Birding Is a Front for Something (We Just Don't Know What)

Birders get a bad rap in the public mind. Most people think we're senile, pith-helmeted dorks -- annoying, embarrassing to be seen with, but basically harmless.

Then this article in Slate.com (by Nathan Heller), comes along with its own strange view of what we do. This piece is so peculiar I couldn't help sharing it with the other birders in my life.

Here are some of the salient passages:

"...a bird-watcher's motives can seem puzzling, if not downright suspect. Rising at vampiric hours, these people leave polite society behind to spend long stretches staring not at dazzling vistas or strange beasts but at birds—and often unexotic ones at that. They pack enough high-end equipment and field expertise to undertake a hunt but never touch their prey; the consummating act of birding is, at most, a picture snapped for private use and from a distance, in the manner of a pervert with a beach pass. Birding is the sort of hobby that seems like a front for something."

I'm not clear what kind of mental leap was necessary to go from a fundamental misunderstanding of the pleasures and virtues of birding to an insinuation that birders are a bunch of perverts or worse. I could go on and on about his out-of-hand dismissal of "unexotic" birds -- which, to Heller, probably means anything smaller and less colorful than the Froot Loops toucan. But the bigger point is this: just because the pleasures of someone else's hobby are lost on you doesn't mean that hobby is somehow sketchy or evil. Seriously. If I lived in fear of everyone with a pastime I considered pointless and stupid, I'd never leave the house.

"...there are four species of birder at large in the world. The first and least intimidating group includes those who see bird-watching as an endeavor roughly equivalent to Tuesday-night poker, volunteer gardening, or mah-jongg—an open-access hobby and a chance to connect regularly with friends. These people are frequently novices... a second group, an autonomous cadre of enthusiasts who set their own schedules and often dwell on single bird groups or locales for stretches, like a book critic taking a month to read an author's full oeuvre. Then there are the specialists. These people focus on one kind of bird obsessively and always, often with accompanying Web sites. Fourth are the listers, who chase birds to check them off a list. Some keep life lists (birds they've seen in their lives);* some keep year lists (starting anew every January); and others make up to-do lists by country, state, and so forth (certain New York City listers work by borough). There is, possibly, something compulsive in this approach...."

There's perhaps some truth about the first and fourth categories -- but I don't think I've met anyone in the two middle groups. The only people I've met who systematically bird only one place are biologists who are paid to do so. And if there are serious birders who pursue only one kind of bird to the exclusion of all others, they are rare birds indeed. And many birders I know, myself included, fall into more than one category -- I love birding as a social activity, and I also like keeping lists of my sightings.

And what about the bigger, unspoken, fifth category that almost all birders fall into: people who enjoy birding as an opportunity to commune with nature and be reminded of the fundamentals of how the world works?

To his credit, Heller does actually follow a few birders into the field (he says nothing about whether he enjoyed his search for American Coots or not). But strangely, nowhere in his article does he ask any of them WHY they got into birding what they hope to gain from it, or how birders contribute to society as a whole. Instead, he wastes numerous column inches verbally scratching his head over why we're out there or trying to posit birding as a complicated metaphor for something related to environmental angst in the post-nuclear age.

Dude. If you want to know why we bird... just freaking ask.

On My Nightstand: Reading About Birds

(First in an occasional series.)

When I started birding a few years ago, I noticed something weird: I was in one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country (Orange County, California, just south of Los Angeles) , but almost all the birders I met were white. And even they realized that this wasn't a good thing.

And so did John Robinson, one of the tiny number of African-American birders and professional naturalists. After years of enduring double-takes from people who'd never seen a black guy with a spotting scope, he began to investigate why so few people of color are birders. The result of his investigation is his book Birding For Everyone: Encouraging People of Color to Become Birdwatchers.

Some of the answers he finds—gleaned from interviews and recent results of the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment— are unsurprising: A lack of role models. A lack of exposure to and education about the pleasures of the natural world. (Oddly, the top reason African-Americans surveyed gave for not birdwatching was a lack of time—something birders of all backgrounds can relate to.)

