Author Stephen Shunk is 15 minutes late for his lecture. The Monterey Bay Birding Festival is about to launch “All About Woodpeckers,” a workshop theoretically to be led by Shunk as the first in a series stretching from Thursday to Sunday, and he’s stuck in traffic.
“You mean a migration jam?” quips someone at the registration table.
Thursday’s sunrise saw the seventh annual festival start in caravans departing daily to locations like the Pajaro Dunes, Carmel Rivermouth, Rancho Del Oso and Natural Bridges—locales rich in wildlife and natural scenery, each field trip followed by a course of bird education back at Watsonville Civic Plaza, with 15 minutes to get settled in your seat.
Upon arrival, the bearded Shunk jumps straight into an enthused trivia game.
“What is the most migratory woodpecker in North America?” he asks.
Thirty-seven people assembled in the otherwise vacant Watsonville City Council chambers think they might know the answer, and some blurt it out before Shunk can finish the question. The adrenaline is palpable. This is no classroom filled with slack-jawed university students. These are birdwatchers. Some have traveled across the country to get here. Whatever you call them—birders, twitchers, ornithophiliacs—you can’t call them lackluster.
An hour and a half later and the group knows that woodpeckers slam their heads into trees with 1200 Gs of force, they have a slithery tongue that wraps around a bone inside the back of their skulls and the steepest decline in woodpecker populations belongs to the flicker—one of the better examples of competition from starlings.
The audience nods. Oh, yes, they know about starlings. They know enough to participate in woodpecker trivia time, and there are no awkward silences after the lecture, only questions people need answered and knowing laughs when it pleases Shunk to make a joke.
“Stephen was the one to show me my first pileated woodpecker,” shares a woman with close-cropped hair. “I sat down and cried for about 20 minutes.”
He’s that good.
“Have you ever seen so many bird brains?” asks Texas veterinarian Warren Resell during the social reception immediately following the lecture. The answer is no, and he chuckles at his joke while sharing the details of his early morning field trip at Pinto Lake. “We saw 34 species, and I saw 10 out there that I’d never seen before. That’s the best thing in a birder’s world.”
They’re called “life birds,” explains festival organizer Clay Kempf, a husky man with a long graying ponytail. “Birds you’ve never seen that you identify for the first time.”
The demographic that attends birding festivals makes it hard for a twentysomething to blend in, whether sitting in the back of a lecture or milling helplessly during the social reception, eating free taquitos and trying to be inconspicuous between information tables.
“College-educated, upper middle class” is Kempf’s prompt assessment of attendees. “People who come to these festivals are older and mostly retired. They have time to travel and some extra money for gear. Young hotshot birders will usually get recruited to be field trip leaders, and usually don’t go to festivals because they don’t need to. They can find birds on their own.”
A quick glance around the room suggests nothing that would make him a liar.
“One of the sad things about birding is that we’re all old people,” agrees 20-year birder Bill Auberle, a ruddy man who peppered his trek from Arizona with stops for interstate birdwatching and the
sighting of a Nashville warbler—the first one he’s documented. His voice drops and he gestures around the reception hall. “Look around the room! We’re all old!”
He’s very convincing. “But then, I certainly didn’t bird when I was young,” he says, shrugging. For Auberle, birding is an excuse to get outdoors and hike, and according to him, young people do that anyway.
The Game of Life Birds
The half-day field trip to Elkhorn Slough and Moss Landing begins at 6am, and it’s still dark.
A birder since the tender age of 12, hot shot leader and Berkeley mapmaker Rusty Scalf is now 57, and his weathered face fits the profile of a bearded conquistador. The world is both early morning gray and overcast gray, and four more people clad in fishing vests, athletic shoes and Polartec would have put his group of 11 in the ranks of several tours that have already sold out.
He spots sandpipers sauntering around Moss Landing Harbor, and up come 11 pairs of binoculars to watch them jab their long beaks into the swamp.
“I didn’t realize those godwits had such long bills,” someone says, and Scalf says they’re plumbing the slough for invertebrates. He points out a marbled godwit, long-billed curlews, a ruddy turnstile and the sandpipers, the smaller ones scurrying over the wetland like mice.
“The tiny birds are all arctic birds,” says Scalf. “They’re wintering here.”
Florida birder Bill Phelan flips to the long-billed curlews in his North American Birding Field Guide.
“Look,” he edges in and holds it out to the only participant who didn’t bring binoculars, pointing to the picture and then to a faraway bird on the muddy bank. “It’s one of the most bizarre birds you’ll
ever see.”
