Good Birder, Good Friend

You hear it all the time from the freshly initiated: Birders are such nice people! Cynically, I think myself that birders are probably as nice and as not nice as any other group of people; it’s just that we’re all on our best and most easygoing behavior when we’re out doing something we like to do. Shift the locus of social contact to something other than birds and birding, and we all turn out to be more complex, more subtle, and some of us even perhaps a bit less “nice” than we are when we’re sharing a lifer or a harmless bit of birding gossip.

In other words, it can be a risk, that step from enjoying someone’s company in the field to actually getting to know her or him: it doesn’t always work out. The same person whose good nature never once flagged on the 44-hour drive for the Ivory Gull, in another, normal, non-birding situation can have feet of clay or something even less appetizing. You just never know.

Dave was one of the good ones. We met him and Kitty on a Cape May roadside on a rainy day; the bird was a Mississippi Kite, and the pleasure of the sighting was doubled by the nice couple we shared it with. It was a while before we ran into each other again, though, and a while after that that we figured out that we all lived just a couple of miles apart. Chance meetings in the field quickly gave way to early morning rendezvous for pelagic trips, big days, and the occasional wild goose chase, all of them enlivened by Dave’s non-stop enthusiasm. The earlier the start, the longer the chase, the better, and the hilarity with which our crazier days ended was matched only by the excitement with which they began.

The easy affection one feels for a birding buddy changed to friendship when Dave hatched a new plan: let’s do the World Series! The Mad Harriers were born, and that spring Dave spent untold hours scouting north Jersey, a part of the state neither of us knew that well and one we knew would be crucial to our effort. I joined him whenever I could, and we spent long, cold mornings refining our route, fine-tuning our ears, and filling the empty miles and minutes with conversation. We were kindred spirits in many ways, and our differences just great enough to be intriguing; Dave’s was a truly generous spirit, his mind acute and clear, and those scouting hours, with all four of us or just Dave and me, will always be precious hours to me.

We birded farther afield, too. “Couple vacations” can be touchy, but the weeks Dave and Kitty and Alison and I spent in Arizona when we were all still living in New Jersey were delightful, relaxing and pressure-free, filled with good birds and good spirits. We had a day together here last fall, and Alison got to go out with them when she was in Princeton last month. The connection was one we knew would last.

Kitty called early Friday morning to tell us that Dave had passed away. Others will write of his considerable accomplishments as a scientist, his successes in business, even his skills as a birder. But for us, Dave was a friend who filled his short life with more than most people can imagine, and whose parting now leaves a sad, deep void in ours.