Some might wonder why it's a problem that the birding world is as white as a Bufflehead's belly: after all, birding is a hobby, not a career choice. So what if some of America's ethnic communities have different recreational preferences than others?

Robinson has a long-sighted answer: it's not just about the people. It's about the birds. Like it or not, non-white populations in the US are growing faster than white populations (back home in California, whites are already less than 50% of the state's population). And yes, non-white Americans do vote. Will this population be willing to support national parks and nature reserves if it has no idea what's in them? Will people be willing to support legal measures to protect wild birds if they've never seen one?

So, the fact that the youngest, fastest growing groups in the country have little interest or connection to the natural world not a just social problem: it's an environmental problem. And Robinson points out that he's not the only one to make this claim: it's long been a concern of environmental activists of all backgrounds.

Robinson's proposals to reverse this trend are eminently reasonable: Outreach efforts to schools and low-income communties by environmental professionals (including commerical birding enterprises such as optics companies). Get birding and nature advocates involved in educational partnerships with groups such as Head Start. And while he emphasizes that the white birders he's encountered have been welcoming and friendly, he recommends that nature reserves and birding groups target some of their public relations campaigns explicity to minority audiences.

Robinson's book simultaneously addresses two audiences: people of color on the verge of becoming birders, and experienced birders/environmental activists interested in making the birding world more inclusive. This makes the work a bit schizophrenic: the former group may not be interested in statistics about why people like them aren't birding, and the latter won't care about the detailed instructions about how to use binoculars effectively.

He also plays down the role of cultural factors in the absence of minority birders, only mentioning that cultural preferences have been examined and are considered "controversial". I can't speak for the African-American community, but I do know that less-assimilated Asian-Americans would rank birding somewhere between beer pong and karaoke on the scale of usefulness in personal and professional development. (When I first saw Robinson's book, I immediately imagined equivalent volumes addressed to my peeps: "Just Because It's Inedible, Doesn't Mean It's Uninteresting! Birding for Chinese-Americans" or "Birding: It Will Raise Your AP Biology Scores and Look Awesome on Your Yale Application!")

Someone needs to spell out (diplomatically) the uncomfortable truth: some cultures put less emphasis on the importance and sanctity of the natural world than others, and it's up to insiders with a knowledge and understanding of these cultures to change this. (Sigh. Okay, I just did it.).

And here's something else I'd tell an inner-city or newly-immigrated would-be birder: Birding doesn't have to be expensive. Sure, there are a lot of people out there with $1000+ bins who regularly jet to Costa Rica to expand their life lists, but you can still have an amazing time without doing this. (In about three years, I've gotten over 300 lifers and had tons of fun with my $60 no-brand Sports Chalet binoculars.)

But these are quibbles. Robinson has performed an important service by pointing out that environmental stewardship—and enjoyment of the natural world—are too often perceived as white concerns instead of what they are: human concerns. And his passion for birds, and for serving as a role model to minority birders, is contagious. I'm looking forward to seeing where he takes this mission next.

Pretty Ugly (part 1)

Salton Sea lifer #1: Verdin.

The odd French expression jolie-laide translates literally into "pretty-ugly". It does not mean "sort of ugly" but simultaneously pretty and ugly: it's used to describe things that are alluring despite not being conventionally attractive—such as Edith Piaf and pugs.

I thought of this expression often over the past week, after spending three days stomping through piles of dessicated dead fish and waking up to the smell of cow manure—and loving almost every minute of it. Birding near the Salton Sea simultaneously sucks and rocks.

We arrived on the Thursday after Christmas, drove past the boarded-up remains of old motels, gas stations, and resorts; checked into a non-boarded-up hotel, and immediately set out to look for Glenn's grail bird, the Burrowing Owl—and within 15 minutes found one, peeking out of its burrow off the side of the road. We pulled over and spent about half an hour watching and photographing it before it retreated into its hole. Over the next few days, we would see several more: on our second day, we got lost—detailed maps of the area appear to be nonexistent, something we overheard several other visitors complain about during our stay—and pulled to the side of the road to get our bearings. And right across the street were TWO Burrowing Owls, staring at us from on top of their burrow!



