Back on a Bird Crew

Birders are weird. For one thing, they’re reckless drivers. One moment they’ll be happily toddling along the road, the next they’ll yank their steering wheel to the side and rummage around for the binoculars that are wedged into the cupholders of the car because they spotted a raptor on a telephone wire. For another, they frequently disguise themselves as shrubs and wait for a fancy chicken to do a fancy dance in a field somewhere. They’re not malicious or dangerous, but their eyes constantly scan the foliage in a way that makes it clear they live in a reality separate from the rest of us. They dress in muted colors, scribble lists in waterproof notebooks, and throw around phrases like “I hope there is a woodcock around here somewhere,” with completely earnest faces.

I never wanted to be a birder. My dream as a wildlife biologist was to chase wolverines across the crown of the continent, track jaguars through the pine oak canyons of Mexico, or follow okapis through the jungle of the Congo. Rarely, if ever, had I seen a red-tailed hawk soaring on a thermal and felt my heart take flight with it. I was vaguely aware of birds existing and feigned mild interest when a neighbor would announce a different variation of finch at their feeder. Of course, I was careful not to show to much excitement lest they think I was one of them.

That began to change when I took an ornithology course during my university studies and was assigned a devastatingly handsome Spanish exchange student as my lab partner. Suddenly, I realized birding could be very interesting indeed. To my great bewilderment, my cunning attempts to seduce him by inviting him to go birdwatching at 5 in the morning were never successful.

My transformation into a birder did not happen overnight. It snuck up on me and I slowly started to pick up mannerisms without being aware of what I was turning into. I tried to hide it at first, like a survivor during a zombie apocalypse that doesn’t tell the group they’ve been bitten. But I couldn’t contain it for long.

When I watched movies with friends, I complained that the bird calls in the background did not match the habitat—how could anyone be expected to focus on the plot if there was a common loon calling in the middle of a British forest, or the screech of a red-tailed hawk superimposed on a bald eagle? I started to wake up early to sit on the banks of frozen rivers in the spring, waiting for the rare bird someone had seen before to show up again, while my hands turned numb from cold and frost formed on my eyelashes. One day, I caught sight of a yellow-rumped warbler unusually late in the year and reflexively patted the pocket of my dark green jacket for a waterproof notebook. To my horror, I realized that I had become a birder. Even more horrifying, I loved it.

For several years I worked as a seasonal field technician, mostly on bird-based projects, and migrated from place to place as each season passed. After some time, however, the lure of a consistent salary and health insurance proved too great and I said goodbye to the travelling life. Or at least, I tried to. I had thought that a taste of that life would slake my thirst, but it had only made me yearn for more adventure, more travel, more places to see and mountains to climb. Even as I enjoyed the trappings of a conventional life, I found my mind wandering back to that time when I was paid to be a bird nerd. Admittedly I was also paid to be a bird nerd in my current position, but that came with caveats of meetings that should have been e-mails, e-mails that should have been meetings, and having to tell land developers, “No, you can’t just knock that bald eagle nest out of the tree.”

Now, after several years away, I decided to take the leap and jump back into the seasonal field tech life for at least one more summer.

After a couple of emails to my former supervisor and an international flight to Colorado, I was back. I made my last preparations in a haze of jetlag, filling a shopping cart with granola bars and instant noodles. The Bird Conservancy set me up with a Toyota Forerunner for the summer, as long as I promised to keep the squirrel-related incidents to a minimum this time around. I said I would try but could guarantee nothing. I packed my camping gear into the car and drove from Fort Collins to Grand Junction for a week of training before the field season started in earnest.

Even though this would be my fourth season with the Bird Conservancy, and I knew my supervisors well, there was still a familiar anxious knot in my stomach as I pulled up in the campground to meet my new coworkers. Being around people I don’t know always makes me slightly nervous. I sweat, my words come out in a jumble, my heart races. Occasionally I faint outright, as though my brain wants to retreat so badly that it just shuts down. It’s a counterproductive response if you hate being the center of attention.  

It took me three tries to pluck up the courage to walk over to the picnic tables where the rest of the crew had gathered. The first two times I pretended I forgot something and retreated to the car. For the third time, I gave myself a stern pep-talk in the rearview mirror of the car, took a deep breath, and walked over with a bird guide clenched in one hand as a talking point in case I panicked.

Luckily, I didn’t have to try to make conversation for long. Mark, my former coworker and now my supervisor, handed everyone a binder with the information about the specific transects they had been assigned. Each transect had a page with the coordinates, directions, and camping information filled out by previous field technicians. My binder was a treasure trove of information. Past technicians had left helpful hints about the best places to camp, directions for unmarked dirt roads, warnings about bulls or rattlesnakes. Sometimes arguments broke out on the page, separated by time, about how difficult the terrain actually was or the best order to do the points.

Some pages were blank except for the coordinates. Nearly a quarter of the transects in my binder were completely blank. It would be up to me to figure out what roads to take to get there, or if I had to backpack in to reach them, if there were rivers to cross or cliffs to avoid.

The chitchat with my coworkers came to an abrupt end when I spotted a great-horned owl nest in the spruce tree next to my campsite. There was an exodus from the picnic tables to the grass in front of my campsite as the sun set. My coworkers and I sat in contented silence with our binoculars and cameras long after it grew too dark for photographs. I didn’t need to be nervous around these people. They weren’t people, after all; they were birders, like me.