Take Me out to
the World Series...of Birding  A brutal test of brains, endurance, and the ability to make funny noises By Susan Milius
I'm negotiating by
phone with John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Laboratory of
Ornithology. A scrub jay and flycatcher specialist, and the discoverer
of several South American bird species, he's a key player on that World
Series powerhouse the Sapsuckers. In a week plus a few hours,
Fitzpatrick and four lab colleagues will match wits with 57 other teams
in the oldest and most famous birding contest, sponsored by the New
Jersey Audubon Society. In its 16th year,
the event has evolved a variety of subcategories, but the Sapsuckers are
going for the main event, the one that offers a silver cup big enough to
float a duck. To win, a team has to identify the most species within a
specific 24 hours in New Jersey. New Jersey? Absolutely,
Fitzpatrick says. The Atlantic Flyway, the path that millions of birds
take northward from their winter homes to summer breeding habitat,
sweeps up through the Garden State. I see that the spring migration
brings avian rush-hour traffic in the skies, so what better place to
watch it than New Jersey? As I explain how I
want to follow an all-scientist team in this event, I'm struck by the
undercurrent in Fitzpatrick's usual easy charm with the press. Today
he's still charming, but there's the sound of handling-a-situation, as
if I've said something really shocking. Indeed I have, but
I won't realize this for a week. What I've done, in my naïveté, is ask
if I can ride in the Sapsucker van. After all, in the
1992 World Series, a writer for the Wall Street Journal rode with the
Northern Beardless Tyrannulets. Marie Winn was able to give a first-hand
account of such key events as the finding of a mourning warbler, even
though she did have to take a bus home from the finish line when the
team wanted to keep on birding. The event may
drive birders delirious with pleasure, but it's murder for avian-sports
reporters. Each team picks its own starting point, anywhere in the
state. There is one finish line, thank goodness, but teams reach it by
any path they choose, zigzagging along routes they revise at the chip of
a sparrow.
The driving
abnormalities of birders in general—sudden swerves and slow-downs,
exotic lane changes and pullovers—multiply as tension builds. Even if
a reporter in a chase car could manage not to lose a team's van or die
backing down an exit ramp, there's the risk that the reporter's vehicle
screeching to a halt could scare away a bird. In which case, a reporter
could come to an untimely end after an attack with a spotting scope. In retrospect, I
recognize that Fitzpatrick reacted with amazing calm and generosity. We
do not discuss how the reporter-laden Tyrannulets came in 20th, whereas
the Sapsuckers ranked first among out-of-state teams last year and this
year are serious contenders to float their ducks in that big silver
trophy. Fitzpatrick
explains that much more than Sapsucker honor is at stake. Cornell lab
supporters have pledged about $550 per species that the team finds, and
he hopes to log more than 210. The time for one more person to clamber
in and out of the van, the extra chance noises that might drown out a
distant trill, the distractions of dealing with a stranger—he puts it
delicately, but in essence, an extra person might cost his team a bird. Nevertheless,
Fitzpatrick offers to confide the team's beginning location so I can at
least watch the World Series start. WS minus 3
days: Is this for real? I might as well be searching for Jimmy
Hoffa. The tentative information I have is that the Sapsuckers will meet
me Friday night in the Great Swamp of New Jersey. At midnight.
Fitzpatrick writes
a tidy schedule on a legal pad. To reach the kind of numbers they want,
they have to average finding a bird about every 7 minutes, and some
stops are allotted only 30 seconds. As the schedule
marches down the fifth page, JoAnn Little calls the team to a
steak-chicken-pasta feast. In 1997, before she became Sapsucker chef,
McGowan consumed a deli sub around 3 a.m. The team still talks about
that sub since McGowan developed food poisoning in the van during the
contest. Of course, he didn't drop out, and he credits plastic bags with
saving the team a lot of unscheduled roadside stops. A mild uproar
breaks out when I ask what keeps people from adding a few extra warblers
here and there. Birding honor remains strict, they say, and cheating
isn't as easy as it may sound. The teams become acutely aware of bird
whereabouts, so anomalies stand out. Also, this year, each team can
report only one bird that its members alone find. What also ruffles
the Sapsuckers' feathers, although they don't call it outright cheating,
is another team's legendary response to the speeding-ticket ban. A
certain group (Fitzpatrick goes ostentatiously vague about its name) one
year took along a state trooper to drive. "They won't give tickets
to one of their own," Wells explains, as the dining room
electrifies with outrage. Several years ago,
a siren and flashing lights interrupted the Sapsuckers en route. Deep in
ornithological debate, they'd forgotten to keep an eye on the
speedometer. The trooper eyed the van, asked if they were with the World
Series of Birding, and then said, "Got a bald eagle yet? There's
one down that way...." The Sapsuckers
thanked him for his directions and then faced the dilemma that the
eagle, which they could have used, seemed too far away. Yet ignoring a
trooper's tip posed its own risks. The team continued driving its
planned route, but very carefully.
The van has more
room than the Apollo cockpit, but not much. More dire is the issue of
psychic space. This is not your average bird walk, and these are not
well-rested people. I can see that in a few more hypertense hours, the
Sapsuckers will face a danger of spontaneous combustion. McGowan starts a
scramble among the gear when he mentions that somewhere he has packed a
Cornell cassette of nocturnal calls to play in the van. Many migrants
fly at night, and their flight calls often do not resemble the sounds
the average birder recognizes on the ground. The search stops
when Kelling points out that they all know the tape by heart, anyway.
