Learning the Birds

A Midlife Adventure

Susan Fox Rogers

• Publisher: Three Hills
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501762260
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

"The thrill of quiet adventure. The constant hope of discovery. The reminder that the world is filled with wonder. When I bird, life is bigger, more vibrant." That is why Susan Fox Rogers is a birder. Learning the Birds is the story of how encounters with birds recharged her adventurous spirit.

When the birds first called, Rogers was in a slack season of her life. The woods and rivers that enthralled her younger self had lost some of their luster. It was the song of a thrush that reawakened Rogers, sparking a long-held desire to know the birds that accompanied her as she rock climbed and paddled, to know the world around her with greater depth. Energized by her curiosity, she followed the birds as they drew her deeper into her authentic self, and ultimately into love. In Learning the Birds, we join Rogers as she becomes a birder and joins the community of passionate and quirky bird people. We meet her birding companions close to home in New York State's Hudson Valley as well as in the desert of Arizona and awash in the midnight sunlight of Alaska. Along on the journey are birders and estimable ornithologists of past generations—people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Florence Merriam Bailey—whose writings inspire Rogers's adventures and discoveries. A ready, knowledgeable, and humble friend and explorer, Rogers is eager to share what she sees and learns. Learning the Birds will remind you of our passionate need for wonder and our connection to the wild creatures with whom we share the land.

#1 BIRDER

Dutchess County, New York

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in April, I called my sister Becky just as she was finishing dinner in Paris. Her report on life in the last week rang of success. She had organized a conference on the history of education; her daughter Alice earned the highest grade in her law class. I had my own good news.

“I’m the number one birder in Dutchess County.”

Silence shut down the wires between the Hudson Valley and Paris.

“Who decides this?” she asked cautiously.

I laughed, an admission that this ranking had nothing official about it. My claim originated from eBird, a site launched in 2002 by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology along with the National Audubon Society.

eBird puts to work all of the birders in the field. We go out, see the birds, then log in what we have seen and where. With thousands of ears and eyes in the field, researchers have access to an enormous bank of information about bird movement, distribution, and abundance. There are a lot of things that scientists do with eBird data. One of my favorites is the creation of heat maps, or occurrence maps, which show the movement of a particular species as it migrates. These maps make the mass of birds, marked as orange dots, look like a fiery ball in various stages of brightness. Studying them, you can almost hear the whoosh of birds as they move overhead.

These heat maps are not just great to anticipate the arrival of a particular favorite, like the Black-throated Green Warbler or a Brown Thrasher working its musical medley. The maps are used in conservation projects like Bird Returns, run out of the Nature Conservancy. With these maps, researchers can pinpoint when shorebirds are going to need habitat on migration from South America to the Arctic. At just the right moment, they pay farmers in California to flood their rice fields, creating “pop up habitats.” In its first year, 2014, forty-five farmers collaborated, producing 15,000 acres of habitat for birds. This was a huge success to have such participation in the project, given that California was in the midst of a drought crisis.

But many birders in the field are not thinking about producing data for research or conservation. It’s about the list. Every time you enter the birds you have seen, eBird keeps track of your sightings and numbers for the year, or month, or for an area. I already knew that I wasn’t capable of keeping a life list—to this day, I can’t say how many birds I have seen—and that I found the urge to list off-putting. But, if eBird didn’t prime my competitive juices, it did induce a special bird envy. When I got my “needs list” for Dutchess County and saw that Deb Tracy, driving around with her wee dog, had found yet another Screech Owl sunning in a hidey-hole, I wanted to see it as well. Better yet: I wanted to be the one to have found it.

The desire for a big list or envy over another’s sightings—eBird has tapped into these very human competitive emotions. With a click you can see the top birders in the county, state, or country. You can track who is doing what and where. So everyone birds more actively, which means more data for those using this information. It’s perfectly ingenious, one of the few fields of research where you have people working for you tirelessly, daily, dutifully, and for free.

When I first heard about eBird, my local bird people still communicated through a Yahoo Listserv or by phone. People on walks would ask: “Do you eBird?” as if asking about something slightly illicit. Everyone shook their heads and said no, no they wouldn’t eBird (just say no). Then, so fast, everyone was eBirding, and it was obvious that everyone was birding more often, and in a more focused way. Peter stopped birding outside of Ulster County. His county eBird list became his obsession. If I wanted to bird with Peter, I had to leave Dutchess County, cross the Hudson River, and enter Ulster, his county.