After leaving our first owl in its hole, we continued to the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge , where I scored three lifers in a five-minute period: a Verdin, several Abert's Towhees, and a flock of Gambel's Quail, all a few feet from the visitor center. By now I was absolutely giddy: if this pace kept up, I would expand my life list by 36 birds an hour! And assuming 10 hours of birding a day (Glenn wanted to get both sunrise and sunset shots, so we planned to be out shooting/birding every day from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m), this would mean 360 new birds a day over the course of the next two full days of birding! Woohoo!!

Of course, it didn't end up this way—in the end, I got only five more lifers (Ross's Goose, Common Ground-Dove, Inca Dove, Eurasian Collared-Dove, and Sandhill Crane—all expected, common birds in the area). Still, being able to spend three days doing nothing but looking for and thinking about birds in a new place was reward enough.

Thankful

                     Yum, yum!

The Thanksgiving holiday has been a welcome respite from my insane work schedule. We had our customary decadant dose of turkey and stuffing with my family up in L.A., AND two extra days to spend birding—what more could we want?

Even though we didn't spot too many rarities, just being outdoors with our cast of regulars was enough to be thankful for. My family, quite sensibly, has always eaten Thanksgiving dinner late (since everyone gets sleepy after a big dose of turkey, why not hold off the feast until just before bedtime?) Thus, Glenn and I had most of Thanksgiving day to spend outdoors looking for birds.

We started out at TeWinkle Park in Costa Mesa, where a couple of Hooded Mergansers and Yellow-throated Warbler were spotted last year. No rarities of that magnitude have been spotted there recently, but it still has a pretty pond filled with feisty ducks and herons, and is a pleasant place for strolling and photography. And as is the case with any park, occasional surprises do show up: last week, we saw this bird, who appears to be a female Summer Tanager:



Then we headed to the Upper Newport Bay, where we spotted two of the Eurasian Wigeons reported there earlier in the week. We also spotted a loon off near the opposite side of the bay, but from where we were, we couldn't tell what kind it was (most likely, it was the Pacific Loon reported during the last Sea and Sage monthly survey of the area).

On Friday, we celebrated Buy Nothing Day at Bolsa Chica, which was as jammed with waterfowl as South Coast Plaza was with shoppers. Over 100 Double-crested Cormorants were swimming near the footbridge, as were dozens of Brown Pelicans, Lesser Scaups, and Western Grebes. Near the tidegates were several Redheads mingling with the Scaups, as well as dozens of Snowy Egrets and White Pelicans. The only unusual birds we found were the resident Reddish Egret and a male Eurasian Wigeon, who was vocalizing loudly in one of the back lagoons.

We also saw, from a distance, the infamous bird-killing glass wall surrounding the McMansions on top of the bluff. I noticed strips of yellow tape—the kind used for police barricades—flapping from the wall: Were these put up in response to bird concerns? And who did it?

I learned during today's Sea and Sage Audubon trip to Bolsa Chica (can't get enough of that place!) that the tape wasn't actually attached to the wall, but to a chain-link fence that had just been installed directly behind the wall, in response to birders' concerns.



While a clearly imperfect solution (its looks won't go over well with homeowners, and small birds may still fly into the glass when trying to move through the fence), it at least shows that birders aren't as wimpy they look: we have the moral authority and clout to push people to do the right thing.

And this is something else to be thankful for.

Birding Meme

I found this meme—a list of questions for birders—on Cogresha's birding blog. Don't look at it; it'll put my blog to shame. Okay, go ahead—you'll like it, I promise.

Here are my answers to Cogresha's thought-provoking questions. I'm curious as to how others would answer these—feel free to share your thoughts!

