zaaaaaa zooooooo!

David Allen Sibley talks the talk and, as a birder extraordinaire, he walks the walk, from marsh to savannah to tundra. Now sparrows and ordinary folk herald the arrival of one man's passion, the definitive guide to the birds of North America.

By JEFF KLINKENBERG

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 5, 2000

At more than 2 pounds, The Sibley Guide to Birds is hefty in scope and weight.

CONCORD, Mass. -- On the movie screen, Indiana Jones lopes through a bamboo forest. Normal people follow the plot: Is Indy going to catch an arrow in the back?

David Allen Sibley, sulking in the neighborhood cineplex, is not normal people. He can't enjoy the film, not with those obnoxious bird screeches on the soundtrack.

goBek, goBek, goBek, poDaydo poDaydo

Trouble is, the willow ptarmigan that mocks the sweating Mr. Jones in that tropical jungle dwells in the arctic.

"I guess it's dramatic license," Sibley says with disapproval.

When it comes to birds, Sibley prefers to stick to reality. If the bird is green, don't pretend it's yellow. If it warbles, don't make it cheep.

Birds have intrigued Sibley since he climbed out of the crib. At 6, he traced pictures of them; the next year he drew them from real life. At 12, he dreamed of creating the perfect field guide for birders.

Now, at 39, he's about to pull it off. The National Audubon Society's The Sibley Guide to Birds will show up in stores this month. If you thought Indiana Jones was dying to get his hands on the Ark of the Covenant, you don't understand hard-core birders. A fanatical flock, they can't wait to dip their beaks in Sibley's book, if only to compare it to the birding Bible long in print: Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds.

Sibley's volume features 6,644 color illustrations of 772 North American species. It has authoritative maps and authoritative text. It does everything but cry goBek, goBek, poDaydo poDaydo when you press the picture of the willow ptarmigan.

"The master artist and the master birder are one," says world-famous birder Peter Dunne. "David Sibley knows the birds of North America as intimately as anyone has ever known them."

Not bad for a college dropout.

Pishingus sapiens

"Pish, pish."

When David Sibley talks to birds, they talk back.

He's pishing up a storm in the marsh of Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge near his home in Concord.

"Swamp sparrow," Sibley says, identifying a bird by its chinga chinga chinga song alone.

The sparrow confirms the identification (Melospiza lincolnii) by alighting atop a cattail blade in plain sight, as if the little critter wanted to take a good look at the Homo sapiens making with the annoying pish-pishes.

Sibley is round-faced, like an owl, and wears round, rimless spectacles. The original strong silent type, he will never be mistaken for a noisy ptarmigan. His conversation is punctuated by long pauses as he studies the tree line through his binoculars.

He started stalking birds in his boyhood back yard in Connecticut. He soon outgrew the yard; his dad, Fred, a Yale ornithologist, liked to bring along offspring when he traveled.

They hung from cliffs while Fred studied one of the rarest species on earth, the California condor. They camped their way across North America, looking for anything that moved in the sky.

When David was 9, he and his dad were birding in Connecticut. "There's a prothonotary warbler," David announced. Fred started to correct his son; warblers are difficult to identify, and that species of warbler is unusual in Connecticut. But there it was. Another time, the boy identified a Bell's vireo by its chewede jechewide cheedle jeew song. Fred doubted until he trudged across a pond and saw the rarity.

"Even when he was a little boy, he was writing down bird songs in his own hieroglyphics," Fred says.

Childhood visitors to the Sibley household were loathe to open the refrigerator freezer to dig out a banana Popsicle, which was just as likely to turn out to be an American goldfinch. David liked to fool with their dead wings to understand the mechanics of flight.

zaaaaaa zooooooo

"Hear that savanna sparrow?" he whispers now, back in the present, in the Massachusetts marsh.

He and his wife, Joan, moved recently to Concord from Cape May, N.J., where they used to count hawks. They met at Massachusetts' Manomet Bird Observatory in 1983. Joan had heard of Dave Sibley -- everybody had heard about birding's whiz kid. But as she sat reading Trinity by Leon Uris she was shocked to see the young man emerge from his pickup truck carrying clothes -- on hangers. He was infamous for his rumpled wardrobe.

"Turned out he'd been visiting his grandmother, who had put the clothes on hangers," Joan says. "I've never seen him use a hanger since."

Joan has a master's degree in ornithology. David dropped out of Cornell after his freshman year.

"I wanted to be an ornithologist," he says. "But I just couldn't handle being in the classroom."

In the 1970s, when many hormonal males dressed like Tony Manero -- John Travolta duded up for disco in Saturday Night Fever -- Sibley wore T-shirts, short pants and sneakers so tattered other birders volunteered to buy the poor boy a new pair.

fraank fraank fraaank taaaaw taaaaw

"Anyone hear that bird over in the swamp?" somebody would wonder about the distant croak.

Sibley and his poor footware would leap onto his bicycle and pedal like mad to the water's edge. He'd wade in, lift his binoculars and nod.

Great blue heron.

Warblers, wagtails and peanut butter

In 1934, a schoolteacher named Roger Tory Peterson wrote and illustrated the first practical guide to birds. Friends and family thought he was daft. The publisher, anticipating a niche book at best, did a modest first printing. In what is still considered a publishing miracle, 2,000 books were sold in a single week during the bleakest economic period in history.

