April 2001
Bird Lecture with special guest Mr. Jack Gorman
Tonight I will be presenting "An Introduction to the study of Birds Through Bird Watching".
As I understand your group, part of your program involves nature studies. All my life, starting as a teenager, I have been interested in nature and fascinated with birds. So I am delighted to be discussing birds and bird watching with you. And what a good time for such a discussion. Springtime! It's an invigorating time, the favorite time for birds and for watching birds. After a long winter birds are on the move, many of them are migrating north. Food is becoming more available to them. They have molted and are in their very best plumage. They're happy. They're singing. They're looking for mates and preparing to mate and nest. In south Texas, April and May are the prime months for birds and for watching them. Hundreds of people from all over the United States and many from around the world will be coming to South Texas to bird watch during spring migration.
Bird watching is one of the fastest growing hobbies in America. It is estimated that about 30 million Americans of all ages are birdwatchers. They range in ability and interest from people who only watch from their back yards, to people who observe birds while walking in the park, to birders who take trips to birding hotspots, to birding fanatics who travel all over the country and the world to observe bird life. It only takes three things to study and enjoy birds. First it takes interest and curiosity. Second it takes a pair of good binoculars, binoculars that have a magnification of 6 to 10 powers. You can purchase such binoculars for as little as 30 dollars or as much as 900 dollars. I generally use these 10 power lightweight binoculars, which cost about 200 dollars.
The third and most important prerequisite is to carry and be familiar with a field guide to the birds. Field guides are a birders' Bible. Let me expound on the history of field guides how they have made the sport of birding possible. Humans have always found birds interesting. Even in ancient times people recognized different types of birds. The Bible mentions over 20 species of birds. Bird watching in the United States started with a man named John James Audubon who was a knar-do-well frontiersman and artist in the early 19th century. He made it the main objective of his life to find, identify and paint all the birds in America. At that time America consisted of only that territory east of the Mississippi River. Audubon wandered mostly on foot throughout the east from Florida to Canada and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. He found and painted most of our eastern birds. His paintings were reproduced and published in book form in 1851. They were not only artistic masterpieces but gave us the first good record of American bird life. But paintings do not make a practical field guide.
It was not until the 1930s that the first good, field guide was
written by a man named Roger Tory Peterson. You might say that he was the father of
American birding. When Peterson was 14 his biology teacher would take her classes on
nature walks. On one of these spring hikes he became fascinated with the beauty and variety
of our warblers. For the rest of his life he combined his fascination of bird watching with his
considerable skill as an artist. He produced the first truly good field guide that became the
prototype for all field guides to follow. As the years went by he became an extremely
talented artist and produced field guides to the birds of the eastern and western United
States as well as one for Texas. His field guides were used exclusively for about 40 years.
They made bird watching easy and enjoyable. As birding became more and more popular,
new authors have published numerous field guides for birders of all levels. And as birding
became a worldwide sport, field guides have been written to cover almost every country and
local in the world. If you want to bird in Europe there is a field guide to European birds. In
South America there are field guides to South America birds. In India an Indian field guide.
In Australia a field guide to Australian birds. And even a guide to the birds of the Galapagos
Islands. One can purchase these field guides in local bookstores.
Let's look at the Peterson's field guide to the birds of Texas and take the mystery out of using it. There are 800 species of birds in America and about 400 can be seen in south Texas. WOW! That sounds like a lot of birds to put in ones memory bank. But, you don't have to. The field guide does most of the work for you. First of all it arranges all the birds in families. For instance, all the species of sparrows are printed on the same page. Likewise for all the hawks, hummingbirds, owls, sandpipers, and ducks have their own color plates. So once you familiarize yourself with the book and the different bird families, you can easily look up and identify most any bird. For example, what if you see a woodpecker at your back yard feeder. You notice it has a red head and back wings with some white wing patches. You look up woodpeckers. Texas has 14 species of woodpeckers.
You find the one with the red head, black wings and white wing patches and there it is, a Red-headed woodpecker. You have identified it. Thus if you bird any place in the world, with effort and the right field guide you can identify most of the worlds 8000 different species. A while ago one of my friends told me, "I don't understand how anyone would travel all over the county just to look at birds?" I tried to explain to him that there is another world out there. A world we are all linked to, the world of nature and birds are a quintessential representation of nature. Bird species have evolved to fill every niche of every continent and ocean in the world. Each species has its individual structure and personality that fits into the environmental where it lives. I've had the pleasure of watching birds for over 50 years and am still amazed at many of their actions. I've marveled at tiny chickadees and nuthatches eating sunflower seeds from my hand; at the beautiful coloration of cardinals and scarlet tanagers and Gold finches. At the sight of a Bald eagle calling to its mate in Alaska. And who could not marvel over the Carolina wren like the one that came up to my window to listen when I was listening to a recording of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto. For five minutes that wren answered Beethoven back with a song of his own? Or being 50 miles out at sea fishing and having an albatross with its 7-foot wingspan glide by on the air currents with not flapping a wing. And you know that it will navigate the oceans for 10 months of the year without seeing land. And how about those might mites of flight- the hummingbirds. They weigh less than 10 grams, can out maneuver any other bird species and fear nothing. I've seen them chase huge hawks away from their nest area. Yet, they have gorgeous plumage of brilliant green with red, blue or purple throats. Thus, birds bring us into the world of nature to which we are ultimately linked.
Sooner or later all birdwatchers realize this wonderful natural heritage is slowly being destroyed. Year-by-year more bird species become extinct. If we don't protect the environment our natural heritage will disappear forever, never to be seen by our children or grandchildren. Thus, most birdwatchers become environmentalists.
In closing, let me mention three excellent nature and bird watching organization that are open to anyone interested in joining them. The largest and oldest is the Audubon Society. Created about 100 years ago, its National headquarters are in New York City. It has hundreds of local branches throughout the states. Locally the Houston Audubon Society is situated downtown and offers monthly programs and field trips. An Audubon offshoot called the Piney Woods Wildlife Society, of which I am an ex-Vice president, holds meetings at the Mercer Arboretum on the third Tuesday of the month. It sponsors monthly nature programs and bird hikes to areas in and around Harris and Galveston Counties. The other group I want to mention is the American Birding Association that has its headquarters in Denver, Colorado. The ABA has thousands of members throughout the world. It is geared to advanced bird watchers, sponsors birding trips and sells birding supplies and literature.