Getting set a-twitching

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
When I was 10 years old we moved into a new house. On the lawn next to the back porch we found a pile of lumber scraps, old venetian blinds, a few half-empty cans of paint, and some cardboard boxes full of what someone apparently thought of as junk. All of this had been dumped rather unceremoniously, and the contents of at least one of the boxes lay scattered among the greater wreckage. It was there that I found a small green cloth-bound book with a black drawing of a bird in flight on the cover. It was an early edition of Roger Tory Peterson’s “Field Guide to Birds,” originally published in 1934. The one that I found in my hands was the third edition from 1947 and as I leafed through the color plates I could almost feel the hook go in. On that day 48 years ago, I became a birdwatcher.

Peterson started out as an artist. He grew up in Jamestown, New York, out west on the shores of Chautauqua Lake. He moved to New York City in the 1920s to pursue his art career, but was already fond of natural history and joined the Bronx County Bird Club, where he met Ludlow Griscom. Griscom was a Cornell-trained ornithologist, having studied under Arthur A. Allen, the founder of the Laboratory of Ornithology, and in Ithaca he befriended bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, then hailed as the modern Audubon.

Modern binoculars had recently been invented, a cross between powerful-but-heavy military field glasses and weak-but-light opera glasses. Thus armed, birdwatchers no longer had to shoot a bird to get close enough to identify it. Griscom devised a systematic method of identifying birds in flight via “field marks.” He was teaching this method to the members of the Bronx County Bird Club when Peterson joined.

The artist, inspired by Griscom and by Ernest Thompson Seton’s diagrams for duck identification, transferred the field mark approach to illustrations of all the birds in the eastern two-thirds of North America and issued his landmark field guide in the depths of the Great Depression. Birdwatching, called “twitching” in England, had been seen as largely the pursuit of eccentric old ladies. Suddenly it was a hobby that drew in all ages and demographics.

Perhaps because there is little cost attached to birdwatching after you purchase your binoculars and a field guide, the popularity of birdwatching as a pastime exploded in the wake of the publication of Peterson’s field guide. Previous bird publications were large, rather academic tomes, suitable for placing next to a dead bird and using it to patiently match up minute morphological details visible only when the corpse was in hand. Griscom and Peterson made it possible to glance through binoculars at a bird on the wing from 50 yards away and get a positive identification by taking note of a small selection of obvious field marks. You could then refer to a field guide that fit into your coat pocket and was filled with plates covered in diagrammatic images surrounded by black lines pointed directly at the field marks.

I began my first “life list” immediately; Peterson’s field guide includes a list of taxon names with an adjacent underbar over which you are meant to place a checkmark as you add a bird to your experience. Our house was surrounded by second-growth woodlot when we moved in and proved to be home to wood thrushes. My parents cut down the trees for the firewood and to re-landscape the parcel. The wood thrushes disappeared. Birdwatching began to teach me about ecology. Eventually, after transferring my life list from worn-out guide to new a few times, I abandoned the keeping of list altogether.

At some point in the 1980s the difference between birdwatchers and “birders” was made explicit. Birdwatchers were interested in the actual life of birds. We enjoy watching what birds do all day. They forage and feed, they build nests and feed their young, they have querulous relationships with their own kind, other birds, and other animals (including us), and you can even get to know individuals and enjoy their unique quirks.

Birders, on the hand, are about the list. They rack up species the way that some Adirondack hikers rack up peaks to get into the “46er Club.” Walking up a mountain merely check its name on a list is essentially turning hiking into golf, famously described by Mark Twain as “a good walk, spoiled.” The 2011 film “The Big Year” attempted to make a three birders into romantic figures, and it didn’t do well either at the box office or with the critics. These three men were using birding to fill voids in their lives. I couldn’t help thinking that birdwatching — which gets you out of yourself and immerses you in the lives of the birds and the natural world in general — would have been a more rewarding pursuit for them.