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  Adventures of a Louisiana Birder

  ADVENTURES

  OF

  A LOUISIANA

  BIRDER

  1 YEAR * 2 WINGS * 300 SPECIES

  MARYBETH LIMA

  Louisiana State University Press

  Baton Rouge

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Louisiana State University Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First printing

  Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom

  Typeface: Sentinel

  Printer and binder: Sheridan Books, Inc.

  Map by Lynn Hathaway

  Illustrations by Aaron Hargrove

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lima, Marybeth, 1965– author.

  Title: Adventures of a Louisiana birder : one year, two wings, three hundred species / Marybeth Lima.

  Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046200 | ISBN 978-0-8071-7137-0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7158-5 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7159-2 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lima, Marybeth, 1965– | Bird watchers—Louisiana—Biography. | Bird watching—Louisiana. | Birds—Louisiana.

  Classification: LCC QL684.L8 L56 2019 | DDC 598.072/3409763—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046200

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  This one is for all you mommas out there, two in particular:

  Kathleen (Kay) Florence Rogers and Mary Eleanor Hathaway

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. Listing toward Listing

  2. For the Love of It

  3. Birding from the Inside Out

  4. The Year of the Day Trip

  5. The Quest for Three Hundred: The Marathon

  6. Swan Song

  7. Three Hundred

  8. Lagniappe

  Epilogue: I Know Why the Cajun Bird Dances

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A. Field Notes

  Appendix B. 2016 List of Louisiana Birds

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  When I began writing this book, my main purpose was to share stories about birds, birders, and Louisiana, to shine a light on these communities and places. My hope was that some random birders living outside the state might read the book and think to themselves, “Wow, I really want to visit Louisiana to bird. I think I would have a wonderful time.” Louisiana is, I humbly submit, one of the best states for birding in the country, and among the most underappreciated. Our official state checklist, which includes all bird species seen within our borders, numbers 482 and counting.1 Louisiana’s species diversity is high in part because we have portions of two of the nation’s four major migratory flyways (Mississippi and Central) located within the state. We also sport 397 miles of coastline, and although our pelagic (ocean) bird species diversity is nothing like what you’d encounter in California or New England, it is still respectable enough to contribute substantially to our state list.

  Louisiana offers great birding year-round. One can see almost every North American species of duck and sparrow in the winter. Spring migration colors start flying through in late March and keep birders of all stripes spellbound until mid- to late-May. The sweltering summer is our slow season, although the coastline is a wonderful reprieve from the heat and yields a number of shorebird and tern species. Also, a post-breeding population of Wood Storks, mostly from Mexico, heads over to hang out in south Louisiana during the summer, and some of our intrepid birding souls manage to find summer rarities like the Ruff or Gray Kingbird. Fall migration is the season of understated color and greater challenges, as the birds would rather blend in than stand out. And then, back toward winter, American White Pelicans show up in droves at the LSU lakes and bring out half the citizens of Baton Rouge to see them.

  During the almost five years in which I wrote this book, the contours of near death and death intertwined with my birding. As a result, I added two additional goals: to illustrate the ways in which birds and birding (and by extension, any beloved pursuit) can help one get through tough times, and to share the story of the end of a person’s life in the hopes that the experiences that come with it might be helpful to others.

  I am not a professional birder, far from it. I am more an active amateur—which isn’t to say I’m not entirely consumed. It’s just that my talent for birding doesn’t match my passion (although my mom thinks it does—more on that later). Birds and the people who are passionate about them are intensely interesting to me—interesting and fun and magical and crazy and idiosyncratic all at the same time. Birding offers a perspective on the human condition, at the intersection of people and birds. Birding is also about communities, both human and avian, contained in the larger ecosystem in which we all reside.

  The stories, rituals, and customs at disparate intersections have been the focus of my professional life (intersections of biology and engineering, of university and community). Birds help me understand the world and make me a better person, a person passionately interested in the world being a fair, just place for all its inhabitants, particularly ones with wings and beaks. Hopefully I am not plagiarizing myself by ending this preface with exactly the same sentence I used in my book Building Playgrounds, Engaging Communities: I hope that you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  Adventures of a Louisiana Birder

  1

  LISTING TOWARD LISTING

  The truck peeled backward down the dirt road and angled in uncomfortably close to my rear bumper. The man who jauntily exited and headed for my passenger window looked a little like a Bantam Rooster.

  “Watch y’all doin’?” he demanded.

  “A Christmas Bird Count, sir,” I answered. “We count the birds out here in rice country on this day each year.”

  “Ah,” he said, visibly relaxing and blooming a smile. “So, what have you seen so far?”

  “Lots of geese, but duck numbers this year are pretty low.”

  “You right about that,” he responded. “It’s on account of Wildlife and Fisheries—they been feeding the ducks out at Lacassine National Wildlife Refuge. It kind of isn’t fair. Wildlife and Fisheries encourages us to hunt and we all go out and buy our duck stamps, but in the middle of duck season they ring the dinner bell for the ducks in a place we’re not allowed to hunt.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Not only that, but that blasted crop duster went through here this morning.”

