Bird Bath and Beyond

Birders exhibiting their expertise.

Does your new friend sleep with binoculars by his/her bedside table. Does this person have a telescope at every other window in his/her house? This is not because they are perverts or peepers, they are just passionate birders. They perceive a world, you fail to, they also forget that you perceive a world, they fail to.

Have you ever found yourself confiding in a friend on a Sunday morning in Central Park, only to be interrupted mid-sentence by her screaming "Cinnamon Teals in formation at 10 o' clock!"  Perplexed you ask, "what?" because you were just telling her about having your heart broken the previous day, but she is still preoccupied, "there's a few Blue-winged teals in the flock...*" Or recall that time you were wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art with this charming guy, and he was busy distinguishing the species of vultures on the Egyptian urns instead of comparing you to a work of art? If you answered yes to any of these scenarios, then the person you have unwittingly befriended is a birder.

*That was a trick mention, Blue-Winged Teals don't fly over NYC. #BirderFail, now you know what I felt like throughout this trip. I was oblivious.

Birders can bird even in their sleep. Somnambulistic birding. This was the case with George Armistead, from American Birding Association, who once woke up in the middle of the night at his girlfriend's apartment, opened a window, pulled apart the curtains, and screamed "Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher," while he was still asleep. His girlfriend told him, "You're being creepy, come back to bed. 

Birders in this season's birder essential raiment: Bluebird earrings, khaki multi-pocket utilitarian vests, sun shielding hats and shirts, insect repellent scarves, and durable hiking boots. Accessories include but are not limited to top of the line cameras, heavy duty tripods, binoculars, and digiscopes.

Birders are sadly a misunderstood bunch. They have heightened senses, their eyes never miss a sighting, their ears never miss a call, well, maybe yours but certainly not a bird's. And as a side bar, to those who are dating birders, I strongly believe it will help to program your number into his/her cell with his/her favorite birdcall. The chances of them answering your calls are likely to increase ten-fold with this change.

The Puff-rumped Charlie. Fee, fi, fo, fum, I spy BIRDS.

Birders say the darnedest things.

For instance, we were talking about our top five favorite films, and George, began shaking his head despondently before he stated, "One of the most disturbing moments in Shawshank Redemption for a birder is when Red lifts up that large piece of obsidian rock that "had no earthly business being in a Maine hayfield" to find the box Andy left for him, because just as Freeman pulls out the box, this Cactus Wren that truly has no earthly business being there, in New England, sounds off. Cactus Wrens need cactuses to thrive...  when films just plug in whatever birdcall they think sounds good in any location they please, it feels like water torture. And don't even get me started on South Park. "

Me: Why?

George: Because they constantly play the Hermit Thrush and the Warbling Vireo in the background as a score...like constantly. After a few episodes it begins to feel like an endless loop of nails on a chalkboard and caterwauling cats.

Dorian: So George are you saying that of all the things on South Park the only thing that offends you is the bird calls?

George: Absolutely (chuckling).

Alvaro Jaramillo pointing out the bird species we just saw in the Birds of Colombia guide book to Juan-Pablo (works on Colombia's tourism outreach) and me (the girl who spots leaves and lasers as birds.)

George isn't alone in feeling this anguish.

Alvaro adds, "Unlike with visuals, with sound, you can figure out exactly where in the world you are. Birds have very distinct calls, and it differs from region to region. You can experience a place just through the soundscape as a birder, you know exactly what types of trees, vegetation, flowers, fruits exist in a place when you hear the calls. Hollywood does not get this, they constantly allow for the wrong bird to sound off in the wrong place, and it ruins the integrity of the entire story. It's as if a guy in a gorilla suit walked through a critical moment in the film..."

If you can't beat 'em, bird with 'em. It quickly becomes a bonding exercise. This was a shot of me with local Colombian guides and volunteers from Pro Aves Foundation, atop the Santa Marta Sierra Nevada National Park, on the Eldorado Reserve side of the range, on the morning after forest fires ravaged 50 hectares of this biodiversity hotspot that contains over 15 endemic species of birds.

I made the choice to tumble further down this rabbit hole. For a girl who had only seen birds in her grandmother's backyard birdbath and feeders, this was like walking through the wardrobe and discovering Narnia.

