May 21, 2011

It’s midnight. 12:01 to be precise. Twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes left to try for 169.

The minivan crunches into the gravel along the edge of Snake Mountain Road and comes to a stop. The doors open. Four men pour out into the darkness. I follow behind, stumbling over the back seats, trying to be quiet. They spread out along the road and then stand motionless in the fog, two with heads cocked toward the sky, two bowed as if in prayer. Peeps and croaks from frogs spill out of a nearby wetland, thousands of points of sound washing over the road.

Then a sharp, sweet line of music punctures the frog noise: witchity-witchity-witch. It’s our first bird.

“Common yellowthroat,” says Allan Strong. The Big Day has begun.

Two years ago, these same four expert birders—Allan Strong ’83, now a professor of wildlife biology at UVM; his brother Dan Strong; Peter Jones; and Scott Schwenk G ’08, one of Strong’s former Ph.D students—had their best Big Day ever: driving 379 miles around northern Vermont, they detected 168 species of birds in one day.

“The idea is to go out in twenty-four hours and find as many birds as you possibly can,” Allan Strong explains. “It’s just a fun way to get out and see the sights and test our wits against the birds.”

Allan Strong tests well. Following rules established by the American Birding Association, Strong set a Big Day state record in New Hampshire, 170 species, that still stands fifteen years later. He once did five Big Days in one spring, starting in Louisiana and working his way up the East Coast. In 1999, he and his brother did two Big Days in a row, Vermont then New Hampshire: forty-eight hours of birding, 181 species, with two hours of sleep.

And—other than one eyebrow-raising report of 177 species—his team’s 168 in 2009 is the most ever detected in a Vermont Big Day. “That was an extreme year. Everything went right,” Strong says. But hope is the thing with feathers, Dickinson wrote, so why not go for one better?

“We’ve come up with a check-list of 210 possible species, but we’ve got a set of 169 grayed out which are our best shot to break our record,” says Strong.

The common yellowthroat is first. But the reason we’ve come here, to this desolate patch five miles from Middlebury, is not to search for this rather-common warbler. It’s for the increasingly rare whip-poor-will.

Strong opens a pouch on his backpack and takes out a flat speaker attached to an iPod.

“OK, the pod is hot,” he announces. From the speaker, the three emphatic syllables of a recorded whip-poor-will song slice through the air—whip-p,p,p,ooor-WILL!— whip-p,p,p,ooor-WILL! We wait in a pregnant interlude of frog noise. Then, like a silky and longing echo of the brassy recording, a real whip-poor-will calls back from the trees. It’s haunting. The birders chuckle happily. But this is not a time for lingering.

“Alright, let’s go,” says Allan Strong and within seconds we’ve piled back into the van and are rumbling toward Hawkins Slang near Kingsland Bay where the team hopes to hear owls and marsh birds. For weeks, they’ve been scouting sites throughout the Champlain Valley and in the Green Mountains, looking for rare species that they can return to on the Big Day. Allan and Dan Strong found this whip-poor-will a few days ago.

Two penciled check-marks and it’s only 12:06 a.m.

At 4:10 a.m., we’re near the summit of Camel’s Hump. Like miners in a tunnel, a string of headlamps ascends the Burrows Trail into blackness. Weirdly green ferns and surreal burbling brooks lurch out of the gloom. We’ve been hiking for more than an hour, followed by a fickle moon shrouded in mist.

Earlier, in the wetlands, the birders heard seven marsh birds—and caught a glimpse of a great horned owl. They discussed whether a dim quack was the blue-winged teal or green-winged. They settled on blue. At least one barred owl called back to an uncanny imitation hooted by Strong.

Now we’re seeking birds that live in these high-elevation spruce and fir trees. For most of the way, Strong has been turning his iPod on and off, broadcasting the insistent peep, peep, peep of a saw-whet owl into the woods. In return: nothing but maddening silence. “It seems like it would be the polite thing for the owl to just call back once,” he says with a rueful laugh.

And for the next few minutes the poetry of Pablo Neruda rolls about in my mind. “Where are the birds?” he laments in his “Ode to Birdwatching,” speaking to the sometime experience of any birder, “miserable invisible cretins, devil birds, go to hell.” But just then grace descends.

“Oh, hold on,” says Allan Strong, hearing something no one else does. The bird speaks again, a single downward whee-er that we all hear. “Bicknell’s!” Strong says, “Yeah!” It’s one of the most rare and endangered migrant birds in the eastern United States, the Bicknell’s thrush. Peter Jones cheers. “Nice,” says Schwenk. “That’s their call?” Dan Strong asks his brother.

Two hours later, the saw-whet has still eluded us, but many other forest birds have awoken, singing their dawn chorus. At 6:07 a.m., Strong holds up his hand. “Shh,” he says. All stop and listen. “Did anyone else hear that?” he asks. To my ear, there is nothing but the sound of wind and one noisy winter wren. But the others heard something more faint. “Evening grosbeak?” Jones ventures. “I would have said siskin or cross-bill,” Strong replies, “too loud for a grosbeak.” Too loud? Like a librarian is too loud at a death metal show.