  “Yes, it flew right over our heads a few times.” We’d been watching two Vermilion Flycatchers when the biplane first motored overhead. Although the brilliant red, adult male flycatchers stood their ground during the plane’s closest passes, many other birds had flushed and our team had tried to count them as they scattered.

  “That thing scared off whatever few ducks were left. Anyway, I watch stuff around here. What do y’all want to see?”

  “Everything.”

  “Y’all seen the eagles yet?”

  “Yes, in the fields off Highway 335.”

  Nodding, he said, “How ’bout the cranes?”

  “Which ones?” In rural Louisiana, crane is something of a generic term, the same way that coke is generic for a soft drink of any flavor. A crane might be a Sandhill Crane, but it could also mean an egret or heron species.

  “Whoopers,” he s
aid, “the big ones. I haven’t seen them in awhile, but they used to hang out together, three of ’em, on this very road you’re on now—go down farther, past those trees up there, and search the fields. I sure hope they’re okay. I try to watch out for them and make sure that no one shoots them.”

  Another truck was attempting to traverse the road and the man’s truck was blocking it, so he said his goodbyes.

  Some twenty minutes later and about three-quarters of a mile down the road, my entire Christmas Bird Count (CBC) team drew in an excited, collective breath when we viewed three Whooping Cranes foraging in a rice field about a quarter mile north of the road. Two were bent over, slowly probing the ground, while the third stood erect; I viewed it eye-to-eye, because this beautiful all-white bird with red crown accents stood as tall as I did. The product of a six-year, concerted reintroduction effort,1 these individuals were among the seventy-two total whoopers in the state. We reported the presence of the cranes, but not their location, to ensure that the cranes were not further disturbed by humans.

  Place can teach you things. One of the things Louisiana has taught me about is birds. Sometimes you can clearly trace the path of a hobby from childhood to adulthood, a hobby that “maps,” if you will. For example, my wife, Lynn Hathaway, spent a large part of her childhood at her daddy’s knee, and he was a fix-it guy. He taught her everything, and as a result Lynn likes to tinker now and can fix just about anything, which is an amazing perk for me. I may be an engineer, but I am definitely not what one would call mechanically inclined. Anyway, my birding hobby, or to quote the infamous words of author Mark Obmascik, my “fowl obsession,” doesn’t map directly from childhood to adulthood.

  If I think about it, signposts along the way hinted that birds would find a place in my heart, because I have many childhood memories about nature and specific memories that involve birds. My parents taught my brother and me about the natural world while we were growing up—whether it was bacteria in pond water that my dad took us to collect and observe under my microscope, or the names of various rocks, plants, trees, shells, and yes, some birds that my mom taught us. One of my earliest memories is of me and my parents watching spellbound as a praying mantis ate a grasshopper.

  When we lived in Nashua, New Hampshire, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my mom sprinkled birdseed on the picnic table in our backyard and pointed out the Blue Jays, Northern Cardinals, and Black-capped Chickadees that came to feed. I remember standing outside without moving for forty-five minutes in frigid temperatures with my mom while we watched a Great Blue Heron fishing in a brook in Oswego, New York; we had gotten sidetracked from an after-Thanksgiving dinner walk with family. The silhouette of that bird patiently fishing against a sky that morphed from pink to purple to midnight blue is one I will never forget.

  We vacationed in Massachusetts every summer while I grew up. During family walks along the beach, we’d always point out “the big sandpipers” and “the little sandpipers.” And yes, we thought that there were only two kinds, Willets and Sanderlings, respectively. Although I didn’t know the name of the bird that made the call until years later, the sound of the Common Tern was part of my quintessential summer vacation memories, the same way that the call of the Fish Crow was a reminder of the spring breaks I spent in Florida during college. So, there were signposts (if not clear epiphanies) of my future birding adventures.

  I am lucky enough to have run with a group of ladies a generation older than me from the time I moved to Baton Rouge in 1996. Several years after I started running with them, the ladies got into bird-watching. Their conversations about the birds we encountered while running fired my interest. There were the birds we’d see pretty much every week, like the Carolina Wren, Northern Mockingbird, and Northern Cardinal, but then there were others we saw or heard only occasionally, like the Eastern Kingbird or Eastern Towhee. The birding leader of the ladies is Joan Nicolosi; she and her husband, Joe, own a camp on Grand Isle, a barrier island off the coast of Louisiana and one of the best places in the state to bird. Joan and Joe were generous enough to share the camp with all of us for birding purposes.

  In 2000, a pair of binoculars for Christmas sent me off to the races. Early in my birding days, I attended monthly birding walks at Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center in Baton Rouge; the walks through the 105-acre swamp and bottomland hardwood forest area were led by Harriett Pooler, a strong birder by sight, and Beverly Landaiche, a volunteer at the center, who birded primarily by ear. I loved it when the two of them guided together because I could learn the basics of birding through two senses at once. Although I love seeing birds and can attest to the frustration of hearing a bird you’ve never seen, I am especially drawn to bird song.