A fleeting impression of spindly legs and a long curved spaghetti noodle of a beak, and the curlew flies away across the harbor as the group moves toward the beach, trailing birders along the jetty, binoculars glued to their faces as they shout back and forth to each other.
“Kingfisher! Belted kingfisher in flight!”
“Oh, my God! It was a white-crowned sparrow! Oh, he just left!”
Scalf talks about the mysterious migratory patterns of the snowy plover as he sets up his tripod between piles of kelp and slime. Behind him a lone surfer charges into the waves, and someone snorts and remarks on the temperature of the water.
“Those guys are the crazy ones.”
Scalf bemoans the lack of loons while a stale fare of cormorants and gulls laugh at him.
“Just don’t make the mistake of calling them seagulls,” birder Mary Wilson scolds, wagging her finger as a bolder bird trundles nearby. “It’s just ‘gulls.’ And then of course there are all different kinds. The Western gull is most common out here. The darkness of the back is a good marker. It’s a lighter shade of gray for the California gull, and its bill is slender and comes to a tapered point, see, while the Western has more of a bulbous tipped bill.”
She explicates and the group reaches an outcrop looking above about half the Moss Landing gull population, milling about and screeching near some sea lions. They may have different names, but their beady eyes are all hungry, and they would all fight over your sandwich.
The Texas veterinarian offers his binoculars.
“Want to look?”
A polite decline and explanation (“Oh, don’t worry about it, I feel like I’ll see them again”), and Moss Landing’s power plant gives a merry twinkle from across the harbor.
“Four years? That’s not a beginner,” bursts out Elk Grove native Janet Marvin after hearing the self-deprecating assessment from fellow birder Marilyn Shelton. “You’re intermediate at least. I haven’t even started to count.”
Someone asks how many birds are on her companion’s lifetime list.
“Two hundred and ten,” someone else answers.
“Five hundred,” counters Judy Johnson, a small rosy-faced woman from up ahead and straight out of Fresno.
“They’re competing,” Marvin says in an aside.
“It’s not competition,” mollifies Shelton. “It’s showing where we are in the journey.”
“Some people try to get records,” explains Janine Watson from under a Central Valley Bird Club hat. “That’s called the ‘big year,’ where from January through December they look for the most species to identify. Some people travel all around the world and try to see as many of the 10,000 species of bird as they can.”
They start talking about the new movie coming out showing the tribulations surrounding competing birders, one of which is played by Jack Black. They’ve all heard of The Big Year, and it’s no surprise that Hollywood has heard the whispers of them intriguing enough to spark a feature film.
Johnson says that 745 life birds is the current record for one year as Scalf points us to a black tern lurking in the reeds.
“That particular year was hot because it was an El Nino year,” Johnson says. “The warm currents come up and it’s not good for birds—you have a lot of die-offs—but it tends to push southern birds up north.”
Which equals more variety and better chances of seeing hitherto unidentified birds, both important factors in completing a “big year” or beating a personal record.
Scalf leads us to Elkhorn Slough, wetlands on the other side of Highway One owned jointly by the University of California, California Department of Fish and Game and the California Nature Conservancy. The group is greeted by brown pelicans flying in a long V, and Scalf explains how they keep close to the water in order to get warmer thermals. Bill Phelan offers his open field guide again.
“I’m an entomologist,” says Johnson. “I was always mildly interested in birds, on the cusp of getting into it. Marilyn was the one who pushed me over. She brought me out one day and I was hooked. Finding new birds really sucks you in. It’s so beautiful how all this fits together, and I love the individual personalities of the birds.”
Johnson follows Scalf to the marshy shoreline, binoculars bouncing around her neck. The viewfinder of his tripod is trained on a nondescript brown bird huddled in the grasses, a whimbrel, and 11 ohhs and ahhs roll over the water as Scalf declares how pleased he is with the find. It’s an easy bird to miss in the fog.
Spending time in wildlife has been stressed as the underlying raison d’être for many a birdwatching excursion, but using the nature excuse to soften the status of their nerd cards doesn’t always fly after a long day of birding amongst their own kind. The truth is weighted heavier on the side of the birds themselves, and the dedicated would never confine themselves to state parks and scenic wildlife preserves.
“It’s funny,” Johnson muses as the whimbrel preens under a wing with its abnormally long beak. “But like I was telling them earlier, actually the best place to bird in Fresno is the wastewater treatment plant. A ton of birds out there.”