My whole life I have tried to avoid competition. In high school, I thought I should follow in Becky’s footsteps as a runner—she competed nationally in high school and later she captained the Harvard track and cross-country teams. When I showed up at track practice the coach beamed, “Oh, you are Becky Rogers’s little sister.” I should have been good. But after a few weeks, during which I frequently doubled over sick, I quit. I didn’t have the lungs, the discipline, or the nerve to compete. I was grateful when I found rock climbing where overt competition did not yet exist.

In the small world of rock climbing in the 1970s people were, of course, competitive. But there were yet no formal competitions. I reveled in the after-climbing talk, where we discussed over beers who had done which route and how. These tales were often filled with high jinks and not-so-subtle bragging. Out of these tales local heroes emerged while cheaters and liars were shamed. This informal competition was soon to change.

When I was in high school, a rumor spread that the Russians were speed climbing. Not to be outdone by the Russians—this was the 1970s, so we were living deep in the shadow of the Cold War—my climbing partner Neil and I went to our tiny local cliffs, set up a rope, and started the stopwatch. It was an odd day, filled with falls and laughter. I knew in an actual competition I would not do well. It probably was no coincidence that once climbers started training and competing on indoor climbing walls my passion for climbing began to fade.

Now here was birding, an activity—not even a sport—for ladies in floppy hats, and yet it was so full of competition. The introduction of eBird into the birding world was like the advent of official rock-climbing competitions: birders jumped on it with a zest that was seductive.

For me to compete, however, was absurd. When I started birding, my goals were modest as I knew I had started too late in life to be anything but a decent birder. What I could do was compensate by being loyal to the birds: going out daily, paying attention to the ordinary while seeking the rare. I imagined this was like practicing the piano every day. I had my scales down, but I would never be able to play a Bach two-part invention expressively. eBirding encouraged this approach, as I logged in my daily efforts, kept track of the flow of birds through my life. It was the bird version of the journal I have kept since I was a child. And eBird tracked the numbers for me.

So there I was in April 2013, number one.

The difficulty with measuring one’s ability through eBird is that some of the best birders don’t eBird. It also happens that birders make mistakes, log in birds they thought they saw but misidentified (which I have done more often than I want to think about). So, though a good birder is often at the top of the eBird list, it’s also possible to be number one and not be anywhere near one of the better birders in an area. That was the current situation I was bragging about.

“The pressure is on,” I said, sighing into the phone. “Everyone is rooting for me.” By everyone, I meant Mark, now the president of the Burroughs club where I had started my bird journey. And Peter. We were working our way toward a warm but cautious friendship, one where he continued to mentor my birding, if most often from a distance.

“Nice job getting a woodcock so early,” Mark emailed me. “Pine Warblers should be back on Cruger Island Road,” he coached. And “There’s a Wigeon on a pond off of Route 9.” He knew I needed a Wigeon. Peter urged me to think big. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t have a King Rail in the North Tivoli Bay.” It was Peter who put it into my imagination that I could be number one when he wrote, “Look out Adrienne [then ranked #1] Susie Rogers is gunning for you.” In a flash, I thought, why not? It took about two weeks of focusing on what birds I could add to my list. When I hit number one Peter sent an email that read: “#1#1#1#1#1#1!!!—from, #3.”

In this push to number one I did not lose my mind and soul to games and ego. What I realized was that pushing for a bigger list had interesting benefits as I focused on birds in a new way. I thought about what birds should be in my area, and when, and how I might find them. So when I noted a Prairie Warbler missing from my list, I walked the fields near the North Bay that I did not usually frequent to hear the ascending song, which Roger Tory Peterson described as similar to “a mouse with a toothache.” When I realized I didn’t have a Golden Eagle, I trekked out to the Thompson Pond area (without luck). The absence of a Peregrine Falcon made me fret. I then proceeded to spend a substantial, some might say silly, amount of time crouched near the train tracks peering hopefully up at the Kingston Rhinecliff Bridge where the birds often nest. eBird made me think more accurately about bird movement, habitat, and behavior. It also made me think about my own behavior.

I imagined that Becky was hoping that my birding habits would mellow once Peter and I separated. Instead, my birding had taken this odd, semicompetitive turn.

“I’m exhausted,” I joked. “Being number one is a heavy responsibility. When I’m away next weekend I’m sure to fall behind. The stress of that is enormous.”

“The problem is that you’re half serious,” she replied.