  I bird-watched for five years without writing anything down, and for another five with occasional lists for when I did something “serious.” Joan and I went to a Louisiana Ornithological Society (LOS) meeting in New Orleans in 2007, and several months later the two of us dragged along the ladies and their husbands on a spring migration trip to High Island, a small coastal community near Galveston with an appropriately Texas-sized reputation for birds. Until 2010, I was happy to call a sparrow a little brown job and never bother to go further with identification. But something changed over time; I got increasingly interested in birds, even sparrows—especially sparrows, actually, because I knew so little about them. In so doing, I shifted from bird-watching to the more serious pursuit of birding.

  In 2010, I hired my first-ever birding guide when Lynn and I took a trip to New Mexico with our friend Linda Lee. We spent a day with Bill West, who took us to Santa Fe National Forest and showed us birds I’d never even heard of, like the American Dipper and the Williamson’s Sapsucker. The latter was particularly memorable because Bill showed us a nesting pair of these woodpeckers, and the females and males look completely different from each other, a phenomenon known as sexual dimorphism. In addition, the babies looked distinctly different than their parents. It was a jaw-dropping experience to watch the pair feed their babies in a nest hole about twenty feet from where we stood. Bill’s knowledge of birding amazed me, and I resolved to see if I could become as good of a birder as Bill.

  In 2011, I finally decided to take the advice of Joan and the ladies and go to the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival (RGVBF) in Texas. They had gone in 2007, but because of my teaching schedule I hadn’t been able to go with them. The ladies had raved about that festival for years. By 2011 my schedule had changed substantially enough and I had gotten serious enough about birding to book a trip. I took my momma with me; she had continued to appreciate birds throughout her working life.

  My mom worked at the public library in Grand Island, New York, for fifteen years; every spring she put chairs over nests that Killdeer had constructed on the library grounds and made sure that the public stayed away from them. She loved watching Red-tailed Hawks on her drive to work; once, she shared her amazement at seeing a Snowy Owl on this same drive. When she retired and moved south to coastal Mississippi, my mom decided to take up birding more seriously. She joined the Bushwhackers, an informal birding club started by the late legendary Mississippi birder Judy Toups. Instead of watching only the birds that came across her path, my momma started taking trips to see them.

  Our first trip during the RGVBF was the big day van tour. On this outing, teams of six birders, two birding guides, and two local guides who know how to get to all the birding spots ride in each of six or so vans, and the vans are in friendly competition. The van that tallies the highest number of species seen between 6:00 A.M. and 4:30 P.M. wins the competition and bragging rights. (Big days usually last for twenty-four hours, but this festival sported a shorter competition period.)

  This day was one of the most amazing I have had as a birder. We put 250 miles on the van as we picked off spectacular birding area after spectacular birding area—Estero Llano Grande State Park, Laguna Madre, Bentsen-Rio Grande State Park, and so on. I wound up seeing more than forty birds I’d never seen b
efore, and my jaw dropped several times at some of the most wondrous birding sights I’d ever witnessed: An adult White-tailed Hawk atop a telephone pole at close range; seventy-five Buff-bellied Hummingbirds feeding in a small field of Turk’s Cap; and an Aplomado Falcon perched at eye-level on the post of a barbed wire fence, with a Cassin’s Sparrow balancing on the barbed wire right below it. I have yet to see a picture or drawing of an Aplomado Falcon that comes close to how majestic this bird is in real life. The mix of colors (yellow, orange, black, gray, and white), along with bold lines and nuanced streaking, make the bird seem like a moving impressionist painting. We finished the day with 150 bird species and came in second place to the winning van, which had 153. After that big day with guides Andy Bankert and Michael Hilchey, I was totally hooked. I began my ascent (or descent, depending on whom you ask) into bird nerddom.

  After the RGVBF, I got inspired: I compiled my years of “important” lists—including several trips to Grand Isle courtesy of Joan and Joe, the LOS and High Island trips, the day in New Mexico with Bill West, occasional day trips to bird, lists of birds that had crossed my path during trips I had taken to places like Hawaii, California, and Grand Cayman, as well as things I could remember from childhood—into my birding life list. It had about 350 birds on it. In creating this list, I joined the legion of birders who keep a life list, which consists of all the species of wild birds encountered in their lives.

  The other thing I took with me from that trip at the RGVBF was a driving desire to see the movie The Big Year, which had just been released. The author of the book upon which the movie was based, Mark Obmascik, was a keynote speaker at the festival. Greg Miller, one of the birders featured in the book and movie, was also on hand at the festival.2 My mom and I had read the book, which is about three birders trying to see a record number of bird species in North America in a single year; hearing Greg and Mark talk about the movie got us excited to see it. I was even more thrilled because during that very first morning in Harlingen, Texas, at the Best Western that netted birders like us by providing a predawn breakfast, Greg Miller sat down at the table next to us at about 5:15 A.M. I read his festival name tag and said, “You’re Greg Miller? The Greg Miller?”