheasants are bred each year in Britain for the gun — far more than could ever be eaten, thus confirming there are still many among us who find it amusing to kill. In contrast, a ravaged old woman regularly feeds stale bread to gangs of pigeons, Ring-billed Gulls, and sparrows at the edge of a parking lot around the corner from my house. Smiling beatifically with pigeons on her shoulders and gulls between her boots, she might be St. Francis returned as a bag lady.
Finally, of course, there are birdwatchers and/or birders, many of whom are fiercely competitive, both with themselves and others. I once travelled with a fellow whose preoccupation with shorebirds and waders made him utterly scornful of the “dickey-birds” living in the forest. Nevertheless, I suspect most bird enthusiasts simply maintain well-stocked feeders and bird baths, conducive to a more relaxed form of watching, though an increasing number go a step farther and contribute information about population trends by acting as volunteers at field stations, or by recording their sightings for projects such as Feeder Watch or the annual Canadian Lakes Loon Survey. True amateurs have made a hugely important contribution to our knowledge of birds and their behaviour.
I first met Richard Pope because of our shared enthusiasm for Pelee Island and its birds. Just off the tip of the more celebrated point of the same name, Pelee Island is a great place to welcome passage migrants. The local community hosts a SpringSong Festival in May, the focus of which is a bird race in which teams strive to see as many species as possible in a twenty-four hour period. A unique feature of this event is that competitors cannot use any form of motorized vehicle in their search. The winners and runners-up are celebrated at a banquet on the Saturday night.
Over the years, Richard and I have often found ourselves wandering about together in search of a reported Yellow-breasted Chat, an Acadian Flycatcher, or perhaps the Prothonotary Warbler. I must say that Richard’s patience and persistence is humbling; he often remains in the gathering dusk well after I’ve abandoned the search. Thus, I wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d committed himself to seeing three hundred species in Ontario, during what birders call a Big Year.
We humans seem to need challenges. In the realm of birds and birdwatchers, these challenges are generally focused on “listing,” or keeping a record of all the birds seen in a day, a year, a life and/or in a backyard or a bird race on an island. The considerable challenge that Richard set himself was nothing more than a marginally insane extension of Pelee’s Green Bird Race, except that he was mostly racing against himself. Or perhaps against the void that would have probably loomed, were he not to have achieved his goal of three hundred species.
All races are against time. The birds themselves are racing time during their migration. Too soon or too late and they’ll die or be unable to breed. So, in his counting and his self-imposed time-limit, Richard Pope is in some ways imitating Nature itself. His engaging account of his Big Year could well be called One Man’s Migration.
Finally, I ask myself: How much easier would it have been to achieve Richard’s goal forty years ago? And how much harder will it be to count three hundred species during a year in Ontario thirty years from now. Will it even be possible?
GRAEME GIBSON
Twitch Not Lest Ye Be Twitched.
— THE MINOR PROPHETS
It’s a tick.
— HUGH CURRIE
Preface
To twitch, or not to twitch — that is the question.
— HENRY IX, ACT 77
“POPE IS STRICTLY FOR THE BIRDS,” say some thoughtless wags, without stopping to consider why this might be so. My fateful connection with birds predates my birth. On a star-crossed morning in May of 1941, my father, Ernie, and two friends, Charlie Mol-ony and Ott Devitt, went to King City to investigate a Pileated Woodpecker’s nest in a farmer’s woodlot — a relatively harmless thing to do. This was before drugs and switch knives became the fashionable way for young men to spend a spring morning.
They took my mother with them, which was not unusual, except that she was some five months pregnant and her running skills were compromised by this fact. On the way back across the field the group was distracted by the crazed bellowing and clod-throwing antics of an enraged Jersey bull, which for some reason had taken umbrage at the invasion of his turf and was going ballistic. Mother, not a bull-lover at the best of times, was scared witless. There was but one tree in the field, a superannuated white pine, and the men somehow got my mother into the tree even though she was not what you would call a natural climber. Fear may have helped her. The bull charged and the men, too, got up the tree with an uncomfortably small grace period. An hour later the bull lost interest and wandered off looking for someone else to terrify. That’s what they do; it’s their thing.
It was some time before the men, armed with stones and a disconcertingly minuscule amount of bravado, were able to coax my mother down from the tree to make a run for the fence. And run my mother did, certain the bull was in hot pursuit the whole way. Even later in life she never recalled the episode dispassionately.
Leaving aside my unnatural attraction to Pileated Woodpeckers — my first “heard only” bird — and my incapacitating fear of all bulls, especially, but not exclusively Jerseys, let us rather note that in this episode we see the origin of the connection between me and birds. I never made a choice to become a birder. The gods willed it. They even make me fly frequently in my dreams. It can be exhausting.
Photo by Sam Barone.
Pileated Woodpecker (male). Algonquin Provincial Park. The red moustachial stripe indicates this bird is a male.
Birding, as is widely known, is the fastest growing pastime in the Western world with well over fifty million participants in Canada and the United States alone. It has grown in quantum leaps since 2001. It is reported that 53,350,000 Americans feed wild birds (2006 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation; report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). Throw in the Canadians and we’re over fifty-five million! People become birdwatchers (slightly less serious) or birders (slightly more serious and sometimes approaching the manic; occasionally called “bird nerds” behind their backs, a term I shall henceforth eschew in this book) because birds are beautiful, numerous, and varied, and often available in one’s own backyard. In colder climes, many people gaze mindlessly out their back windows all day long for up to six months of the year. Most mornings in May one can find people, like my friends George Fairfield and John Carley, crouched in the half darkness on their back porches staring intently off into the distance, patrolling for loons. They are part of Loon Watch. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but tell me you don’t know someone like that. What is not known is what occasionally pushes a relatively normal birder over the brink and turns him or her into a twitcher.
What exactly is a twitcher, you might ask. The big Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “an instrument for clinching hog-rings.” This is not a meaning I favour. The porcine allusion seems quite superfluous. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a birdwatcher who tries to get sightings of rare birds,” but also “a person or thing that twitches.” Though I use the term in this book in the first sense, you might be surprised how often the two meanings overlap. Twitchers range from the merely utterly possessed and driven to the certifiably insane, ready to kill without hesitation to see a real rarity. British twitchers have been known to abandon spouses at the altar to rush off to the Scilly Isles for some off-course migrant. The Scillies, not surprisingly, are known for their twitchers.