A BIRDER'S ROAD TO DISCOVERY

Those of us who enjoy bird study in one form or another arrive at this pastime over different routes. My journey began thirty years ago when I heard a mockingbird's all-night concert. Never had I heard such imaginative bird song. I was captivated.

Too ignorant right then to realize that I had experienced a whole new awareness, I set out to satisfy my curiosity about the nocturnal serenader. Little did I know that I would soon be hooked by an interest that would prove so compelling that it could be called nothing less than a passion. No arrow shot by Cupid ever found a truer mark than that mockingbird's song.

Others are aroused to birds and their ways by any number of other happenings: A feather caught in a bush -- who was the owner? A picture in a book -- is there really such a bird? A pretty creature sitting on a nest -- what is her name? A limp body under the picture window -- what is this magnificent mite whose life ended so unfortunately?

Whether we amble into a state of awareness without remembering our first step or are plunged into it by some incident, we all travel the same road of discovery. Not long after I passed the "mockingbird milestone," I borrowed a copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds from the public library in an effort to discover the identity of a little bird that had built her nest above our summer cottage door. That did it! Here was a book that pictured more than 350 birds, all reputed to nest east of the Mississippi River -- and I had not yet seen any of them except robins and blue jays . From that moment on, I was determined either to prove the book a hoax or to see all that was represented therein for myself.

That resolve led me to scatter bread crumbs that winter on the picnic table under my kitchen window. My equipment was a pair of borrowed opera glasses and a copy of Peterson's book. Not having yet learned how to look for those telling features called field marks, I right away thought English sparrows were chickadees. The black throat of the former misled me. It was not until I put up a proper feeder that I attracted more variety of birds, including chickadees.

Unfortunately for beginners, most birds do not have the unique color of a blue jay, the conspicuous crest of a cardinal or the unmistakable markings of a redheaded woodpecker. That's what field guides are for. They draw attention to the most salient points of each bird and tell how to separate similar-looking species.

While encyclopedias and other tomes about birds are beautiful to look at and surely make interesting reading, they are not suited to the task of pinpointing a bird's identity. Every birdwatcher, regardless of the degree of interest in the subject, should own the Peterson book mentioned above, Robbins' Birds of North America published by Golden Guides,the National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America OR the newest, and one of the best, Stokes Field Guide to Birds (either Eastern or Western regions) by Donald and Lillian Stokes. The Peterson and Stokes guides help reduce confusion by limiting birds to just one region of the U.S., whereas the others cover the entire country.

It has been many years since a first rate field guide has been published, and I am so pleased with the Stokes' guides. Instead of drawings, they have chosen top quality photographs. They have assigned one species of bird to a page and have filled each page with an amazing amount of pertinent and useful information.

If you start as I did with no knowledge of birds at all, using a field guide takes a lot of practice and patience. There are many problems in matching a live bird to its picture. First, you have to learn something about the different families of birds and where they are found in the book. They appear in a scientific order from the most primitive in the evolutionary process (structurally speaking, not in intelligence) to the most advanced. Sometimes it seems that you have found a bird that is not in the book.

Being confounded like that is an affliction that affects every novice birder. Bit by bit, though, it all comes together, and we begin to know the common birds of our yards in each of the seasons. For some of us, that is enough. For others, the desire to see all the birds we possibly can becomes an obsession, and we travel. We start by taking trips, either alone or with others of our kind, around our county. Then we head further afield. First, it's just to another part of the state, but before we realize what's happening, we find ourselves on birding vacations in Florida, Texas, Alaska, Newfoundland...

Has this happened to you?