Me: "Is the mix of calls in a geographical area distinct despite the numerous migratory species that fly over the landscape?"

Alvaro: "The mix of calls you hear in a sound byte can help you narrow down the specific geographical location. It can be as local as a certain corner of a state. You have got to know your birds from your bugs and frogs and you've got to know what flocks come together in each place."

Me: Flock me.

I could not help but wonder if any of these guys had considered a career as a movie critic, or a position with a crime investigative unit.

"Maybe the killer stashed the body last summer?" The cops would ponder. "No absolutely not." The birder would intervene. "The fabric has dirt in the pockets that contain traces of a fungus that occurs only in spring, and the presence of Woodcock droppings only further emphasizes the time of year. You see, the very smell of that fungus in the forest denotes the migratory season for Woodcock, and by extension the dawn of spring." Another case solved by the "Birder Boys".  "Birder Boys" by Asher Jay, a book and/or TV series about crimes solved by boys who bird. It will be an overlap between The Hardy Boys, boy scouts and a birding club. I plan on writing this as soon as I finish all my outstanding projects to conserve actual birds in the wild.

Rufous-collared Sparrow. Something known, now for something new, something burrowed, and something blue.

Having spent a week in the company of some renowned birders on the Northern Colombia Birding Trail, on a trip organized by Audubon Society and USAID, I have been able to discern some of the unique characteristics that define this subculture of individuals.

They love khaki cargos that can zip off into shorts. They really love their optics, and if you show up at 3 a.m. in a white van and play birdcalls outside their hotel, you can kidnap the whole group of them. Daily exposure and proximal association with the bird-watching tribe meant that I too began showing signs of such eccentric behaviors.

I began bolting up in bed whenever I heard chirps outside my window.

I started seeing birds in my sleep. They were all in focus and nothing but close-ups of bright colored plumes. I was pretty excited in my dream state.

I now have a wish list of birds I want to see.

Last but not least, I just signed up for eBird. If I was not an endorsed nerd before, I sure am now. My username is Empress Brilliante, mostly because the boys bestowed that upon me, as my field birder name, during my visit to the dry forests in Colombia, and it has stuck with me ever since. In fact I have recommended that eBird start a dating site so birds of a feather can get together. Since a moment of inspired dialogue urged me to coin this, I strongly maintain the app should be called Flock Me.  

What's a banana between birds in love? A male and female Acorn Woodpecker. If they can flock together so can you.

Golden-naped Tanager at Kilometer 18, Cali, Colombia. One truly is the loneliest number.

I can no longer deem myself an outsider to this community, in fact I am seriously considering starting a Birder's Anonymous chapter in Manhattan, because like so many, I too am hooked to these beings that soar effortlessly across the heavens.

Birders all suffer from ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) in the field, and fraternizing with their ilk encourages you to emulate this seemingly distracted mind state. In trying to transcribe an interview with Christopher Calonje, avid birder and organizer of the Colombian Bird Fair in Cali, I realized how often we broke our thread of conversation because of a bird. Mostly because I was finally getting good at spotting these winged wanderers, and I could not stop myself from naming or photographing them, even though I was the one conducting the interview.

Me: "Sorry, I sent us off track again."

CC: "No this happens all the time, birds come first. There are times when I am on the phone, and... look Green Honeycreeper!!"

Me: Oh I wanted to get her..."(and I hand my recorder to Chris, and proceed to photograph the bird).

CC: "Go go go!!!"

A few seconds and a symphony of clacking Canons later...

CC: "Should I stop this recorder?"

Me: "No, you should continue talking about... how you are dealing with bird trafficking?"

CC: (He laughs but cooperates with my request). "There's a lot of educational awareness going on to combat the trafficking of birds, and promoting birding has helped us mobilize local communities..."

I got my picture of the fabulous Green Honeycreeper, even if it happened at the cost of my interview. If this were a birder initiation test, I am certain I passed it in flying colors.

The Colombia Bird Fair, takes place in Cali, and is on its second year now. It gathers an incredible array of individuals from various countries and walks of life with one shared passion: BIRDS. From installing murals across the city depicting endemic bird species, to empowering local guides and offering transport services, Christopher enables the birding culture to take root in Colombia.