Recent studies show that London cab drivers have an enlarged hippocampus—that part of the brain responsible for navigation. What about the auditory cortex in the brain of Al Strong? A scan of these birders’ heads might not show any difference, but clearly they’ve developed a great subtlety in interpreting a chip of noise floating in an ocean of sound.

Bird-watching is really a misnomer for what they’re doing. Mostly it’s bird-listening. The birders all habitually cup their hands to the ears, which does a remarkably good job of heightening sound. “Someday I’ll use prosthetic ears,” Strong says.

Birds are magic. Tens of millions of years of evolution allow these hollow-boned, anxious gems of feather and ambition to take to the air in Jamaica and Belize and the rainforests of Brazil in transparent clouds and descend on Vermont with equal stealth. They flit into sight and then out again in aerobatic prestidigitation that baffle the untrained eye. But the experts, like these four birders, can read their slight of wing.

“It’s a bizarre skill, that’s generally not useful,” Strong told me, with a laugh. “But it constantly keeps you curious about how little do you actually need to identify a bird.” For many birders, there is plenty of challenge in telling a bird by its song or sitting still in a tree. But Strong wants to know, “Can you identify it in flight? Can you identify it by its call note? Can you identify it by its nocturnal flight call when it’s going over in the middle of the night?” Almost always he can.

At 7:26 a.m., we’re barreling down the road off the side of Camel’s Hump, gravel flying behind. Dan Strong hangs his head out the window. Jones simply opens wide the sliding door of the minivan, one socked foot to the wind and leans out to listen. They’re hoping to catch the call of the Louisiana waterthrush they heard here a few days ago on a scouting trip. It begins to rain and then pour.

But rain doesn’t deter them much. They get the waterthrush and by 8:00 a.m. the team has sixty-eight species checked-off on their list. By 9:00, eighty species. By 10:00, ninety-one.

The quest is not without diversion. Strong holds up a silver foil bag and announces, “Time for Zapps.” These, apparently, are not ordinary potato chips. Mail-ordered in preparation for the Big Day, these chips are supposed to taste of “a Cajun boiled seafood fest.” They are spicy and they are tradition. “When I was in Louisiana,” he says, “we had a rule that you could not start eating the Zapp’s before eight o’clock. Otherwise you are hopelessly addicted.” Easy does it, I guess, as we all dig in at 10:35 a.m.

By 11:00 a.m. the team has detected 115 species. “Fifty-four to go,” Jones says, “the day is young.” “Actually, the day is middle-aged,” Strong says. The birders are doing well—except for Scott Schwenk who is turning a bit green over the lurching roads—but the count is falling off record pace. They’re not getting as many lucky finds as needed.

Spirits rise at 11:27 a.m. when Strong hears a Tennessee warbler. “Wow. Sweet,” Jones says. It’s only the second time that they have heard this species on a Big Day.

“Noon report,” Jones says, “One-hundred-twenty.” That’s twelve species an hour. But, as expected, the pace is slowing, as the check-list fills. “You can go out and find a hundred birds on a day in May without any trouble,” Strong says. (Well, he can.) “It’s those extra fifty that are the rare and unusual ones. Planning a Big Day forces you to really think about species distribution patterns and habitat requirements.” Which is why we’re driving madly across the countryside, stopping at what is becoming, to this avian embedded reporter, a pleasant blur of fields, wetlands, and woodlots.

By 1:00 p.m., we’ve seen only three more species. At 2:00, the count is 127. At 4:30, it’s 140. For most serious birders, this is already record-smashing terrain. But after we drop-off Schwenk at his house—it’s a stomach bug, not car-sickness, we all agree, after he makes several roadside stops that don’t involve looking for birds—I can almost hear the three remaining birders downgrading their expectations. They’re already looking ahead to next year’s effort.

“We probably didn’t need to go as far up the mountain,” Jones says.

“Stopping to put the scopes up for the peregrine was nice,” Strong says, “but was it worth it?”

Birds, of course, care nothing for human ambitions—or aesthetics. At 5:34 p.m., in traffic along Kennedy Drive near South Burlington High School, buses, a garbage truck, and commuters grind forward. Then, like a searing stroke of white paint, we spot a great egret, elegant and tall, fishing in a marsh next to the road. “Beautiful,” Jones says.

Two hours later, the sun is low, and the count is 143. At 8:07 p.m., we spot a cliff swallow at the visitor’s center for the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge; least bittern and veery in the gloaming of nearby Mud Creek. At 9:14 p.m., our tally stands at 147 as we drive toward the Franklin County Airport.

In the darkness, at 9:25 p.m., a helicopter approaches the airfield. Its thudding rotors and red landing lights are impressive. But they’re not enough to drown out the staccato buzzing of a lone grasshopper sparrow, calling from the dark grass. 148. We could head to Colchester, Strong suggests, perhaps get one more owl. But it’s almost 10 p.m., the record is out of reach, and the birders decide to drive home. It’s been a Big Day.

This story originally appeared in the summer 2011 issue of Vermont Quarterly magazine. See the full issue online at alumni.uvm.edu/vq. To request a print copy, contact University Communications, (802) 656-2005, newserv@uvm.edu.

PUBLISHED

10-05-2011
Joshua E. Brown