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You can count on the birders

They quietly navigate the line between man and nature for the A udubon Society's annual bird inventory .

By BEN MONTGOMERY
Published December 31, 2006

TAMPA - The sun is touching the tips of the trees when Mary Keith steps out of her Subaru and into a field that used to be a forest.

"This is what kills me," she says. "This used to be a beautiful walk through the woods to a beautiful little pond. Now it's ..."

She stops and looks up. There they are.

There are still birds here. It just seems there are not as many.

That is why Keith is standing in her rubber boots on fresh bulldozer tracks by an office park off Fletcher Avenue on the day before New Year's Eve.

Somebody has to count the birds.

She does so with expensive binoculars, a tiny note-pad and the help of a retired math teacher named Gail Kruetzman and a vacationing Californian named Mike Rippey.

The three drive from ponds to patches of woods around Lettuce Lake Park near the University of South Florida, quietly navigating the lines between man and nature, to take a kind of urban inventory of Tampa birds for the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count.

They listen to the woods for the "who-cooks-for-you" call of the barred owl over the constant hum of nearby traffic. They spot blue-headed verios and palm warblers, and men on riding mowers.

They make a pish sound to stir the birds' curiosity then return to their cars to get hassled by a security guard for trespassing on private property.

Keith has counted in ever-expanding Tampa for 10 years now. In the past few years she has found a shrinking habitat.

"People take what was natural native woods and they dig in artificial ponds, but they don't make it deep enough for native birds," she says. "They put sod in and landscaping and they overfertilize, and our native birds and native plants are disappearing like crazy because we don't give them a place to live."

Signs of that struggle are everywhere.

Near a small pond behind a telecommunications building, there are no birds to be counted. Not one.

"No heron. No egrets. No ibis," Keith says as the others scan the pond. "It would be easier to list what we're missing rather than what we're finding."

Despite the gloomy apprensions of this group the overall count showed a healthy population over the county.

This group saw some evidence of it. Before noon, the three set off along the edge of a pond near a freshly scraped field.

A few steps in, Keith sees something.

"Ooh," she whispers. "Look there."

High in an oak tree sits an uncommon, redheaded, kuk-kuk-kuking sign that there is hope.

"It's a pileated woodpecker," Keith says.

"Magnificent," Kruetzman says.

Ben Montgomery can be reached at bmontgomery@sptimes.com or 813 661-2443.

[Last modified December 31, 2006, 01:20:25]