Never Presume

On Saturday, Dec. 13, I went to Great Swamp. Since my retirement I usually don't go to popular birding spots on the weekends, but that day I was restless. A Barred owl had been reported for weeks in the area and I wanted to see it, even tho' I've seen and heard them before so it wasn't a life bird.

At this time of year owls are active. One of the very few things I miss about the days when I'd have to rise before 4 a.m. and catch a train to get me to work by 7 a.m. was hearing the hooting of the owls most commonly found in my area - Great Horned, Screech and Barred.

"Barred Owl" by btrentler is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I did a lot of walking that day in the cold at the Swamp, and found a lot of birds including two bald eagles and northern harriers. But no owls. I have yet to find an owl unless it was pointed out to me. So when I started back to where I'd parked and saw a group of people up the road with their long lenses pointed in the same direction, I knew the owl had been spotted. I got to them very quickly.

At first I saw nothing, but one of the men literally positioned me in front of him and told me to start looking up a particular tree. Then I saw the bird.

I like Barred owls. Unlike the Great Horned or the Screech, this owl has dark eyes. It is grayish-brown and has streaking on its white breast - the barring - to help it blend into its surroundings. It looked serene as it rested in the tree. It looked at all of us, at times turned its head. I wished I'd brought my own long-lensed camera.

I asked the man, had he found this bird, high in a tree set far back from the road. No, he said. It turned out to have been another man I had briefly spoken to earlier on the road.

I did not ask the name of any of the people assembled there, including the man who pointed me in the owl's direction. Nor did I offer my name. 

I had always thought birders didn't do such things. We are too busy looking for the birds we seek to follow the social niceties. I thought it was some sort of unsaid "code," like never broadcasting the exact position of an owl found during the day. Owls are night creatures and need to rest by day undisturbed.

What birders DO do is help someone see the bird they found. Among other more kindly reasons it allows them to say the sighting could be corroborated. 

I repaid the man by telling him about the two mature bald eagles I'd seen up the road just minutes before. He rushed there to take pictures, which he was still doing when I drove off.

Then I did something I now regret. So happy was I to have seen this owl I went to a Facebook birding-related page I follow to thank the man publicly. I noted the road - not the exact location - of the owl and said we hadn't exchanged names "per protocol" because I thought that's just how things are done.

After the page's administrator published the post I began to get blowback.

My use of the word "protocol" was questioned. I responded that maybe that was too strong a word. Some questioned why I would think birders so impolite as to not be friendly. A few criticized me for, they claimed, giving the location of the owl and urged me or the administrator to take down the post. One such person, a man I've birded with and know by name, said the Barred owl had been a "sacrificial lamb" for years. I don't know what he meant by that but I responded that he knew the road I had been on is a very long road and I had not noted the exact location.

As for the person saying I should take down the post, I responded that I'd said nothing wrong and if the administrator allowed it to be seen, HE knew I'd said nothing wrong.

The last comment I saw was, "What a bizarre thing to choose to post."

As of this morning 35 people "liked" what I had written, so these people understood what I was getting at.

But I am now very sure of several things:

Birders can't be classified as being all the same. While there are things we all do, some will be nice and some will be nasty. Some will give names and some won't.

Never publicly state anything about finding an owl, even in the most general of terms. In fact, don't state anything on Facebook. Keep your thoughts to yourself.

Never think you know everything, because you don't. As I've often said about myself, I'm no expert. This experience reinforces that belief.

Finally, never presume.

Never presume there is anything like a 'birding code" even if in decades of birding you can count on one hand and have fingers left over the number of times you and someone else have given your names. 

Never presume you can be friends with another birder. Just like in high school there are cliques and there are outsiders. I consider myself one of the latter.

Thank you to the man who helped me find the Great Swamp Barred owl.

Summer Babies

When my first niece was born nearly three decades ago, we waited for the phone to ring. Back then it was a landline on a table in the hall. We were not alone in waiting. When we visited MH’s parents, each time the phone rang he’d yell, “The baby, the baby!” but it was usually someone else.

When the call finally came, I answered and MH yanked the phone from my hand. “I’m the blood relative,” he said. I’ve never forgotten that. Luckily, our niece loves me just the same as him.

(photo courtesy of Redmond family)

This niece has just had her first child. Everyone knew about it within seconds on Facebook and there were literally hundreds of congratulations and other comments on the many photos. It is a fast and technological world we live in now.

Meanwhile, out in the yard, birds are also having babies in the June heat. However, they aren’t tweeting out the news using Twitter or posting to Facebook, so you have to keep your eyes open and watch for the signs.

