Birding in the Buff

We’ve all experienced it: sitting in a meeting, or out on the sidewalk, or over a meal, we glimpse something interesting and reach for our binoculars. They’re not there. And as birders we blush, as surely as if we’d been caught with our pants down.

I love my Zeiss FL’s like life itself, and most birders have a similarly passionate relationship with their optics. But mitteleuropäisch glass and the beautiful views it gives us can, paradoxically, get in the way of our truly learning the birds; lost in the splendor of feathers, we can be tempted to ignore the bird-as-organism, and miss out on opportunities to learn more about our object’s habit and habits.

And so this morning a dozen Tucson Audubon Society members and friends joined me in an experiment. No binoculars, no scopes, no field guides: just a couple of hours simply watching the birds at Tucson’s Fort Lowell Park, concentrating not on details but on impressions, not on knowledge but on knowing.

It was tough at first, all of us instinctively clutching our chests when a bird flew past just out of naked-eye range, but it was a delight to watch–and to feel for myself–the anxiety slip away as we got used to looking at birds in a new way. The frantic search for Petersonian field marks was replaced with a relaxed but careful examination of structure, shape, and behavior, and when it was all done, we’d learned a lot about the 21 species we detected and identified on a bright but windy morning.

As I look back through my notes from Aprils past, we really couldn’t have expected more even with optical aids. Such wintering birds as American Wigeon, Ring-necked Duck, and Brewer’s Blackbird still lingered on and around the pond, while many of the common desert breeders were already busy with courtship and nesting. Male Anna’s Hummingbirds sang away, and a fledgling, hummer most likely of that species peeped loud at its nearby mother. House Sparrow nestlings were cheeping from their nests, too, and at least one of the European Starling nests in the old cottonwoods already harbored young, to judge from the neatnik adult that emerged from a deep cavity carrying a fecal sac. White-winged and Mourning Doves were singing, displaying, and flying to and from nests on light poles and in trees. A pair of Cooper’s Hawks nesting in a tall pine just north of the park gave great unaided views, the female cackling menacingly at us as the male perched silent nearby.

Those same Cooper’s Hawks provided, indirectly, the most amusing moment of a thoroughly enjoyable morning. I worried when I arrived before the start of the trip that we wouldn’t recognize each other without the double-barreled badges of the brotherhood. But that psychic birder-to-birder link worked just fine, and we had no trouble assembling. And it turned out that we not only recognized each other, but that there was something unmistakably birderly about our little troop to non-participants as well. While we watched Verdins and Cactus Wrens in a little patch of remnant desert, a car slowed, then stopped, and the driver rolled her window down to tell us that we were welcome to come in and see the Cooper’s Hawks nesting in her pine trees.

How’d she recognize us without our field marks hung ’round our necks? By structure, by habitat, by behavior, by flock habit and voice: just the same way that we knew our birds!