The ‘World Series’ of Birding--Watchers of a Feather Flocking Together

CAPE MAY, N.J. —  From the unblinking certainty of its soul a bird speaks in the night:

“Who, who-oo, whoo-whoo!”

A great horned owl. Bird No. 1.

Peter Dunne winds a European turbo through its gears in rapid search of No. 2.

It is 4 a.m. Starlit above, misty below. Pre-dawn velvet.

The shadowy carload, armed with binoculars and telescopes, is the Guerrilla Birding Team (“We hit and run”) in hot pursuit. Dunne, the leader, and two teammates are practicing for the next weekend’s World Series of Birding, a midnight-to-midnight contest to see who can identify the most birds in the woods, swamps, fields, beaches, marshes, backyards, telephone wires and highway medians of New Jersey. The 24-hour outing will have some of the best bird watchers in the country piling in and out of cars like circus clowns.

It’s 5:05. A cindery old railroad bed near Waterloo. “Bzeep. Bzeep.” Woodcock. Then a faint, pneumatic drumming that is felt as much as heard. “Like a heart attack,” observes Mary Gustafson. Ruffed grouse.

Expert Bird Watchers

Mary Gustafson, 24, state ornithologist from Ohio, a muncher of carbohydrates between stops.

Four “tseebits” followed by a trill. “Tennessee warbler,” says Dunne.

“No, Nashville warbler,” Peter Bacinski corrects him. “Tennessee is quicker at the end.” Dunne agrees. Ears can get rusty over the winter.

Peter Bacinski, 36, in the office an expert on high-tech lighting and heating, outdoors an expert on things that grow and fly. Comfortable abdomen admirably designed to provide perch for field glasses. Could hear a pin drop in an earthquake, or spot a needle in a haystack.

It is 5:20. An insistent, rising call like, “teacher-teacher-teacher!” Ovenbird. There are a number of mnemonic phrases birders file in their ears to help them keep hundreds of bird calls straight: “Quick, three beers!” Olive-sided flycatcher. “Sweet, sweet, I’m so sweet!” Yellow warbler. The pewee announces itself “Pewee!” then asks, in a second phrase, “PeWEE?”

One of the best birders in New York’s Central Park is blind.

It’s 5:30. A white-bearded man in cowboy hat, vest, lumberjack shirt and serious footgear as well as the obligatory binoculars emerges from the mist. For birders, this is the traditional plumage, and Dunne identifies him immediately. It is Dr. Dick Turner, earthy art historian, former college president and current scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, who lives on Cape May to be near the bird migrations.

A Clubby Group

Top birders, as varied as the birds they watch, are a highly gregarious lot well known to each other. Dunne, a master at attracting birds with his repertoire of imitated bird song, tells how he also has mastered getting Turner to return his phone calls: “Tell his secretary half of an off-color joke.”

As a man of letters, Turner is asked about the honor system among birders.

“Integrity is very, very important in birding. We accept what others say they saw or heard. If you’re doubtful about someone, there are very subtle ways of exorcising him.”

He chuckles, recalling past subtle exorcisms: “Maybe it’s because there’s no money involved. If there were, we might end up like in those bass tournaments, where guys have been caught smuggling in record fish.”

Under the World Series rules, identification--by sight or sound --must be unanimous on 95% of the birds listed. The balance may be identified by one or more members of a team, who usually number four. This, says Turner, allows room in the back seat for empty corn chip bags. (Other rules forbid use of aircraft to cut travel time and use of tape-recorded calls to entice curious birds out of the trees).

It’s 7:30. A Boy Scout camp near Allamuchy. The new sun is an orange in the mist rising off a pond. Bacinski lowers his window, refrigerating those in the rear. He immediately hears a red-eyed vireo and a Carolina wren.

‘Warbler Neck’ Hazard

Dunne jolts to a stop, makes peace with a highly territorial caretaker and gets two wood ducks on the pond. The Guerrillas scan the budding canopy of trees overhead, a contortion that leads to the occupational hazard of “warbler neck.”

