Out of Cleveland, Into the World !: A Birdwatchers’s Perspective on Journey
Clayton Graham
On a bitter cold morning in mid December, I begrudgingly rouse myself from bed at 5 a.m., grabbing my binoculars and spotting scope. The roads are treacherous and the temperatures well below freezing, and yet I find myself driving 45 minutes to Cleveland Heights, to pick up my friend, Phil. Entering my car, Phil suggests that we make our way to the coal plant at East 72nd street to check for gulls and diving ducks. It’s a good day to bird watch in northeast Ohio. Gulls coalesce near the warm waters of the coal plant, gleaning swarming shad at arm’s length, while strings of mergansers and shadowed scoters ungulate near the Lake Erie breakwalls. By 9 a.m. our species list includes Greater Black Backed, Lesser Black Backed, Bonapartes, Thayer’s, Little, Glaucous, Herring and Ring Billed gulls as well as several diving ducks and a flyover group of caroling snow buntings. We wait at the coal plant to check for wandering jaegers and scan flocks for vagrant gulls, but both the cold and our stomachs get the best of us. Over coffee and pancakes, Phil and I catch up, discussing the newest folk bands, and of course stories about birding. This is the point when I break the news to Phil. “Dude, Phil, I’m going to be traveling to Alaska, Hawaii, Thailand, India, The Maldives, Tanzania, Egypt, Turkey, Norway and Germany for the next thirteen weeks.” “Jesus man, half your bag is going to be field guides. You’re going to some good places for endemics too.” Savoring my coffee in a lull of conversation, I can only hope that I will come back with grandiose stories and exotic species to describe to Phil the next time we meet over coffee and pancakes.
From an early age I was always aware of the treetops and sky. My mom says I would lean around the rail of my stroller, craning my neck as birds flew overhead, and by Kindergarten I was drawing and writing stories from the perspective of birds whirling over my house. Saturday mornings were spent exploring my backyard, listening to the dawn chorus, and observing the parabolic blurs of birds while lying on leaf litter. With the exception of a driver’s license and broader knowledge on birds and the world, little has changed about why I birdwatch. Unlike plants or most animals, birds can cover huge amounts of territory effortlessly, giving their wanderings a sense of randomness, and chance encounter splendor. Although I still have many species in Northeast Ohio to see (northern shrike sightings in Ohio are just cruel jokes) I have seen many of the 250 species that migrate or nest here. What was once amazing, such as springtime sightings of electric warblers, or hearing the ethereal babbles of thrushes and veeries, sometimes, regrettably, loses its novelty. And yet, just when the birds of winter become drab or too laborious to leave the comfort of your home, the seasons change, bringing new species and the revitalization of my heavy binocular usage.
As I was preparing to go around the world for thirteen weeks, the changing of seasons would no longer exist for me, throwing a wrench into my year long routine. One week I would be at 8,000 feet in the foothills of the Himalayas and the next I would be watching Brown Noddies dive into the Maldives azure waters. All of the bird species were new to me, and birds were no longer on fields, mudflats or treetops, but on sand dunes, mountain faces, and every other conceivable habitat. This was all but regular, and challenged my homegrown skills as a birdwatcher.
Much of my life has been tempered by birds. I even bird watch in my dreams, mumbling species names between rapid eye movements. For most people though, birds are interesting, but to bird watch requires a lot of excessive time and dedication. It is quite possible to spend a whole day in the field without seeing a single bird, besides European Starlings. Currently, while traveling with my classmates and my professors, I have to remind myself that our class is focusing on courses related but not specific to ornithology. Train stations, hotel gardens, and historical sites; places of rest and waiting, are where I have done most of my birding on the trip so far. Surprisingly, these can be just as productive as National parks. In Thailand, I soon realized that without access to the jungle canopy, I might as well prefer train tracks or hotel gardens. It seems only the birdsongs venture below the leaves of the canopies in Thai jungles. By the end of India, nearly a month after leaving Ohio, I had recorded nearly 130 species of birds. Finishing our first safari in Tanzania, I stood in the expedition vehicle grinning with avian satisfaction. Everywhere I looked a bird flew, hopped, or sang into eyesight.
With no guidebook, though, taking morphological observations for future identification soon became stifling. Unique and colorful Tanzanian species, such as Mousebirds and kneeling Jabirus, were easy to identify with the internet, even a week later while in Cairo, but bland pipits and variations of flycatchers, where only the color of the eye stripes vary, are virtually impossible to identify without a field guide in hand. If only Amazon had shipped those guides to my house on time, I wouldn’t have been reduced to being a lobotomized Carrolus Linaeus. So where do I draw the line? Do I write down species lists including possible bird sightings or only record what I explicitly and definitively see? Although I do have a sense of competition, it’s trivial whether I see 131 species or 130 species of birds. What matters most is the pathway I take finding the birds, as well as knowing the birds on an intimate, rather than numeric level. I take reverie in the birds I was able to observe through Alaska to Germany, and in ten years time, look forward to looking through my cracked and worn guidebooks and being overwhelmed with memories.
Walking through the foothills of the Himalayas, I am well aware that birds are much more hypersensitive than I am. No matter how hard I try to be quiet, or what colors I wear, the birds here have incredible vision at a level of 100 hertz (allowing them to fly at 25 miles an hour through heavy brush) and extremely adept hearing. This hypersensitivity basically makes all of my stealth wanderings obsolete. I stay still, gentle in my movements and quiet in breathing, and slowly the birds reveal themselves to me, becoming active and descending from their hiding places. Winged blurs and echoes surround me, and I stand in the middle of a feathered centrifuge watching flitting tits, redstarts and vertically ascending creepers call to their winter cohorts. All of the burrs that are attached to my pants, and the mud on my hiking boots no longer matters with the experience of watching the avifauna inhabitants of these foothills. I simply can’t help but smile and laugh.
Now I know I’m no St Francis of Assisi, as shown through my terrible pishing skills, but I take comfort and pride in moments like this. I am neither hidden away behind a blind, or holding the birds in hand, but both the birds and I have a tacit understanding of what is a respectable distance for my approach. And with this gained knowledge of acceptable proximity and silence, I am able to observe new species in a foreign place. There truly is much comfort in knowing that the world I am traveling around in thirteen weeks, which was once only limited to a backyard in Northeast Ohio, still has secrets that no amount of time or effort can reveal without my waiting patiently.
As my journey came to a close, I strode into the Natural History Museum of Berlin with memories of all of the species and places I had encountered in the last 12 weeks of traveling. In the back of the building, birds were pinned up in a display representing species variation and the diversity of bird life, including several species that I had seen while traveling. I slowly walked to the front exhibition hall of the building, reading displays on geology and dinosaurs, and ventured into a small niche harboring a glass case. Before me was a fossil of Archaeopteryx, the very species which radiated into the birds of the world. Archaeopteryx, aesthetically was quite ugly, with feathers attached to scales, and yet I still couldn’t help but smile, even laugh. This ancient fossilized creature has managed to give me tons of good conversations and a passionate lifestyle. But to this scaly dinosaur with wings, feathers were only a means of continued survival. Closing my eyes, I imagined myself reaching into the case and shaking the five-clawed limb of Archaeopteryx. I left the Natural History Museum, knowing the origin of flight, and the wonders it has created.