Female Flame-rumped Tanager, not quite as orange as the male's rump, but she doesn't need to try, he does. His courtship determines her choice. When did the human dating scene lose this basic plot?

I asked some of the bird enthusiasts I crossed paths with, "why birds?" Here's a list of my favorite responses:

"...because staring at women is considered creepy." - Dorian Anderson, Los Angeles

"It gives you a great reason to get out of the easy chair." Ron Majors, Pennsylvania

"It's the most portable hobby. You can bird anywhere, at any time. At night, on a boat in Antarctica, you can golf and bird, wine taste and bird, boat and bird, because it's richly diverse, beautiful, and not geographically curtailed.

" - Chris Wood, eBird Project Leader, The Cornell lab of Ornithology

"...birding is the gateway drug to nature." - Alvaro Jaramillo, Alvaro's Adventure, San Francisco

"... because it keeps you alert engaged, living in the moment, observing something strange, weird, colorfulor beautiful." - George Armistead, ABA, Philadelphia

The brilliant, hard not to fall in love with, male Red-headed Barbet. I gasped the first I saw him.

So, why birds?

"There are plenty of them. You hear, see and find them easily. They are accessible. Birding trains your eye to search for life in all sizes." - Roger Rodriguez Ardila, Biologist, Bird Guide at the Eldorado Bird Reserve.

"There are birds in every habitat, and you can understand how they are all connected through evolution, and how we can use such convergence as a force for good. Use it to get people on board for the conservation of greater tracts of wilderness in relation to sustainable economic growth for local communities." - John Myers, Audubon Society, Washington DC

The beautiful female Red-headed Barbet. The name comes from the male's red head in this dimorphic species. Her palette although, subtle is stunning nevertheless, rather like a Cezane, or Monet, while the male is more like a bold and bright Hundterwasser.

For me it is a lot more personal than all that. When I was a toddler, my mom exposed me to the works of Dutch and French masters, but she had no way of preparing for how I was going to respond to their use of color. She just knew I was moved by a piece of art when she spotted me trying to lick it.

Now nearly three decades later, I was completely unprepared for the fact that on the Northern Colombia Birding Trail I was going to come face to face with birds that would put museum worthy masterpieces to shame. From the Crested Quetzals and Emerald Toucanets to Multicolored Tanagers and Long Tailed Sylphs, I wanted to lick the heck out of every bird I had the privilege to see in the wild. Their color combinations are not only intoxicatingly expressive but more harmoniously resolved than any painting by any well-known artist. Nature's brush is effortlessly innovative and it always results in unrivaled perfection.

In my pre-school days, I licked my fair share of globally celebrated paintings. I was young, free and less judged by people for this sensory peccadillo but licking birds as a grown woman....well, a girl's got to draw the line somewhere. So for now, photos of birds will just have to do.

The exquisite, irreplaceable Crested Quetzal. Good heavens that's a hot bird... look at all that green...so yummy! So...

...Any one have any good remedies for healing a paper cut on one's tongue...Not that I... Just asking...Oh never mind. You wouldn't understand. It's a birder thing.

Emerald Toucanet. I imagine a birder's compliment would go something like this, "your eyes are as green as an Emerald Toucanet's body, your summer dress the yellow of his bill, your lips the red of his rump...sighh...you are beautiful."

Birding 101: Unidentified Flying Organisms

A Multicolored Tanager, essentially an impressionist painting on the move.

A few weeks ago, if someone had asked me what I thought of Tanagers, my mind would have honed in on the obvious typo in a term that obviously describes the most obnoxious phase of any human's life cycle. Oh, how the past ten days in Colombia have changed me, for now I know Tanagers refers to the second largest family of birds. That's right my brain has now allocated prime real estate for such facts as: Tanagers constitute around 4 percent of all avian species, nearly the value we assign to our collective understanding of what constitutes the universe we inhabit.

12 percent of all Neotropical species are Tanagers, they largely sport an unapologetic, bright palette of plumes, opt to co-parent their young (some species go as far as securing nannies) and show their offspring the nest's ledge when they start mouthing off two weeks after hatching. They are the aquarium fish of the skies, and are seen outside of their natural context as often as you see reef fish incarcerated at dentist clinics. This is why I love birders and divers, people who value immersive moments with wild things, where the wild things are.