It’s 8:05. Dunne brakes for meadowlarks near an orchard. He gets one in 30 seconds. Then a field of corn stubble, bobolink country. That takes 15 seconds. To the uninitiated, it is beginning to seem awesome.

The concept of the bird watcher is comic, but the birder might counter that there is nothing funny and something sad about people going through life deaf and blind to one of the most visible and charming examples of the abundance of life on this shared planet. Birders, always respecters of diversity, don’t say such things, but the option is open.

“I know a guy in Bayonne who’s birded for 30 years, but is afraid to come out of the closet,” Bacinski says. “He always tells everybody he’s going fishing.”

Recent statistics indicate, however, that birding is the fastest-growing pastime in the United States next to gardening. About 25 million people are now “out of the closet.”

It’s 9:06. “Red tail!” Mary cries as the car tools down a back road west of Somerville. “Kestrel on a phone wire!” Bacinski counters, his front window still open to the chill morning air. A a burger-chain restaurant looms ahead. “Great place for sparrows,” says Dunne. “Probably the sesame seeds,” says Bacinski, an authority on habitats.

British Visitor Along

“What do you do in the real world?” Bacinski asks Jeff Delve, a 31-year-old English guest slowly thawing in the back seat. He’s along for the dry run for kicks, and to decide whether to bring over a British team next year.

“Computers,” Delve replies. He’s been in the Colonies before, once took a three-day business trip to Dallas. His abiding memory of Big D is of seeing a scissor-tailed flycatcher. In Britain, breeding ground of eccentrics, bird watchers are part of the landscape, like earls. Delve knows a countryman who watches “Hawaii Five-O” on the telly just to hear new birdcalls.

It’s 9:32. Dunne wheels up to the Squibb company’s landscaped grounds near Princeton. Swish! A green-backed heron. Swish! Ruddy duck. On the official score card, the heron is marked “should see.” On the duck, “lucky to find it.” The birds so far number 89, about 60% identified by their songs. “Fair,” says Dunne, as Bacinski claims a purple finch on the front lawn.

It’s 9:45. Institute Woods in Princeton, Ellis Island to warblers migrating in spring, when oaks flower. Dunne gargles like a screech owl. The others make kissing sounds. This is called pishing. Conventional wisdom has it that pishing causes birds to stand forth bravely from the leaves to protect their fellows.

Theories on ‘Pishing’

People who believe this are the “altruists.” They are mightily angry at an Israeli ornithologist who says that birds respond to pishing because they are showing off, flaunting their machismo in the face of the strange noises. Dunne pishes anyway. He says it either attracts birds or scares them away.

The Guerrillas pish and the forest, just off an aptly named Lover’s Lane, resounds like the back rows of a movie theater on Saturday night. A parula warbler, whether altruist or braggart, stands forth. The Guerrillas exchange high fives.

Does musical ability help birders identify bird song? “Maybe,” says Bacinski. “Tone-deaf people don’t seem to do as well.”

“I dunno,” says Dunne, who is credited with a world-class ear. “All I listen to is rock music.”

Peter Dunne, 34, heartthrob-handsome, eyes ocean blue and comparably deep. Professional birdman with the New Jersey Audubon Society. Considered law but preferred, much preferred, fresh air and birds to niggling at $150 an hour. Invented World Series, only such event in the United States, either in a taproom or over a Western omelet the morning after, with Bacinski. Led the team that set the New Jersey record of 201 species in 1984 with the help of Roger Tory Peterson, St. Francis of American birding.

Four Top States

The Guerrillas’ 1984 record made New Jersey, where 376 bird species have been catalogued, only the fourth state to top 200 in what birders call a Big Day. The others are California and Texas, where planes are allowed, and Alabama, when weather grounded all the flights across the Gulf of Mexico. New Jersey is an essential corridor from here to there, as the voyagers, feathered or motorized, well know, for better or worse.