Questions for Birders

1. What is the coolest bird you have seen from your home?

My most memorable at-home sighting was my very first sighting of a Townsend's Warbler about a year and a half ago, just after I started getting into birds. There I was, coming home from some errand and right in front of me appeared this amazing black-and-yellow bird unlike any I had ever seen before. It was the most exotic-looking little bird I had ever seen in the wild. At that time, I had no idea that such cool birds could exist in my lame little suburb. Now I know that Townsend's Warblers are regular winter visitors here, but I still get a buzz whenever I see one.

2. If you compose lists of bird species seen, what is your favorite list and why?

I've only recently started keeping formal lists of my sightings, as I wrote about here. For me, the only thing better than the happy memories of past birding trips is the anticipation of upcoming ones. So I'll answer this the same way Frank Lloyd Wright responded when asked what his favorite building was: "My next one."

3. What sparked your interest in birds?

What turned me into an official birder was my training routine for the Orange County Marathon. I did all my long training runs through Talbert Nature Reserve, and down to the mouth of the Santa Ana River. I only allowed myself to stop running if I was in life-threatening pain, or if something really unusual showed up. The race would have gone better if I hadn't chosen such a birdy training ground: during my long runs, I had my first sightings of a Black Skimmer, and my first local sighting of a Bald Eagle. I ended up taking a lot of walking breaks.

4. If you could only bird in one place for the rest of your life, where would it be and why?

I'm not touching this one with a ten-foot pole—may none of us ever have to make this choice!

5. Do you have a jinx bird? And why is it jinxed?

No jinx bird—just a lot I haven't seen yet, and a lot I'd like to see better.

6. Who is your favorite birder, and why?

I'm in no way qualified to judge who has the best ornithological credentials. But I am in deep awe of my first (and so far, only) official birding instructor, Sylvia Gallagher. Not only does she teach birding classes at every level, several days a week; she writes about our local birds and does bird embroidery that's mind-boggling (anatomical detail that rivals Sibley's drawings— in silk thread!). She's also politically active and active in our local Audubon chapter. And she's a great—and demanding—teacher. I noted with glee that an intermediate-level birding class offered by a neighboring chapter covered some of the same topics we slaved over in Sylvia's BEGINNING birding class. To her, if you can tell a penguin from an ostrich, you can surely distinguish a Cassin's from a Western Kingbird!

7. Do you tell non-birders you are a birder? What do they say to you when they find out?

Absolutely, if there's an opening for in in the conversation—I think of it as "birding evangelism": the more people who can be engaged in the natural world and made sensitive to its needs, the better. Most non-birders are politely curious about it; a typical response is to say they have an uncle/boss/neighbor who's really into birds. Quite a few also ask bird ID questions (e.g. "I saw this big yellow bird in my back yard; what do you think it was?"). If people aren't interested, of course I'll change the subject.

Better Birding Through Technology

It's never too late to fulfill your New Year's resolutions. Mine was inspired by Kimball Garrett's presentation at the Sea and Sage Audubon pancake breakfast last fall: he encouraged birders to log in their sightings on eBird, a great site hosted by the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. The awesomeness of eBird comes in two flavors. First, it gives individual users an electronic record of all their sightings (which can be sorted and analyzed in a number of ways). Second, and more importantly, the collective input from users forms a huge database on bird distribution and population patterns. For obvious reasons, this information is of great interest to ornithologists.

I won't go into why it's taken me 10 months to get around to setting up an eBird account (it's free), but I finally did. The site is easy and fun to use; you just indicate where and when you birded, check off what you saw, and the program adds up the numbers for you. Very cool.

I faithfully submitted lists for all four of my weekend forays (to the Least Tern Reserve at Huntington State Beach, Bolsa Chica, Talbert Nature Reserve, and San Joaquin) and came up with a total of 59 birds. Not a Big Weekend by any stretch of the imagination, but respectable for a couple of lazy summer days out. Four outings sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't very intense—we still managed to fit in a showing of the latest Harry Potter movie followed by dinner and microbrews at a nearby brewpub. Yum.

And over dinner, we realized that we hadn't done the dinner-and-a-movie thing in a couple of years, since our weekend afternoons and evenings as of late had been dedicated to (1) birding, (2) recovering from birding and/or downloading Glenn's new bird photos, or (3) going to bed early in preparation for the next day's birding excursion.

