For the birds?

While bird-watching is more popular than ever, competitive "listers" may not see how birds live, or that their habitat is disappearing.

By Meera Subramanian

Read more: Books, Environment, History, Animals, Nature, Reviews, Book reviews

Nov. 16, 2007 | The love of bird-watching works a bit like a virus. Some contract it in early childhood, perhaps when nursing a downy chick back to health or when a grandmother points out a black-capped chickadee at the backyard bird feeder. Others catch it through contact with other birders, who tend to gaze off into the sky as you talk to them, mumbling something about wishing they had their binoculars. Either way, the epidemic is on the rise as more and more people get hooked on the simple pleasure of identifying and watching birds.

In "Of a Feather: A Brief History of American Birding," author Scott Weidensaul places birders in a long historical context, from our Founding Fathers to today, bringing the bird geeks from the fringe into the fold. Weidensaul, raptor expert and author of "Living on the Wind," the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book about migratory birds, paints a seamless narrative of the early Americas and the first men (and a few women) who discovered the unfamiliar bird life of North America as Europeans swept over the unknown territory of the continent.

The first part of the book reads like a gossip column, a deeply researched insider's scoop of the early characters who were "liars, drunks, slave-runners and scoundrels of every unfortunate stripe." A few of the names might be familiar; most won't be. They include Alexander Wilson and Billy Bartram, Thomas Nuttall and George Bird Grinnell, Graceanna Lewis and Florence Merriam Bailey, Elliott Coues and, of course, John James Audubon, born Jean Rabine in Haiti to a French sea captain and a chambermaid. Ooo-la-la.

With engaging prose, Weidensaul leads us into the obsessive world of early ornithology and the adventures and misadventures of its adherents in the New World. It was a time of conquering and christening the elements of the newly discovered land, a Garden of Eden that included birds never before spied by Caucasian eyes.

Often failures in every other endeavor they undertook, these early figures became fixated on the natural world, which sometimes drove them to extremes. Some abandoned their families; one shimmied up a tree to collect an egg, which he popped in his mouth, whole, and held there as he escaped on horseback from unfriendly Indians. One character leads us to the next, through chance encounters in Kentucky shops or friend-of-a-friend introductions, although a disproportionate number of these early people who found their focus on birds seem to be Philadelphia Quakers, making me think that the community was smaller than Weidensaul implies.

With the early interest in collecting and cataloging, ornithological art emerged as an integral part of identification and what would one day become the modern field guide. Each generation gave rise to a new format or artistic approach, sometimes through plagiarism with a twist, sometimes with a completely new style. Audubon, after much experimentation, finally discovered that if one impaled freshly shot birds, they could be positioned into dramatic poses, "as though the bird were patiently sitting for its portrait." The hefty limited-edition books of the early years, such as the series for Smithsonian at the turn of the century by Charles Bendire (the egg thief) and Cleveland Bent, were revolutionized in the mid-1900s by Roger Tory Peterson, whose name became synonymous with the pocket field guides he popularized.

The evolution of birding books continues today. Just seven years ago, a quiet man named David Sibley introduced an eponymous field guide with exquisite drawings that became an immediate hit among birders. Each of these advances built upon and improved the previous generation's portrayal of what is ultimately very complex biological and taxonomic information -- should the section on New World vultures be next to the section on hawks or storks? -- that gets to the essence of how we perceive the avian world around us.

Like the rest of America's growing population in the pioneer era, naturalists headed west after conquering the East, leaving behind a trail of newly identified birds (as well as mountains, mammals and more). They approached the new creatures they found with about as much respect for life as they showed the native human population. "The story of ornithology in the West through most of the nineteenth century," writes Weidensaul, "is largely one involving men on horseback with guns." Long before high-powered binoculars and the telephoto lens, years before the take-only-memories, leave-only-footprints ethos, the early birders were all about collecting -- and one collected by killing.

What harm could there be in the mass takings? It was a time of abundant bird life we can barely imagine today, with only a handful of wild characters pursuing an endless winged world. But by the approach of the 20th century, as more Americans became interested in birds, the avian numbers were dwindling. People were discovering that the Western Hemisphere was indeed finite, as airborne species like the passenger pigeon that once blackened the skies went extinct.

The decline seemed inevitable given, for example, that Christmas was traditionally celebrated with something called a Side Hunt in which holiday revelers entertained themselves by shooting anything that moved, mostly birds. Whichever team ended up with the biggest pile of carcasses won. It was fun for the whole family.

As an antidote to the indiscriminate slaughter, a man named Frank Chapman, a member of a young group called the Audubon Society, initiated an event called the Christmas Bird Count in 1900, channeling a nascent conservation consciousness into a contest to identify, but leave alive, as many birds as possible in a set period. Twenty-seven people participated that first year. The event now attracts 50,000 people in 2,000 locations.

Next page: Some birders spare no expense to see a rare bird, yet hardly take the time to appreciate it once found