In all of this, I had Christina at my side. Shin splints had sidelined her from training with Bard’s track team, so she had more time to bird. On our outings Christina wore black half-tights (to help with her lower leg injuries) and black neoprene toe shoes. At first I worried that this smart, kind, nerdy young woman was making herself even nerdier with the birds. But soon she had binoculars around her neck and a long-lens camera dangling from her shoulder. She cut off her hair for a tomboy look, sewed images of vultures onto her jacket, and moved with a vulture’s swagger. I sensed the tattoos were soon to follow. Before my eyes, she was transforming into what I would call bird cool.

Because we were focused on our success in Dutchess County, together we got to know every pond and wooded warbler hangout across 825 square miles. “Why didn’t I know about this place before?” I asked Christina as we left Peach Hill, the warblers dripping from the apple trees. We spent a lot of time at Thompson Pond, a wide shallow body of water filled with ducks and geese, near Pine Plains, and Buttercup, an Audubon Sanctuary. One late afternoon we walked the rail-trail north of Amenia to find a Common Gallinule only to realize the rich bird possibilities of the swamp that borders the paved trail. All of these beautiful spots reinforced my feeling that I didn’t have to travel distances, like to Alaska, to see interesting birds. It just took driving down unexplored roads and walking unused paths in the land around me.

Dutchess County is a great place to become obsessed with listing, as bird records in the county date back to the 1870s. The first county-based Christmas Bird Count was in 1901, only the second year of the CBC nationwide; a bird census has been conducted consistently in May since 1919. There are also extensive migration, nesting, and other records kept since 1885. Much of this data was collected by a man named Maunsell Crosby.

Crosby, born on February 14, 1887, lived most of his life on the family property, Grasmere, a little south of Rhinebeck. Crosby came from a family known for birds. His uncle was Eugene Schieffelin, the man we can thank for introducing European Starlings into North America. In 1890, he released one hundred Starlings into New York’s Central Park as part of his (crazy) project to bring the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s work to the United States. His introduction of the Skylark and the Chaffinch on American soil was not a success; the Starling was too much of a success.

Though he was not an ornithologist, Crosby, who started birding as a child, kept meticulous records of his bird outings. Here is one example of his May census journal:

Up at 3:20 standard time. Temperature 40 degrees, sky overcast. A Song Sparrow at 3:31, Whippoorwill and Night Heron at 3:37, White throat and Chippy at 3:39, Ovenbird at 3:54. Robin at 3:59; Barred Owl at 4:00, Catbird at 4:01, Wood thrush at 4:06, Phoebe 4:10, Grasshopper Sparrow going strong at 4:11, House Wren 4:14, Vesper Sparrow 4:15, Field Sparrow 4:16, Dove 4:20, house Sparrow 4:24; Chuker 4:27; Crow 4:28, then Oriole and Dove and Flicker at 4:35 (2nd one not till 5:03). 30 species noted by 4:48; 40 by 5:06; 50 by 6:06; 60 by 6:48—then breakfast. It drizzled at 6:03, rained at 6:50 and the sun was slightly discernible at 7:50. I left Grasmere at 8:30 and went to Cruger’s Island arriving 9:25. Thence to Pine Plains, arriving at 11:30. I left there early in the afternoon, as the weather was vile, I had a very bad cold and was drenched and overbested.

Overbested. On some days even Crosby couldn’t keep at it. Most days, though, he was up at three or four in the morning, clocking hours in the field. His records are so detailed I wonder how he had time to see the birds.

The Birds of Dutchess County, New York, which was first published a few years after Crosby’s death in 1931 (from appendicitis), relied heavily on his records. The guide is a treasure of information about the birds that have passed through the county, as well as the stories of the people who searched for those birds. The biggest part of the guide is an annotated list of birds that gives a wealth of information about each species, including when and where it is most often found. The historical notes give a fuller narrative as to when a species has been seen in the county and by whom. A handy monthly graph indicates what months a bird might be around, and if the bird is transient or a permanent or summer resident.

One winter day I drove to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, forty-five minutes south of my home, to dig up Crosby’s bird journals. Crosby knew FDR before he became president. Once the presidential library opened in 1941, Crosby’s family donated his notebooks to the archives. The president’s papers are housed in a windowless, sterile room. A few researchers sat at the spare desks, studiously poring over precious documents. We are forever fascinated by this man, I thought, as I watched their focus and wondered what hidden gems they had found.

The archivist gave me the long list of instructions that included no pens or food, and then rolled out a cart with several boxes containing Crosby’s journals. I sat at my narrow desk, while across a divide, other researchers sat absorbed in their own reading, taking notes in pencil and snapping photos of key pages.

Crosby’s bird notebook for 1909 is bound in red cardboard, worn smooth. Inside a...