But while wandering the wilds of South Coast Plaza before the film, we noticed some fledgling House Sparrrows being fed muffin crumbs by their parents outside Starbucks. No, I didn't log this sighting on eBird.

My favorite sightings of the weekend:

—Black-bellied Plovers in full breeding plumage at Huntington and Bolsa Chica,

— A banded juvenile Peregrine Falcon at Bolsa Chica,

There's no such thing as too many Peregrine Falcon shots

—Blue-gray and California Gnatcatchers only a few steps away from each other at Talbert. Both were pretty bold, and let me get close enough to see the white undersides of their tails: black for the California, and white for the Blue-gray. And the male California Gnatcatchers still had their telltale black caps.

—A Sora and what I'm pretty sure was a Least Bittern at San Joaquin (another birder nearby also thought it was a bittern, which reduces the chance that I was hallucinating).

Oh yeah—the owls in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" looked really fake.

Birding Alone

Solitary birding can be either a huge rush or a frustrating pain in the butt. One one hand, I love it because it's fantastically soul-cleansing and relaxing, and it gives me the freedom to obsess over favorite places and birds without worrying about boring anyone.

On the other hand, there's something sad about seeing something really cool and having nobody to share it with. It's kind of like opening your Christmas presents by yourself. Then there's the problem of seeing something neat and unusual and having nobody believe you. I hate it when birds pull that Mr. Snuffleupagus routine.

And they tend to do that a lot.

Yesterday, they were having quite a time of it. Early yesterday morning, I ran a few short laps around Tanager Park in Costa Mesa. It's a tiny park, and a good spot to find Downy Woodpeckers, Northern Flickers, and Western Bluebirds, but it hasn't been very birdy as of late. But as I circled the park, I noticed a large, stocky, short-tailed bird on the lawn near some playground equipment: a Red-shouldered Hawk. It stayed on the ground briefly, then flew into one of the small trees near the footpath.

He was perched only about 7 feet off the ground, so I got a really close look at him as I ran past the tree. This surprised me, since the Red-shouldered Hawks I've seen so far have been fearful of people and seemed to perch as high off the ground as possible. Glenn has been trying since forever to get a close-up photo of one of them, but the mere sight of a camera lens 25 yards away is enough to send them flapping off into the ether.

Glenn would have loved this. But of course, he wasn't there.

After lunch, I headed to San Joaquin to give a tour of the marsh to a visiting conference group. They couldn't have chosen a worse time to look for birds: 2:30 in the afternoon in mid-August. Before we set out, I warned them that what we would see wouldn't be representative of the full diversity of bird life in the Marsh. And that it would be hot and uncomfortable.

Still, even the usual suspects in the marsh are fun to watch, and surprising and exotic to non-birders. (Every time I give a tour, I remember how beautiful and elegant-looking American Avocets and Black-necked Stilts really are.) A five-second sighting of one of the resident bobcats was an added bonus. But on the whole, the marsh was quiet, almost sterile. The trees were silent and empty....

... until after the tour ended and the conference-goers took off. After filling out the required paperwork in the Audubon House, I decided to take another spin around the marsh by myself. And of course, NOW a flock of Song Sparrows and a pair of Spotted Towhees were scratching gleefully in the middle of the path. And an Osprey was perched on a pole by the ponds near the entrance. And the female Wood Duck was back where I saw her last week. And a female Hooded Oriole was calling and jumping about in the trees in front of the Audubon House.

And there was nobody to show this to, and since I didn't bring a camera, no way of documenting it.

I hate it when this happens.

What I Should Have Said

              Me and my big mouth...

"So, tell me about birding—I really don't know anything about it."

We were at my sister's place in San Diego yesterday, after a thoroughly unrewarding day of poking around the Tijuana Estuary. Apart from a few Clapper Rails, an Osprey, a Northern Harrier, a Cooper's Hawk, several Brown Pelicans, Killdeer, and Forster's Terns, the day's birding had been a wash. Nothing new for our life lists, and not even any sightings of any local birds that don't usually make it all the way up to Orange County (such as the Gull-Billed Terns or Little Blue Herons.) And now we were sipping wine in the kitchen with one of their neighbors, who was asking very nicely exactly what birding entailed, and what its appeal was.