I knew when the babies were hatched in the house wren box when Papa Wren stopped his near-constant singing. Now, he was trying to protect the young by keeping the location of the nest hidden.

Another clue: Both parents started shuttling back and forth to the box with food. One would get something, bring it to the box, climb inside, then come out. The other would come seconds later to do the same thing.

Wren box (Margo D. Beller)

When the babies got too big, the parents stayed on the outside of the box to feed the young. It is up to each chick to push its way to the front to get fed. Mom or Dad won’t be coming inside anymore. Fight to feed or die.

Today I came into the backyard and the wrens were scolding their warnings to the young, as usual at my appearance. However, this time, they were in a bush at the other end of the yard. When I stood under the nest box, none came to hover over me as they were doing as recently as the day before.

The young had fledged.

It’s not just the wrens that are doing this. From my open window I can hear the raucous families of tufted titmice and black-capped chickadees. Taking a walk, I see small groups of starlings, the young a sandy brown color, not yet the black of their parents.

Once the quiet period of egg laying, brooding and fledging is over, the young noisily follow their parents around, begging to be fed, slowly learning how to do this for themselves. The birds are more active and are more easily found in the thick tree canopy.

I am hearing more bird song, too, cardinals, chipping sparrows and song sparrows singing territorial songs before starting a new brood. Most birds are not monogamous. Once the young have fledged, the parents go their separate ways and start over. Many birds have several broods each season before it is time to head south in the autumn. That means two birds can create 10 or more birds in one summer. They must do this for their species to survive. 

Tree swallow brood -- look carefully, there are 5 (Margo D. Beller)

Humans do things in a different order. You have nine months of great anticipation and frenzied nest building after conception, not before. Then, once the young are born, it can take decades of care and feeding to get the young ready to leave the nest, presuming they want to or can afford it.

Birds have it easier.

Birders and Bullying

A MEW GULL (first state record pending NJBRC acceptance) was photographed at Spruce Run Reservoir Jan 10. The bird was with a few thousand RING-BILLED GULLS coming to roost near the boat launch area. No reports since.

The above was posted on the weekly Rare Bird Alert for New Jersey on Friday, Jan. 18. A mew gull, a bird usually found in the northwest, is a smaller and darker-eyed version of its more common cousin the ring-billed gull.

I saw one of the pictures posted and it was incredible that out of the thousands of gulls hanging around Spruce Run's popular (with birds and birders) boat launch this one gull would be picked out by a couple of dedicated birders. Talk about a needle in a haystack.

However, there is a darker side of this story and it can be seen on the daily New Jersey bird reporting site. It is a story of cyber-bullying.

No, not the type of bullying you hear about on the news that results in death. This involved a man who obviously knows when to say "stuff it" and walk away rather than a more vulnerable child or teenager being harrassed physically at school and emotionally on Facebook.

Here's the back story.

On Jan. 20, a man from Freehold, N.J., made a brief report to the list via his phone that he and two others had seen a 1st year mew gull in the same place as the one seen Jan. 10, which hadn’t been seen since that report.

I am sure the Jan. 18 alert set several hearts a-pounding in the NJ birding community. The Freehold man went out to Spruce Run and managed to find the gull. His report had others rushing to the same area to do the same.

A day later this same Freehold man wrote the list saying he was removing himself (you have to have a subscription to report but you don’t need one to read the posts).

He had gotten a number of inquiries to his personal email (listed on the post) for details of his sighting - this is quite common and I have done this myself with other reports. Most times the exchange is pleasant and people thank you for providing the information.

However, he also received emails, to put it mildly, questioning his ability to identify birds as well as his character!

He said in response that he made the best call identifying the gull that he could based on using multiple field guides and the thinking of other birders who arrived thanks to his report and looked through his scope. He also said that when he left there were no other birders around and he didn't realize he was violating birder etiquette by not hanging around indefinitely to show others the bird.

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

As a result of the abuse he has received he said he was not going to make any more reports and would turn over any more threatening emails to the people who run the list for further action.

I found this exchange fascinating because it shows how “bird watching” has changed and how degraded our society has become.

What was once passive “watching” has become the more active “birding,” a competitive sport. You see something of that in the film “The Big Year.”  (I recently saw a car commercial based on the film’s premise where two photographers are driving like maniacs over mountains and fields, no road in sight, to get a picture of a California condor, a majestic and endangered species. Oh, the irony.)

