Wing nuts
Dedicated birders fly across Hernando County to tally as many bird species as possible in a day, a task made more difficult by dwindling habitat and wretched weather.
By DAN DEWITT
Published February 23, 2006
BROOKSVILLE
The woodcock's chirping from the grassy field was followed by whistling overhead as its front feathers caught the wind.
"Okay! He's flying now!" Kristin Wood said. She cupped an ear to hear the chirping and whistling and, seconds later, a faint thump as the bird returned to earth.
Wood and four other birders had hiked a mile in the rain and predawn darkness to this spot in Hernando County's Weekiwachee Preserve. Normally, they would wait a few more minutes to see as well as hear the male woodcock's brief, awkward mating flight.
But not today, not when they had identified only four birds and hoped to break their record of 126.
"Let's go," said another member of the party, Mike Liberton. "No self-respecting big day birder would spend this much time on one bird."
Big day birding is just that, "birding," rather than the more passive "bird watching." It is not a hobby but a sport, a test of identification skills and endurance - proof that, as Liberton likes to say, "Birding is not for sissies."
Competitions to count as many species as possible over a fixed area and period of time - big years and big days - became common in the 1960s and '70s. The results are printed in the American Birding Association's magazines and Web sites and pored over by serious birders.
"The people who send us information are very competitive and really want to see their names on the listings," said ABA secretary Carol Wallace.
By the standards of, for example, birders who spend a year of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars collecting sightings from the Dry Tortugas to the Aleutian Islands, the group in Hernando is casual.
Liberton and fellow Hernando Audubon Society member Clay Black, who together started the annual big day here five years ago, "are really into the thing of, let's get as many as we can," said Sid Taylor, a ranger who lives and works in the landlocked Withlacoochee State Forest.
"The rest of us are into seeing new birds and getting out into habitats we don't see every day."
Both the laid-back and the obsessed met at 5:30 a.m. in an Applebees parking lot and birded without stopping for 14 hours. In a convoy of compact SUVs, they worked their way inland from the coast, veering suddenly to the side of the road at the chance to see an uncounted species. They endured fierce winds and intermittent downpours that made the dry, well-lit interior of the Denny's they passed on U.S. 19 look like a paradise.
It was clear from the start that the morning storm would work for and against them.
After leaving the preserve, the birders expected to pick up several species of waterfowl in roadside marshes; these turned out to be mostly deserted, the birds apparently taking cover from the wind rippling the open water.
But at the beachside community of Pine Island, the next stop, the birders immediately saw the aptly named magnificent frigate bird hovering over utility lines on a 7-foot span of wings. Usually an offshore species, it had probably been blown inland by the storm, Black said.
"That's one we don't expect to see," he said. "That's definitely a bonus bird."
Aiming his scope across an expanse of needle grass, he was certain he had spied another rare bird, a peregrine falcon.
"Come on, Kristin! You can see its face good now."
No, said Wood, looking into the scope, it was too distant and its markings were too similar to the more common osprey.
"It's not confirmed," she said.
So it went all day. Black, a big man in a soaked T-shirt, charged into the elements like a pulling guard, calling out the names of birds he had spotted: "I got a least sandpiper . . . I got a Forster's (tern)."
Wood, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, reminded him of the rules that differentiate a big day from Audubon's annual census, the Christmas Bird Count: Other members of the team, and preferably all of them, should see the bird and agree to its identification.
Even so, the total mounted. At the Pine Island beach, the birders saw gulls, plovers and sandpipers. In residential Hernando Beach, they drove under an American kestrel perched on a wire and past a leafless bush decorated with a half-dozen brilliant green budgerigars, an escaped exotic.
A purple martin, sighted at 9:30 a.m., brought the count to 55; the number had climbed to 83 by 12:45, shortly after a flock of white pelicans flew over U.S. 19, their wingspans as wide as a car.
"Cha-ching," Liberton said.
By then their planned route had taken them into what seemed like unlikely bird habitat - the big subdivisions in and around Spring Hill.
The waterfowl that had been absent from the coastal wetlands - blue-winged teal, bufflehead and shovelers - floated abundantly in the artificial lakes of a gated community.
In the back yard of a fellow birder, Andy Maywalt, they saw a bright-yellow prairie warbler at a feeder and a screech owl that angrily showed its head after Maywalt climbed a stepladder and tapped the base of its birdhouse.
"Anything for No. 85," Taylor said.
They picked up a true rarity, the rufous hummingbird, in the yard of another helpful homeowner, who reloaded her feeder with sugar water as they waited.
Black waved away any ethical questions in his pronounced Kentucky accent: "Rules are for wee-umps," he said.
But Taylor was dismayed, she said, not so much by the approach as by the sight of wild birds confined and isolated by development.
"What we're seeing is the last of the habitat. And we're rushing around to find it," she said.
Those concerns - and any thought of a general shortage of birds - seemed to fade on the next leg of the trip. Just before 3 p.m., the birders picked up No. 100, a crow foraging on the edge of a retention pond, as they headed to the more rural eastern side of the county.
But even here every satisfying sighting was countered by reminders of the shrinking countryside and a feeling that the birding was not as good as it once was, that it will probably be still worse when they do this next year.
The birders squandered 30 minutes looking fruitlessly across a field at the only known burrowing owl nest in the county.
"There used to be four or five places we could go for burrowing owls," Wood said.
Bobwhite quail were once abundant in eastern Hernando and through much of the state. But their numbers have dropped drastically because of the loss of pasture and native grasses. This day would pass without a single sighting.
Bystre Lake, the prime birding location in the county, was as alive with birds as expected, but they were mostly the same kinds of birds: tree swallows darting over the water and cormorants lined up on the sun-bleached white limbs of partly submerged oaks.
Still, there were hopeful signs.
Bald eagles, once headed toward extinction, are now so common that the sight of two of them flying high in the now-blue sky over the lake generated shrugs. And Black, scanning the opposite shore with his scope, stopped at two white spots among a flock of sandhill cranes under an oak nearly a mile away. Without saying a word, he invited Wood to take a look.
"Whoopers! Get out!" Wood said, after seeing two whooping cranes - the tallest bird on the continent and one of the rarest, even after a gradual resurgence of its population.
After leaving the lake, still well short of their goal, the birders drove faster and moved on more quickly between the series of farms they visited.
"It's desperation time," Black said.
They proved their sharp eyes again and again, spotting a black-and-white warbler, a blue-headed vireo and, after a detour to a dairy farm's manure pile, an American pipit. As darkness approached, the group had counted 119 birds.
Black consoled himself, saying that better weather would have probably allowed them to see 20 of the species they had missed, including common ones such as the pileated woodpecker.
Taylor couldn't care less: "I'd die happy if I die tonight . . . a whooper, a rufous hummingbird and a magnificent frigate. The first two are life birds for me,'' she said, meaning she had never before seen them in the wild.
The birders' last stop was the Chinsegut Nature Center north of Brooksville, where Wood is the director and where they heard, as she promised, the gentle "whoo" of the great horned owl. Thanks to Black, they also spied the distinctive silhouette of its head high in a pine tree as it spied down on them.
A few hundred yards away, in nearly total darkness, the day ended the way it began, with Wood hearing the chirp of the woodcock, which they could now listen to for as long as they wanted.