And being sleep-deprived, sunburned, and dizzy from wine drunk on an empty stomach, I gave him a totally incoherent answer. I nattered on about Big Days and life lists, and left the poor dude with the impression that birding is something like paintball for nature lovers with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Here's what I should have said instead:

I like birding for the same reasons I like Harry Potter novels—both allow an escape into a rich alternate world filled with both great beauty and incredible tension and danger. But birding is even more rewarding than great fantasy fiction: unlike Hogwarts and Diagon Alley, the magical parallel universe opened to birders is real—and all you need is a pair of binoculars and some patience to get in.

During the spring, I spent a lot of time in ordinary suburban parks filled with playground equipment and picnic tables. None of the minivan moms and kids yelling about how bored they were had any idea what was going on right over their heads. Did any of them have any clue that the trees were filled with gorgeous wild creatures with colors and patterns even brighter than those of domestic parrots? And that many of these would only be here a few weeks, before slipping off again to some distant locale?

If I were to tell one of the kids that I was looking for a bright yellow bird with a traffic-cone orange head, or a tiny songbird of blazing metallic aquamarine, most would think I was joking. After all, everybody knows that birds in southern California are all brown or black or grey. But Western Tanagers and Lazuli Buntings are unambiguously real—and with a bit of effort and some luck, I can find them.

And when I do, I know I've slipped into that parallel universe—but even better, I know it's not really a parallel universe, but the same one in which I live, work and fight off freeway traffic, only in exquisite detail. Because I bird, I can see parts of the physical world that most people miss. I can find incredible beauty and dramatic life-or-death struggles in seemingly mundane environments.

The search for different birds can become competitive, and the competition can be fun—it's rewarding to be able to quantify how much of the veiled physical world one has mastered, and to match one's skills against those of other birders. But the real pleasure of birding for me is just being a part of this hidden world: watching raptors pursue their prey, and fledgling terns learning to fly and hunt, is satisfaction enough.

I can see all of this, and most people can't or won't. Strangely, this makes me feel powerful.

And this is a kind of power nobody can take away.

The More I Bird, The Dumber I Get

"Every time I learn the name of a student, I forget the name of a fish."
—David Starr Jordon (ichthyologist and first president of Stanford University)

Right now, I'm suffering the opposite problem of the late Dr. Jordan: Every time I remember the name of a bird, I forget the name of a student. Or something I'm supposed to be teaching that student.

Maybe it only feels that way. Before I got into birding, I thought of it the same way most non-birders do: as an amiably mindless activity for children and people in the twilight of their lives. Once I got into it, I thought birding would be a skill like long-distance running or learning a second language: it would get easier with time and experience.

Instead, it just kept getting harder. The more I learned, the more I realized what I didn't know and should know. And every time I mastered some new and useful habit of bird observation ( the beak! the beak! Quick! Get the shape and length of the beak!), I learned of a dozen other things I was supposed to have noticed in the three-second period when a new bird comes into view.

This weekend presented a wealth of opportunities for me to face my ignorance. It started (as usual) with docent duty at the Least Tern reserve at Huntington State Beach. The breeding season is winding down: a few young chicks are still present, but most of this season's hatchlings have fledged and are in full undergraduate mode (flying and hunting imperfectly yet independently, and still happy to take handouts from Mom and Dad).



A pair of birders came by to check out the chicks. We started chatting, and I realized I was totally blanking on most the their questions: How many chicks hatched this year? (I had gotten an e-mail on this very topic earlier in the week, but had completely forgotten the numbers.) How long has that fence been there? (Beats the hell out of me.)