It used to be you went out with your binoculars, a spotting scope for distant ducks, perhaps a camera. That has changed - now everyone thinks he or she is Ansel Adams. Cameras with gun-like lenses swaddled in camoflage are the norm, as are, at the other extreme, the ubiquitous cellphone camera in the hands of people clambering over rocks in sneakers.

But there’s more - there is the Internet and tweeting and Facebook. All are designed to let you broadcast information widely and immediately, whether you’ve thought it through or not.

Even the NJ birding list, taken over last year by the American Birding Association, added a Twitter feed on the main page. Get the word out! Now!

The New Jersey birding list home page. Note the Twitter feed to the right.

There are programs for your smartphone to identify birds and play their calls to fool a bird into showing itself. There are GPS and mapping programs so people can go into the deepest part of the forest - way off the trails - and be able to find his or her way out, eventually, maybe, satellite willing.

These fake bird calls are considered bad birding etiquette because they stress the bird into thinking their territory is being invaded by a rival. The GPS allows people to trespass into areas where they are not supposed to be, affecting the ecosystem and potentially putting themselves in danger.

To these people, birding has become an extension of the X games.

All this is done in the name of finding that rarity, that needle in a haystack. Why? I don’t know. To make yourself look good? To make big bucks selling the picture? To tick off another name on your Peterson life list? To help you think you are young, virile and superhuman?

I don’t know if the Freehold man was thinking any of that but he was looking at hundreds of gulls on a boat launch and somehow happened to see one that didn’t exactly look like the others. Birders do that every day. Not everyone finds a rarity.

His note prompted an avalanche of responses from people who begged him to reconsider. Turns out he is far from alone.

Some said they had also received insulting emails that doubted their ability to identify a bird. One man, who constantly reports to the list and seems to be everywhere in the state at once, said he now never makes a report unless he has photographed the bird so he has proof of his sighting. When he started out his ability and his truthfulness were questioned. That has happened to me, too. That's why I am not a list subscriber although I look at it at least twice a week so I can plan my weekend birding.

One man summed up my feelings: This is supposed to be fun.

When I stopped passively watching birds at my feeders and started going out into the field, it was to get into the woods and get out a lot of the stress I felt from a job in the city that put me under more pressure than an uncorked champagne bottle. I walked and, sticking to the trails, discovered birds in their variety and beauty, high and low, in the air and on the ground and in the water.

Sometimes I even found a rarity. But I quickly learned that it is better to keep rarities to yourself, for the bird's sake and to save on aggravation to me and the environment. For instance, I am glad I didn’t report the sedge wren I found years ago in Somerset County because another one (or the same one?) found later that month in Montgomery, NY, created a birder stampede that trampled a field as they searched for it.

Bad etiquette? Guilty, I guess.

(A more recent example of this is in Somerset County involving a farm that had the luck - or misfortune - to host both a pair of sandhill cranes and several northern lapwings, the latter quite rare in New Jersey. If you go to the list you will see more on how this one sighting triggered a circus, including several reports of trespassing photographers.)

This is the problem the Freehold man had: he is not a recognized pro. The original report on Jan. 10 was made by a couple of “established” birders familiar to the listing world whose sightings are not questioned.

As my husband likes to say, the birds don’t follow the road maps and they are not waiting for you to arrive. So it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a mew gull could be found, fly off and then return a week later to be seen by others. That’s part of the fun.

But not this viciousness that, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet, the immediacy of email and texting and Facebook and the general coarsening of human nature, is pervading what was once regarded as a modest outdoor activity.

We’re talking about birds here, people, not politics, war or the economy.

Unfortunately, birding has become a mirror of society. We want everything and we want it now. If you get it and I don’t, I use the Internet or Facebook or tell my 1,000 Twitter followers what an idiot you are and they pass it on. I act before I think because I can and I don‘t care about your feelings because I don‘t know you and don't want to. I want a picture of a rare bird because you don’t have one and I'm better than you and entitled.

Still, I would also like to think there are more good, thinking people out there than idiots. Sadly, the idiots are the ones who get the attention on the evening news and the birding lists.

So I understand why the Freehold man is no longer making his findings public. Life is too short to be dehumanized by small people, even small people who, like you, look for birds. At least this man is emotionally mature enough to walk away from this cyber-bullying.

Also, I understand the importance of people like the Freehold man to those of us in the birding community who have only a limited time during the week to go out and explore, and who want to be able to see as much as possible. I hope he doesn‘t leave birding altogether. People like him do the work and the rest of us get the enjoyment.

Without these people, we have nothing. To subject anyone - high school kid, adult reporting a rare bird - to abuse, in the words of one writer defending the Freehold man, diminishes us all.