Peterson died in 1996. His book, living on, has sold more than 4-million copies.

When David Sibley was a boy, he studied Peterson's field guide like other kids studied Dr. Seuss. He read it at night under the covers and carried it into the woods.

He was a boy when he first met Peterson, who knew his father. The precocious child even showed Peterson a few drawings.

Sibley was barely an adult when he bumped into Peterson again. The aristocratic, white-haired prince of birding had arrived in Cape May for the "World Series of Birding."

The object of competition was to see which team could identify the most bird species in 24 hours. Peterson's teammate was birding's latest wunderkind.

"He was an old man, but his eyes and ears were still pretty sharp," Sibley says.

They counted 201 species and won.

That day, Sibley cleared his throat and told his hero something brazen:

"I'm going to do my own bird guide.

"Go for it," Peterson answered.

Sibley's goal was to create the bird guide he had always wanted. First, the pictures of the birds had to be lifelike. Birds usually don't present an easily identified profile in the wild. They're flying away or hiding in the brush. Their feathers change according to season. Sibley planned to draw six or seven pictures of each bird to show it in every possible way. He also wanted text and maps to accompany the illustrations. Other guides made readers work too hard.

Sibley camped from coast to coast, taking notes and drawing while eating peanut butter sandwiches in his van at night.

He watched for migrating warblers while living, illegally, on the causeway between Miami and Key Biscayne. In the Keys, in the mosquito-infested summer, he searched for Bachman's warblers, now considered extinct. In the Dry Tortugas, exhausted migrating birds fell out of the sky during a spring cold front. Cerulean warblers dropped from trees.

In the Bering Straits, off Alaska, he threw up in rough seas. But the sight of horned puffins made bearable the incessant barfing.

All the while he was sketching and writing. In his free time, he led tours for hard-core birders.

One time, he sat on the banks of the Salinas River watching California gulls and Western gulls. He heard an odd jijek cry and spotted a small yellow bird dart into river vegetation. Turned out to be the first record of a gray wagtail, a Eurasian species, in the continental United States.

Another time he was leading a tour from a pitching boat far out in the Atlantic, hoping to see storm petrels. A large white bird flew past.

"Hey, I think I just saw a Buller's shearwater," Sibley yelled.

"Impossible," shouted another birder.

A New Zealand species, the Buller's shearwater had never been seen in the Atlantic. Sibley insisted. Other birders scoffed. But photographs snapped by someone on the trip told the tale: It was a Buller's shearwater, the first and still only sighting along the Atlantic seaboard.

In 1987, Sibley and his wife, Joan, were relaxing in a hot spring in Big Bend National Park in Texas. They'd been birding for months, living like nomads.

"It was clear the book wanted to be born," Joan says, "and we sat in the hot water talking about the scariness and hubris of saying out loud, "Sure, I'm going to do a field guide to the birds of North America.'

"It takes a fair amount of chutzpah. But once he said it aloud a few times -- in the dark, full moon, in the hot water in west Texas -- it just started to seem real."

Tu-whit to-who. To whom?

"Want to go to Walden?"

Sibley lives a mile or so from Henry David Thoreau's old homestead. Walden Pond is a state park.

"Never read him," he says, more interested in the practical than the transcendental. "But now that I live here, I want to read him."

As a birder, Thoreau was a romantic. The call from a screech owl sent delicious shivers down his spine.

"Wise midnight hags!" Thoreau wrote in his journal. "It is no honest and blunt tu-whit to-who of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn graveyard ditty. . . ."

"Woo-a, woo-a," warbles David Sibley, an imitation so good it might fool a lady screech owl.

Sibley is not trying to attract a mate. He's trying to get the attention of warblers, who hate screech owls. When they hear one, they usually show up to scold. As if on cue, a black-throated green warbler rises to the occasion.

Six years ago, after Sibley got money from a publisher to finish his book, he started painting like a maniac. He paints in a small room off his house, which was once owned by Revolutionary War hero Prescott Moore, who accompanied Paul Revere on the famous ride. Sibley painted eight hours a day until he tumbled, exhausted, into bed. He dreamed of birds.

"I haven't had much time for birding," he sighs now. "It's nice to get outside again."

Sometimes he wonders what is left for him to accomplish. His book documents 772 species; he has seen all but eight of them, though he isn't one of those obnoxious birders who crows about numbers.

"Birding's gotten too competitive," he says. "More men than women are obsessed about how many birds they've seen. Wonder why that is? Maybe it's the hunting instinct.

"I remember when there were more mysteries and discoveries to be made. Now we know so much. There's an information glut. I guess my book will be part of it."

His melancholy vanishes as he walks away from the pond and up the hill into the woods. He stops at a pile of stones. The little house is gone, but you can see the foundations of Thoreau's cabin.

"Pish, pish," says David Sibley.

fee beeyee

"Black-capped chickadee."

If you go

David Allen Sibley will lead a trip and sign copies of his new book as part of the annual Florida Birding Festival and Expo that begins today at Harborview Center, 300 Cleveland St. in Clearwater.

The four-day festival features a variety of seminars and field trips for beginning and advanced birders. For a schedule of trips, speakers and fees, call (727) 462-6520.

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