After our shift ended, Glenn and I dropped by Huntington Central Park. High in one of the trees between "the island" and the pond behind the library was a bright yellow warbler. I knew it was a warbler because of its fine bill and inability to stop moving—but what kind? Bright yellow with olive wings around here= either a Yellow Warbler or a Wilson's Warbler. But I couldn't see any of the Yellow Warbler's red streaks on its breast, and it was too high up for me to tell if it had the telltale black cap of a Wilson's Warbler.

There are no doubt ways of distinguishing the two birds apart from these obvious fieldmarks, but I have no idea what they are.

Saturday night was the Sea and Sage Audubon Summer Barbeque. The invited speaker gave a terrific presentation on the pelagic birds of Southern California—all fascinating, and none familiar to me. Many had migration and breeding patterns that reminded me of back-cover blurbs on fat historical romances ("An epic tale of sex and danger spanning four continents—Buller's Shearwater!") The speaker explained with great care and passion the tiny distinguishing features between the dozens of jaegers and petrels. They were easy to see on his well-focused slides, but would I be able to catch these on a flying bird while on the deck of a rocking boat?

Probably not. At least not yet.

Yet more stuff I now know that I don't know. Oh joy!

Little Grey Birds

Get a lifer: Our first White-breasted Nuthatch

I recently realized that I can finally call myself an intermediate birder, rather than a beginner.

The reason for this promotion wasn't getting though Sylvia Gallagher's beginning birding class in one piece (which I did last year). It was the realization that I'm finally starting to notice, and get really excited by, all those little dun-colored birds that I used to just ignore—if I even managed to register their presence at all. This week, I got lucky and saw three of them, all lifers for me.

I found my first new bird of the week at Talbert Nature Reserve in Costa Mesa. During a midweek walk, I heard a song I hadn't heard before—a husky, urgent warbling. I looked in the direction of the singing, and in the bushes by the path hopped a small grey bird with dark upperparts, a light breast and belly, and a faint white eye line and broken eye ring. It definitely wasn't a bushtit or a gnatcatcher, or anything else I'd seen before.

I rushed home, trying to keep my mental picture of the bird from fading, and flipped though my bird guides. The closest visual match was a Bell's Vireo. But I've been wrong about stuff like this before (more times than not, actually), so I checked the Bell's Vireo song at Whatbird.com to see if it matched the song I heard at Talbert. It was a match: Bingo!

I encountered my next two new birds at Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary: Glenn decided he wanted to take photos of some Acorn Woodpeckers with a new lens he recently bought, and we knew Tucker was a reliable place to find them.

While there, I spent some time on a bridge spanning a (now dry) creek bed. I noticed what looked like really large Rock Pigeons flying back and forth between the trees on either side of the creek. But they didn't sound like Rock Pigeons, nor did they have that mongrel variation in plumage that Rock Pigeons usually have: they all had the same rosy/purple/grey pattern, and the same white band on the back of the neck.

In any nature reserve, it helps to read all those conspicuously posted educational placards: one of them, showing the reserve's typical birds, revealed this to be a Band-tailed Pigeon. When in doubt, read the instructions...

Glenn discovered the third new bird: a White-breasted Nuthatch hopping up and down some tree trunks in the middle of the reserve.

Seeing new birds always makes me feel happy and excited. Seeing two within a span of an hour, only yards apart, is even better. My first naive instinct was that since these two birds were new and different for me, they must be for everyone else as well. Surely, these must be rarities—otherwise we would have seen them already, right?

Wrong. After returning home and diving straight into Hamilton and Willick's book on Orange County bird distribution, I found that our new finds were only news to us—both Band-tailed Pigeons and White-breasted Nuthatches are pretty much par for the course in the foothills.

The reason we hadn't seen them before is that we spend most of our time birding closer to home, on the coast or the flatlands just off the coast. And up until recently, I'm sure I would have written off those Band-tailed Pigeons as just fat city pigeons, and would have been stomping around too cluelessly to notice the Nuthatch at all.

Figuring all this out was both exhilarating and humbling. I can truthfully say I know a lot more about finding and identifying birds now than I did when I started birding two years ago. But it will be years (more likely, decades) before I'll be able to promote myself from an intermediate-level birder to an advanced birder.

And I also need to get out more often.