"Imagine you're standing outside on a warm summer night....,"
an oily, mock-announcer voice from the back seat mimics the tape's
introduction. A surprisingly realistic Canada goose honks next to my
ear, and then the van fills with imitations of whickers, gaacks,
tickitys, trills, whistles, clacks, hoots—the whole avian world
simultaneously and on fast forward. Fortunately, we do not meet a state
trooper. WS minus 5
minutes: The Sapsuckers have taken their first position in the
swamp. Standing on what I hope is solid ground, I see them as dim gray
shapes just ahead of me. On either side, the swamp drops into blackness.
It's chilly. Even though it's
almost midnight, team members wear their binoculars, all from their
Austrian sponsor Swarovski Optik. It's not just habit. McGowan hands me
his to try, and I'm surprised to see images a little brighter than they
appear with the naked eye. "Virginia
rail," Kelling says suddenly, though the team can't count any birds
that they hear before midnight. The Sapsuckers
orient in one direction and grow still again. I realize I won't be able
to take notes because the felt-tip pen makes too much noise. A Canada goose, a
real one, honks, then honks, then honks some more. The team shifts with
disgust. There's a distant
hoo-ing—"who cooks for yoouu" is the traditional birders'
mnemonic—and several voices call out, "Barred owl." Then,
there's a collective, clipped "Ah." The rail has apparently
called again. I haven't heard a
thing that could be a rail during these last few minutes. Or have I? The
team falls into listening stillness again, and I wonder if that
little...No, that's faraway traffic. And that's the wretched goose. And
that...could that be a bird? Or the call of my own pulse? A sudden,
multibarreled burping, nearby and thunderous after all the strained
listening, nearly launches me into the swamp. I hear Fitzpatrick, in a
mockery of the birders' ID call, announce, "Green frog."
Good. Fitzpatrick
has been lobbying for the honor of first bird not to go to that goose.
Which honks almost immediately afterwards and ranks as second bird. The rail calls
again, apparently. I'm awed at how the Sapsuckers pick out birds from
the faint rustles, hums, and creaks of the swamp at night. After a sora rail
and a marsh wren call, we move. By some long-established team consensus,
Rosenberg is the one to imitate king rails. We fall silent. He steps
forward, pauses, then makes several breathy grunts. Later, listening
to a bird-call tape, I realize just how good Rosenberg's imitation was.
Couldn't mimickry confuse birders nearby, I ask him after the event.
"We know for a fact that we've been counted by other teams" in
other years, he says. Still, good ears
can tell. Rosenberg remembers one maddening night when rails weren't
responding to his best efforts. In an overcaffeinated meltdown, he burst
into his imitation of a South American bird. From the darkness, a voice
called, "Ken Rosenberg? Is that you?" The other birder hadn't
seen Rosenberg for several years but recognized the call. As well as
imitating calls, the team sometimes claps and then freezes to see if
birds reply. At one point, Rosenberg pelts the swamp with pebbles.
Sometimes the tactics work. The team finds
more than a dozen species in the swamp, including a great horned owl, a
yellow-breasted chat, and the only black-billed cuckoo they encounter
during the contest, this one recognized by its flight call. The team also
finds other contestants and at one point gets stuck in a three-van
gridlock on a narrow, overgrown lane. WS 1:42 a.m.:
The Sapsuckers are in high spirits as the van jounces out of the swamp.
They drop me at my car, wave, and head north. The roadside suddenly
seems so quiet I wonder if I've dreamed it all. WS 4 a.m.:
After an intense survey of several miles of route 22, I find the motel
where I'd made reservations. Then I spend a couple of hours trying to
read myself to sleep, but Peterson's Field Guide proves too
stimulating. I give up and start driving south to see how the teams are
doing. WS 11:30 p.m.:
I've seen a lot of entertaining birds and people during the day, but no
Sapsuckers of either sort. Here at the finish line, at Cape May
Lighthouse, two rooms fill with giddy teams of birders bug-eyed with
fatigue. This year's World
Series includes two teams named Orioles plus teams called the Lyric
Cassowaries, the Wandering Tattlers, Wild Bird Center of America
Re-Tailed Hawks, the Not Too Swifts, the Wrending Talons, and the Green
Mountain Goatsuckers. WS 11:50 p.m.:
The last teams are crowding in now. I see no Sapsuckers. I do find John
Sterling of the Smithsonian's Woodpeckers, sponsored by Bushnell Sports
Optics. He looks glazed but says his team has broken 200 species for the
first time. WS 11:59 p.m.:
Still no Sapsuckers.
They've had a
roller-coaster day. By 9 a.m., they had 137 species, more than their
wildest hopes. Then, they got stuck in beach traffic on I-80, losing 40
minutes. Remembering their
30-second stops, I dread to think about the mood in the van.
"Morale was low," Kelling understates. Fearing they'd
blown the best lead they'd ever had, they soldiered on, and by 5:30
p.m., they'd tied their previous record of 204 species. They heard their
last new species, a yellow rail, one of the rarest birds in New Jersey,
about 9 p.m. And their score?
"220," says Kelling. I'm about to
whoop, when Kelling explains that the Delaware Valley Ornithological
Club of New Jersey beat them by three birds. While the Sapsuckers fumed
in traffic, the home team had chosen back roads in north Jersey, logging
three grassland species the Sapsuckers never picked up. The Sapsuckers
again win the trophy for the best out-of-state team, but they're still
eyeing the top prize. Next year, they'll be back at the kitchen table. The energy
that birders, both amateur and academic, bring to their pursuit
could easily power a medium-sized city, once a few technical
details get ironed out. In the meantime, ornithologists are
exploring how to harness this zest to collect data over a range
far beyond the ken of a single research team. Says Jeff Wells of
Cornell University and a member of its birding team, "It's a
new era of citizen science." Among the
projects in which scientists have used data gathered by
volunteers: From Science
News, Vol. 156, No. 5, July 31, 1999, p. 72. Copyright © 1999,
Science Service. |
