All That Jizz

By John Leo

Bird watching. Noun (archaic). A form of harmless staring, conducted in woody areas, by genial eccentrics often named Matilda or Chauncey.

Birding. Noun (neologism). Dynamic, addictive and highly contagious behavior combining hunting skills, aesthetic delight, intellectual analysis and the dreamy withdrawal from normal life, especially during spring migration.

Every spring, billions of birds, increasingly restless from the secretion of seasonal hormones, mass into flocks, burst into the sky and pour up the great flyways across the U.S. and Canada. Millions of birders, just as restless but without hormonal justification, compulsively pour outdoors in search of vireos, tanagers, flycatchers, hawks and the stars of the season, brilliantly colored warblers.

In these fleeting weeks, birders head for one or more of the nation's famous migrant hot spots such as High Island, Texas, Big Morongo Wildlife Reserve in California, Point Pelee in Ontario and the Ramble in Manhattan's Central Park. Some will bird in a local park or simply settle into a backyard chair. Says Jerry Sullivan, a Chicago nature writer: "The nice thing is that you don't have to go some special place. You can do it just about anywhere."

During migration, birders tend to show up late at the office, or seem to need a day or two extra to complete out-of-town business. Even a Saturday trip to the dry cleaner's has been known to take two hours or more. In spring, Nature Writer Lola Oberman carries binoculars around her Maryland house all day, just in case a good bird appears at a window. And bumper stickers saying I BRAKE FOR BIRDS had better be taken seriously: on the highway, birders have been known to lose control when a good bird flies over. Pete Bacinski, one of New Jersey's best-known birders, totaled his Chevy Nova when he took his eyes off the road to look for his bird guide.

Once the genteel pursuit of an esoteric minority, birding is evolving into a mass sport. A 1980 study for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that some 2 million Americans were highly committed birders, meaning that they watch regularly, use a field guide, keep a life list and are able to identify a hundred or more species of birds. About 7 million Americans are fairly interested birders (able to identify at least 40 species), and 60 million, or one American in four, are at least casual watchers. Veteran birders, such as L. Hartsell Cash, a retiree in Winston-Salem, N.C., are pleasantly surprised by the sport's new respectability. "In the '40s and '50s it was still a little embarrassing to be a bird watcher," he says. "Now there's no doubt about it -- birding is In."

An estimated 600,000 guides are sold each year in the U.S., and Roger Tory Peterson's classic Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America, first published in 1934, has topped 3.5 million in sales. Birders account for most of the $14 billion spent annually on the appreciation of wildlife. That includes binoculars, spotting scopes, cameras, records and tapes of bird sounds, computerized software for keeping bird lists, and bird tours that reach any corner of the world, from Siberia and Mongolia (23 days, $3,595 from Wings, Inc.) to Madagascar, Mauritius and Reunion (25 days, $3,775 from Field Guides Inc.). Though some birders regard their hobby as a naturalist rejection of high-tech culture, the rebuke often requires frequent jet trips, Leitz 10 x 40-B Trinovid field glasses, Bausch & Lomb or Questar spotting scope and a Sony TCM-5000 tape recorder, especially souped up for birding by Saul Mineroff of Valley Stream, N.Y.

Normally a birder starts in the backyard or a nearby wood, sees all the local birds, then graduates to more and more travel in search of new species. Next come vacations in the states with the most birds (California, Texas and Florida), followed by forays onto the big-time birding circuit: southeast Arizona for Mexican specialties, the Dry Tortugas for noddies and boobies, Alaska for arctic and Asian species. The final step is the long trip to see a single bird: Michigan for Kirtland's warbler, Calcasieu County in Louisiana for the black francolin, a grueling five-mile trek up the Chisos Mountains in Texas for the Colima warbler.

Most birding zealots are at a loss to explain this lavish expenditure of time and energy. "It's just something I have to do," says Richard Turner, a professor of fine arts at New York University, falling into the familiar language of helplessness that marks the committed birder. The backyard and occasional fanciers should consider themselves lucky, according to Pete Dunne of the New Jersey Audubon Society. "Those people are still in control of their lives," he says. "For the rest of us, birding controls us. We're addicts."

High-level birding requires hunting skills such as tracking ability and a knowledge of habitat and weather, plus a knowledge of bird behavior, sounds, plumages and the pattern of small clues, sometimes called jizz, that can even reveal the identity of a distant, backlighted bird.

A single bird may produce more than a dozen different songs and calls, and plumage may vary widely by sex, age, region and season. Even if a species is seen for only a second, a top birder can sift through all the clues and come up with the right identification most of the time. "In part, birding is a mental challenge," says Dunne. "It attracts a disproportionate number of doctors and engineers -- people whose jobs involve the same kind of deductive reasoning birders use."

Many birders get started in their preteen years. "They may get wide-eyed seeing their first 'Baltimore' oriole," says Turner, a birder since age six. "That aesthetic component gets mixed quickly with the urge to collect -- the baseball-card factor -- and the hunting instinct, which is probably in the genes."

In fact, the sport is sublimation posing as innocent fun: hunting without killing, collecting without avarice. "You can collect birds without worrying about a place to store them," says Claudia Wilds of Washington, an expert on shorebirds and a rising star in the birding world. "There's an awful lot of adventure in it. It allows grownups to do things they thought they had put behind them when they grew up, like sloshing around in the mud and getting up in the middle of the night and going out looking for things."

For many, the experience becomes primarily a listing game, with lists for most birds seen in a day or lifetime, a county or a season. Peterson, 78, once kept a list of birdcalls he heard on movie sound tracks. Some feel compelled to list birds seen during a single minute, or those seen while sitting in one chair for a full day (the "Big Sit").