Blue-gray Tanager

Blue-mountain Tanager, eating fruit on a feeder in someone's private backyard. Many Colombians have begun to opt out of profiting myopically from the trade in live birds, instead they put up feeders and lure eager birders and ecotourists, who would rather take photographs than cage a wild bird.

Two weeks of waking up at 4 a.m., and hiking the high altitude Northern Colombia Birding Trail, with a press team of high aptitude birders put together by Audubon Society and USAID, had validated six truths for me:

1. I was insanely out of shape.

2. I was in dire need of an intravenous caffeine drip and a sugar high.

3. I didn't know my birds, so I did not know what to look or listen for when a name was called out. It could have been the size of a Peel P50 (smallest car in the world), but I wouldn't have known where to look for it.

4. Birds move. Constantly. If you are intently staring at a bird that hasn't moved in over three minutes, it is probably a leaf.

5. A bird in the bush is worth more to the local economy than two in a cage.

6. It is a hate crime to imprison wild birds.

Birds symbolize freedom every time they take wing. To deprive them of their right to flight is to strip them off their very reason for being. This is particularly true of migratory species with highly attuned instincts to travel vast distances each season. It broke our hearts to see Bobolinks and a Dickcissel caged at a restaurant in Santa Marta. It was also sad for me to see ill kept Macaws with clipped wings and my first Toucan in Colombia behind bars. Why would anyone want to see these fantastic wild wanderers in such an abject state? 

Female Green Honecreeper wild and free as a bird should be.

Before this expedition, I had seldom spent much time looking at birds; in fact I had suffered three decades of acute bird blindness. Apart from the occasional pigeon that wanted to share my New York bagel with me, and autotype trying to instill birding awareness in me every time I opted to express myself with a certain curse word, I didn't have much exposure to these dinosaur descendants. So as far as birding was concerned, I was, as my iPhone would put it, ducked. However, ignorance of your ignorance can be bliss, so my confidence never faltered in front of my flock.

The first field excursion began with much promise, just outside of Riohacha, at the Los Flamencos Sanctuary. Looking for shore birds, which were incredibly easy to spot, because they were all out in the open, as distinct shapes bestrewn across a scintillating flatland, bobbing for fish in fast drying shallows. This quick and comfortable access to birds big and small, in a plethora of hues, set my beginner birding expectations at an all time high for the days to come.

It only took 24 hours for that myth to unravel, for the very next day we visited the dry forests, where birds chirped cockily, hidden from view, tucked away behind irregular lattices of barren branches. "So many Great Egrets!" birder extraordinaire, Alvaro Jaramillo observed enthusiastically, "there's a flock of Ibis headed our way" Dorian Anderson, the biking birder, responded. "Scarlet-White Ibis hybrid in formation" Jose Luis Pushaina, a local guide qualified, only to be interrupted by George Armistead from American Birding Association. "Do you guys hear that Black-crested Antshrike?" he inquired redundantly, because naturally every one had heard it, most had seen it, some were even cheeping sweet nothings to it, all eyes and ears on point, except mine.

"Where?" I asked eagerly, and one of the three hawketeers, honed in on it with their digiscope and binoculars for me. "There!" they would all elatedly chime in. I was nowhere near perceptive enough to take pride in birding yet, if these fine lads wanted to hand a bird in the bush on a binocular to me, magnified and in focus, I was going to take it.

Black-crested Antshrike, because it's better to see it late than never.

Even my inability to focus my optics didn't stop a gorgeous vermillion Cardinal from showing himself to me. The Vermillion Cardinal, as his name suggests, was this unmistakable, Sin City red that I could not turn my back on. Jose quipped up, in Spanish and Alvaro efficiently translated him, "This bird is so very important to his people, it is part of their mythology and motifs, it's not protected in other places, and ends up being sold in cages, but in Los Flamencos it is protected. It's his favorite!"

Day two dawned in sharp contrast to the dry forests, for we had made our way into the humid, densely verdant rainforests flanking the Tayrona National Park.