It’s 10:40. The grasslands of mid-Jersey at Assunpink Creek. The Guerrillas are now south of the hardwood forests. This means that they will miss raptors--hawks and falcons--rising on the thermals of the warming day. It’s a gamble weighed against chances of spotting other species down south. The whole World Series is a gamble.

Routes are picked and scouted in advance to get the broadest mix of habitats and migratory pit stops with the most economical use of road time. A sudden cold front or rain can foul up expected flight patterns. Last year, one team risked weekend shore traffic to bird Longport on the coast and lost an hour. Conversely, a weather change dumped a whole air force of migrants into the laps of a team that birds Sandy Hook only.

They call themselves the Sandy Hook Onlies. The Closet Birders have on their T-shirts an opening door revealing five pairs of binoculars above the motto Olim Solum Per Annum (We Only Come Out Once a Year). A Latin teacher in Paterson proofread the T-shirt for them.

Watchers Raise Money

The National Geographic sponsors a team, as do several optical companies. Dunne’s car is donated by the manufacturer. Some wise old owls deplore this as creeping commercialism, but the World Series will raise about $45,000 this year for various causes. The amounts are based on the number of birds a team gets. The K Team from Bernardsville’s Scherman-Hoffman Sanctuary, for instance, might find donors willing to contribute 20 cents a species.

It’s 10:43. The Guerrillas get what they came miles to Assunpink for, a grasshopper sparrow mumbling “buzz-buzz” almost inaudibly in a meadow.

It’s 11:09. Lunch. Sandwich meat slapped into bread and warm colas as Dunne motors at relatively legal speeds through the Pine Barrens. He stops only for birds and gasoline. He knows where a rare saw-whet owl is nesting in the Barrens, but passes it up. He won’t intrude on an endangered species. Neither will he scale a stone to flush a bird away from a following team. Otherwise, he is a very competitive man. By now, he is sometimes hitting the ground at a trot.

It’s 11:16. Lunch is over. The $24,000 car looks like a bird feeder, crumbs everywhere. Turner leads the Green Mountain Muthahs, whose feminine component dines with wine and such. Niceties, as nice guys in baseball, finish last. Or, as the Muthahs did last year, “a firm 15th.”

More Species in Marsh

It’s 12:38 p.m. The Brigantine sanctuary of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an oceanside salt marsh. The car doors fling open; a bird immediately cheeps; the Guerrillas shout in unison: “Downey woodpecker!” The casinos of Atlantic City are silhouetted across the water. The Guerrillas, refraining from invidious comparisons of gulls and gamblers and whence trends the republic, pick up 30 more species, including a “lucky to find it” Bonaparte’s gull on a sand bar teeming with similar laughing gulls. Awesome again, like picking out a mugger in a lineup of 5,000 identical suspects.

It’s 2:37 p.m. Stone Harbor at 117th Street, a two-block heronry, one of the very few failures of New Jersey’s ambition to line its coast completely with summer cottages, Ferris wheels and hot dog stands. For its own reasons, the black-crowned night heron has picked the brambles at 117th Street as one of its few nesting places in the state. The Guerrillas have it before they have scarcely bolted from the car.

It’s 2:39. Same place, 119th Street, where there is, incredibly, a traffic island without a gas station. Dunne: “Don’t forget to dump a bag of birdseed here before the Series, Mary.”

Bait. For sparrows. Legal?

Rules on Feeders

“Sure, until someone else does it,” says Dunne. (As it turns out, the sparrows were dining elsewhere when the Guerrillas sped by the following week. Maybe they were studying poetic justice. The rules permit birds spotted at feeders but none that could have been or was handled within the last 24 hours by a human hand. Hence, no chickens.)

It’s 3:26. The Second Avenue jetty at Cape May. Dunne turns his spotting scope in the direction of Bermuda. “Gannet!” A “lucky to find” a long way from its home in Newfoundland. Skepticism about bird watching has long since evaporated in the back seat, but how does one tell a gannet two miles out to sea?

“It’s the only gull-like, large white bird that dives,” explains Dunne as the Guerrillas pile back into the car.

