THE OUTDOORS ISSUE
A POCKET GUIDE TO
No-Kill Birding
B
irding — also known as “birdwatching” and,
across the Pond, “twitching” — began as a le-
thal contact sport. When John James Audubon
traveled the countryside in the early 1800s to
paint the 435 watercolors that would later turn
up in The Birds of America, he didn’t sit his subjects down
in a studio and ask them to pose.
He shot them.
Audubon shot birds by the dozen; he blasted them by
the score. According to one account he was unhappy if he
shot fewer than a hundred in a day. John Syme’s 1826 oil
portrait of Audubon shows the naturalist not with a bird or
a paint box but with a long gun, cradled in his arms and
ready to take out an egret or a crane.
This is, of course, why the birds in Audubon’s paintings
and prints all look kind of dead. They were.
It wasn’t until the introduction of inexpensive optics
and the development of good identification guides in the
early 20th century that bird lovers were able to identify
most wild birds without killing them first.
The big revolution came in 1934, when Roger Tory Pe-
terson (why, we wonder, do all famous early birders have
three names?) brought out his pocketable Guide to the Birds,
widely regarded as the first true field guide. At last you didn’t
have to lug an encyclopedia around to be able to sort out all
the more or less identical warblers twittering in that tree.
With Peterson, no-kill birding — or “birding,” as we know
it today — became possible. (“No-kill” may also apply to the
large number of arguments his book settled without gunfire.)
I am not a real birder. My life list to date consists of four
species of which I am certain — one of them is, I believe,
a robin — and 2,197 misidentifications.
But I do know a few people who are better at birding
than I am. So here, as well as I understand them, are the
rules of modern birding:
No matter what time you got to bed the night before,
you must get up at an ungodly hour of the morning and im-
mediately go outside and drive a long distance in a car. In
the summer, 4 am starts are typical. In the winter you’re re-
quired to wait until the roads are fully iced over. That’s all so
you can hear something called the “dawn chorus,” which I
would describe, but I have never been awake enough while
hearing it to remember later what it sounded like.
You may think that birding occurs in pristine natural
settings — just look at the gorgeous nature photos on bird-
ish websites for, say, Swarovski Optik and the National
Audubon Society. In fact, most actual birding takes place
in derelict, dystopian, semi-urban places full of toxic waste.
Sewage ponds are a favorite destination for waterfowl, and
you haven’t lived until you’ve birded sewage ponds in ru-
ral Mexico. McDonald’s parking lots are known worldwide
for gulls, who favor french fries over sardines. I know of
one birder who has found two separate dead (human) bodies
while chasing warblers. National parks are for tourists and
the faint of heart, not for birding.
Birding is a listing activity, conceptually related to
filling out a scorecard at an endless baseball game. As such
it attracts many people who might politely be described as
nerdy. A friend tells me you’re looked down on in parts of
Texas if you show up for a bird tour without wearing the
right brands of khaki pants, cargo vest and binoculars har-
ness. In Oregon, fortunately, you need only enough Gore-
Tex to go around.
Urban birding can be dangerous. You may call it
“twitching”; the homeowner with two teenaged daughters
History tells us that
the first birders did it
with gunfire
BY BOB KEEFER
JOHN JAMES AUDUBON IN 1826.
PORTRAIT BY JOHAN SYME
COURTESY WHITE HOUSE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
may use the ugly words “peeping Tom.” Be prepared with
bail money. Birds for some reason are especially drawn to
obscure defense installations around the world. Be sure to
memorize phrases in the local dialect for “I am not a CIA
agent” and “Please call the American consulate” before
birding near military bases in Latin America, the Ukraine
or Arizona.
Birders are required by law to ignore chickens, to call
pigeons “rock doves” and to hate starlings. I have no idea
why. Also, I’m told, it’s “Canada” geese, not “Canadian”
geese, unless, as birders say, they’re carrying Canadian
passports. (See my record of misidentifications, above.)
Finally, you may not realize we live in a birding para-
dise here in Oregon. Locally, Fern Ridge Wildlife Area out
on West 11th Avenue provides some of the best birding
imaginable. It’s where to send nerdy visitors with binocu-
lars to get them out of the house.
Thirty miles south of Burns, in Eastern Oregon, Malheur
National Wildlife Refuge, whose headquarters just re-opened
this spring after an alt-right hiatus, is one of the best birding
spots in the U.S. The big blowout of the year there is coming
up. On Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of people dressed
in khaki vests and ergonomic binocular harnesses will drive
around in dusty Subarus and argue over insignificant differ-
ences between thousands of migrating songbirds.
Me, I usually hide out in the refuge’s tiny George Ben-
son Memorial Museum, where the beautiful bird speci-
mens are all clearly identified with tags, having been col-
lected in those good old days when men were men and real
birders used guns. ■
eugeneweekly.com • May 18, 2017
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