Birding by sight and sound

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
In the 2011 film, “The Big Year,” Brad Harris (played, improbably, by Jack Black) is an obsessed birder who can identify species solely by their song. The eponymous Big Year is a competition wherein participants travel North America (north of Mexico) for 365 days in order to see as many different bird species as possible. The year-long event grew out of the Big Day, a 24-hour birding competition that has happened every May since the 1930s. The movie is based on a non-fiction book about three actual birders and is an exploration of birding subculture. One of the architects of this subculture was Ludlow Griscom.

Many people know Griscom’s name because of Roger Tory Peterson’s early association with him as part of the Bronx County Bird Club (BCBC), a group of amateurs who went into the field together to identify birds with binoculars. The club was formed in 1924 by nine teenage boys who were already dedicated birders. Even before the formation of the club, some of its future members had a chance meeting with Charles Johnston, a distinguished older birdwatcher, whom they encountered at the Hunts Point dump in the Bronx, a good place to see snowy owls and rare gulls. Impressed with their skills, he invited them to join the Linnaean Society of New York, where they made connections with other birdwatchers in their native borough. The Christmas Bird Count was already an established tradition, and the boys’ contributions to the annual event were among their first publications.

In 1927, 18-year-old Roger Tory Peterson arrived in New York City from Jamestown, New York for a meeting of the American Ornithological Union. He immediately began going into the field with members of the BCBC; he became the first non-Bronx resident to join.

It was through the Linnaean Society that the BCBC amateurs met Ludlow Griscom. He was then an assistant curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History (where the Linnaean Society met). According to an article in American Birds (Fall 1991 issue), Peterson later wrote that Griscom was “a bit austere in keeping us in line when we dared report anything as unlikely as a hoary redpoll or a Sabine’s gull. We were cross-examined ruthlessly.” But, he added, Griscom “was our God and his ‘Birds of the New York City Region,’ published in 1923, became our Bible.”

Griscom’s time with the BCBC birders was brief. Experiencing friction with Frank Chapman, the head of his division at the museum, in 1927 he moved to the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. But he had already imparted his technique of identifying birds in the field to the BCBC members. Three of them, Peterson, Allan Cruickshank, and Joseph Hickey, went on to become prominent and influential naturalists.

The 1991 American Birds article notes: naturalist Edwin Way Teale once asked Griscom how he distinguished difficult species so quickly and easily. He replied: “It is largely a matter of having a perfect mental image of each bird.” This idea, novel and even scorned during the shotgun era, is still the basic premise of field identification.

In 1931, Peterson left New York City to teach at Rivers Country Day School (now the Rivers School) in Weston, Massachusetts. But he was already working on his famous field guide, which would incorporate the Griscom approach to identifying birds, using “field marks” highlighted in Peterson schematic illustrations. The first edition of the guide was published in 1934. It was an immediate best seller, and Peterson returned to New York to work for the National Audubon Society.

Over the years, Peterson often acknowledged his debt to Griscom. By the time the BCBC members met him, Griscom was already an established professional ornithologist. He had received his undergraduate degree (pre-law) from Columbia University in 1912 and enrolled in the ornithology graduate program at Cornell University, where he studied under Arthur A. Allen and became friends with bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes. He completed his master’s degree at Cornell, but did not finish his doctorate at the University of Virginia due to lack of funds. During his career Griscom made many expeditions to South and Central America, where he discovered several new species.

But as extensive and important as his professional work was, Griscom is best remembered for his influence on amateurs, not just the BCBC members, but the birdwatching community at large. He was an enthusiastic promoter of the Christmas Bird Census (later Count), which was established by Frank Chapman in 1900. Griscom started participating in 1908 at age 18. The CBCs are done in one day, with teams usually searching for owls before dawn and finishing with rails after dark. But they, of course, take place during the winter. Griscom was especially fond of Big Days, which are all-day hunts for birds that, in the temperate Northern Hemisphere, take place at the height of spring migration. Griscom had his best Big Day on the coast of Massachusetts, where he saw 160 species in 24 hours.

In 1945, he wrote: “[What] people are now able to do in the way of instantly recognizing a large number of birds by song, notes, tricks of flight, shape, etc, entirely apart from their colors, seems perfectly fabulous to the uninitiated and was flatly declared to be impossible a generation ago …. The battle for sight records and field identification of the living bird has been won, so far as I know, and there is no real quarrel left about what birds can be recognized alive and when this recognition can be used in scientific research.”

Bill Chaisson, who has been a birdwatcher since age 11, is a former editor of the Eagle Times. He now works for the Town of Wilmot and lives in Sutton.