Though birding is a hobby, watchers are quickly drawn toward environmental issues. DDT nearly wiped out the osprey and the peregrine falcon. On April 19, the last California condor was taken from the wild. "We have to convert interest in birds into backing for conservation," says Arnold Brown of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. "It's one thing to admire a loon and another to realize that it's our oldest bird, 70 million years old, and in trouble from acid rain."

But some watchers are dedicated nonactivists who enjoy birding largely for the companionship it brings. A birder can travel a thousand miles into the wilds of another state and find instant rapport with local birding fanatics, who are busy collecting new species, along with mosquito bites and ticks. "Camaraderie is what birding is all about," says Benton Basham, a Chattanooga, Tenn., anesthetist.

For Basham, it is also about hunting and listing. He is currently at the top of the big-time birding tree, holder of the records for most species seen in a lifetime (777) and the most species seen in a single year (711) in the American Birding Association checklist area -- Canada, Alaska and the Lower 48 states. The world of listing is presided over by the approximately 8,000- member ABA and its magazine, Birding, which ranks birders by species seen, prints erudite articles on how to distinguish different birds in the field and sets rules for the listing game. One such rule is that birds reaching North America through human assistance cannot be counted, touching off speculation on whether the Western Reef heron that drew hundreds of birders to Nantucket, Mass., in 1983 actually came over from Africa as a stowaway on a boat. The ABA checklist committee voted to accept the bird.

The ABA also rules on Big Days, which are competitions to see as many species as possible in 24 hours. The association once removed a species from the total of a Texas team, thus costing it a tie with California for the national title. The team, while standing on the banks of the Rio Grande, had sighted groove-billed anis. The ABA decided that although the eyeballs of the Texans were indeed on U.S. soil, the birds were in Mexico, outside the official area of the game, and could not be listed. The birding world, particularly at its highest level, has a reputation for scrupulous honesty in listing.

It also has a reputation for hard-nosed competition in listing. Fifteen years ago, only about 75 people had seen 600 birds in North America. Now more than 500 have topped that figure, and 75 have seen 700. James Vardaman, a forest-management executive from Jackson, Miss., spent $45,000 and 170 days trying to see 700 birds during 1979. Vardaman, who called himself an amateur, paid guides and tipsters, jetted off after almost every rarity and ended the year listing 699 birds. Basham broke the 700 mark in 1983, and many birders dream of pushing the total higher.

Like other addicts, birders can let their work slip. Don Roberson, a well- known California birder, dropped his law practice at the age of 29 to follow the birds, though he has since relapsed and returned to work. Like ski bums, some talented young birders take low-level jobs as clerks or night watchmen, thus saving their major energies for the chase.

Bob Odear of High Point, N.C., traded down in life to be a full-time part of the birding world. Once the president and general manager of Wrangler jeans, Odear quit to make "one-third the money" running a birding company called Bob-O-Link and its phone service, the North American Rare Bird Alert. For $25 a year, subscribing birders are given a code name and the right to dial into a tape, changed as often as three times a day, listing the whereabouts of all known rarities in North America.

The phone service has cranked birding competition up a notch. Sandy Komito, 55, owner of a construction company in Haledon, N.J., blames Odear for turning him into a chaser. "Before Bob started the service in January of 1985, I was relatively passive," he says. Komito says he hunts rarities by tacking on a day or two of birding to a legitimate business trip. But when the ruddy ground dove was reported in Texas last November, he was there the next day, with no business trip as an excuse. He expects to fly 300,000 miles on birding trips this year and does not want to tot up the costs. "It would scare me if I found out," he says.

Birders have a rough rule of thumb for distinguishing between normal and obsessed watchers: the obsessives dream of going to Attu, a bleak Aleutian island 100 miles from Soviet waters and about 1,500 miles from Anchorage. Attu vaguely resembles a penal colony, but it is paradise to birders pining for a flyby of the Siberian rubythroat or other Asian rarities. "We have people who go without any hope of seeing new birds," says Larry Balch, the ABA's president and head of Attour, a service that brings about 65 birders to the island each spring for three weeks. "There's something magic and very relaxing about being at the end of the earth."

Even the most driven birders seem to harbor a few doubts about the chasing game. "It's ridiculous -- it costs more money than booze and takes more time," says Thompson Marsh, a professor at the University of Denver College of Law. Marsh, 84, who began listing birds in 1918, still hunts with the pack and is ranked fifth on the North American list. If someone wants to start a Birdwatchers Anonymous, says Marsh, he is ready to join. "I experience recurring intervals of lucidity," he says. "When a chaffinch turned up in New Brunswick, I stayed right here and I felt fine. Maybe there's hope for me yet."

Top birders often fly hundreds of miles only to find a bird that cannot be officially listed. Last winter Marsh and other top birders went to Charleston, S.C., to see a rare bird, said to be a gray-headed gull but that could be ruled a hybrid. "It's always a crapshoot," says Paul Sykes, a Georgia ornithologist. "The bird can also leave just before you get there. That's why we try to get there as quickly as we can."

"That's not my idea of bird watching, never finding anything on your own," says Colorado Birder Jack Reddall, who travels to see birds but refuses to chase. "Real birding is getting to know your own area and turning up good birds at home." California Birder Jon Dunn admits to mixed feelings about birding in the fast lane. "Competition taken to an extreme can lead to bad birding, too much pressure to tick off one more species."

Hotshots draw regular fire from purists for turning an aesthetic pursuit into a macho, competitive struggle. But even superlisters have been known to speak of birds with awe and wonder. Explanations for the appeal of birding proliferate, says Joseph Kastner, author of A World of Watchers, because it is hard to explain what the beauty and freedom of birds can do to the human psyche. At the heart of birding, he writes, is the "astonished awareness that comes in some unguarded moment when the watcher is left oddly vulnerable to feelings that only nature can provoke."