It’s 4:20. Higbe Beach by the Cape May Canal, a hotbed of blue grosbeaks, Carolina wrens, prairie warblers, poison ivy and ticks. Bacinski: “I got more tick bites last year than warblers--31.” A flashing hint of yellow and Bacinski plunges into the bush, oblivious to the menace.

It’s 5:25. Cape May County Park. Bacinski, also an authority on human migration, complains about traffic. “Damn shubes.” Shubes? “A derisive term among local merchants for summer day-trippers from Philadelphia who used to bring their lunches in shoe boxes to save money.”

Mistaken Bluebird

Bacinski, astoundingly, misidentifies a bluebird against a lowering sun, then sees a real one by the horseshoe pits. Dunne comes running. No. 168.

It’s 6:24. Leesburg State Prison up ahead. Bacinski: “Jail birds and stool pigeons.”

It’s 7:52. After a mile walk up a decaying rail spur, a climb up a tree to spy from a distance on New Jersey’s only nesting bald eagle, Bacinski takes advantage of the 5% exemption for unanimous identification to let Dunne and Delve do the climbing.

It’s 10:50. It’s dark. Mary can imitate a barred owl, but is shy about doing so in front of humans. She walks off to the edge of a woods and lets go. A barking of “whoos” answers immediately. High fives in the night. No. 174.

It’s 12:15 a.m. A salt marsh along Delaware Bay. A Turk’s moon is low in the sky. The heavens have turned on the stars to full power. The wind has died in the reeds. Wavelets lap at the shore in the distance. The Guerrillas are silent. To listen, to share what they came for: beauty, fun, birds, companionship.

Birder Since Boyhood

Dunne, who has enjoyed birds since boyhood when he would spot one, then run home to look it up in a guide, then run outside again for another (“I was raised to think books belonged in the house”), is a kid again. “Every kid wants to stay up all night!”

At the end of a dirt road, crab trappers are watching a portable TV perched on the roof of an old Chevy. “Whatya all doin’?”

“Bird watching,” says Dunne, striding across a rickety bridge in the pitch darkness without elaborating. He leads on until the canned TV laughter is out of earshot. The Guerrillas listen for rails, which go “click” in the night. They get two, then a screech owl in the shadowed woods in the distance, then the cluck of a gallinule. That’s the last bird of the day.

Dunne, after 350 miles and 18 hours, has had enough for a dry run. He wants a beer and hoagie. In considering weather forecasts, the time of the month, the metal file of “chips,” “cheeps,” “twits,” “tseets,” habits and habitats of the Guerrillas’ birding brains, he had figured his route should have produced 181 species to have had a good Big Day. The gallinule had been No. 180.

Very, very awesome.

Birding on Way Home

Postscript:

In the real thing the following week, the Guerrillas crossed the New Jersey Audubon finish line at Cape May just before midnight. They had 181, including a wild turkey spotted by Delve (“Way to go, Brit!”) and another gannet, this one right off the jetty. But the warblers were out to lunch. Or off to Canada. They tied for fourth.

An incorrect score card--the runner-up team had forgotten to include a laughing gull--caused a reversal following a recount. A similar goof once cost golfer Roberto de Vincenzo the U.S. Open championship, but that’s a professional sport. This was birding. At the World Series awards luncheon, no talons were bared, at least on the surface. Dick Turner, a firm 17th this time, saw no need for exorcisms.

After the lunch, Pete Bacinski caught a ride home to North Jersey and cooled down by picking up casual birds along the Garden State Parkway. He got about 30, including a Forster’s tern that was almost up in the ionosphere. He educated some new skeptics in the back seat:

“The wings say tern. They beat fast, so it’s a small tern. Bigger ones beat slower. The wings were light. The only comparable bird this time of year is the common tern, but they don’t come this far inland. So, it’s a Forster’s.”

He heard eight and saw five in the backyard of a drop-off while stretching his legs. Then he headed home with the world--the real one--ringing in his ears.