A male Blue-billed Curassow, an elusive, critically endangered ground bound bird species, the size of a turkey, in full view at the Tayrona National Park. It has been hunted incessantly by the locals for food and is thus rarely observed in the wild. I sure am glad we got to see two males and three females that day.

Alvaro underscored, "birds are nearly impossible to find in a rainforest." This wasn't the case with me, I saw birds everywhere, but mostly because I was in a foliage rich environment, and I was content mistaking leaves for birds.   

Dorian broke it down for me, succinctly "You have to know the bird's shape and size, and the column or row it most frequently occupies in a habitat. If you know where to look for a known form, you will find it." So while the Birder Boys (as I've come to call them) were spotting Keel-billed Toucans, Rufous-tailed Hummingbirds, and Red-Crowned Woodpeckers, I was calling out sightings I was familiar with, like the "White-Crowned Cow" the "Black-Naped Goat" and the "Common Crested Chicken." Farm animals. They sound a lot more exotic when assigned Bird-like names.

Common Crested Chicken with chicks, doing her chicken thing in a chicken burrow.

A short while later the clouds descended on us, and before long we were walking through a creepy English Moor at altitude.

When a forest begins to fog up, all bets are off for amateur birders, it's when you ought to pack away your binoculars and pick up your bourbon. The chances of me even spotting livestock at this visibility seemed unlikely. It was like a painter had rendered a tonal wash over the entire landscape. Gray birds, against gray leaves, in a silhouette dance against an increasingly bleak, gray sky.

In such conditions, it was clear that even the Eye of Mordor would fail to distinguish the gold on the Golden-crowned Flycatcher, but somehow Alvaro, George and Dorian saw it. They kept trending colors in the jungle that I was certain did not exist, similar to what fashion forecasting inflicts on Seventh Avenue. This season Bice is in. Let's all make Bice happen people! Bice is the new black.

So, despite worsening conditions, the birder boys were going strong. "Purple-throated Woodstar at 2 'o' clock" Dorian would yell, "Amazing, Spectacled Parrotlet to his left, a few branches above him guys," George rallied. "Grayish Piculet on the stick protruding from the shrub in the shadows back here," Alvaro countered. A gray feature on a gray bird, perched on a gray stick, in a gray shrub in the dark gray shadows... perfect...this Fifty Shades of Gray spectacle was going to leave me searching for my sanity, not unlike the movie.

"Glistening-green Tanager on the top branches of the tree, above the U-shaped vine to my right." Jaruen Rodriguez pointed out with a startling green laser that I inadvertently mistook for the actual bird. "Omigosh it's such a virulent green" I gushed. "That's the laser Asher, the bird is above the virulent green dot you are looking at," a true birder quickly corrected me.

Sadly that was not the only time I mistook the laser for a bird that day.

Green Violet Ear, yes once you finally figure out where it is branched, it is one saucy little sighting.

Birding is incredibly challenging, it requires patience, the recall of common bird names at the very least, keen observational skills, an inherent appreciation of birds, and access to quality optics that should make a real birder's birdy-sense tingle. I discovered that if I persevered, took down names on my iPhone after each sighting, and paid attention to everything the birder boys proclaimed, I too could become a competent birder.

If all else failed, I could always resort to inventing my own names for these exquisitely unique, unidentified flying organisms, like the Hot-ass Bird (more eloquently known as the Flame-rumped Tanager). 

Flame-rumped Tanager male, with a conspicuous orange, visibly brilliant hot ass, perched on a banana laden feeder.

I made it my personal mission to get better at this outdoor activity. The thing about birding is that nothing can prepare you for it, but it profoundly changes the way you look at the world. You will never realize how much beauty, diversity and wonder you have been missing right before your eyes, daily, until you begin birding. It makes you pay attention and focus swiftly on minutiae, it anchors you in the present tense, amplifies all your senses, and it helps you perceive everything as important, particularly because every encounter is so fleeting.

You grow tolerant of changing externalities that you have no control over, and if you are anything like me, you finally learn to tweet outside the realm of Twitter. The best part of being a new birder is that every bird is an unidentified flying organism to you; it's a brave new world, inhabited by curious, alien, aerodynamic works of art that are well worth exploring! So what are you waiting for? Get birding!

Not as stunning as the male but still a brilliant palette of oranges.