On Compiling Bird Lists

I got interested in birds early, growing up in Franco’s Spain with rollers and hoopoes to whet the appetite of young eyes staring out the car window on long trips—actually, anything large enough to identify from a moving Triumph station wagon was pretty exciting. I carried my interest to England where I studied. It wasn’t until 1989 when I got to Massachusetts, home of the Brookline Bird Club, that I started keeping a list.

A trip to Texas with this group who adopted me, a new and eager birder reeling from a divorce, and urged me to record every bird until I had reached over ninety new ones (“life birds”), cheering on each milestone, got me hooked on listing. I plunged into Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge in spring, immersing myself in warbler song and color and this community that gathered every morning at six with binoculars. I wrote them all down. I remember my first cerulean warbler, my first hooded warbler, my first Kentucky warbler, rarities all. I learned the zoo-zee-zee-zoo-zee of the black-throated green warbler. I gasped in unison with a hundred other people at a rose-breasted grosbeak, at a scarlet tanager, at a Baltimore oriole. I started entering the birds in a home-made Filemaker database.

American birders are a community and once you get beyond a certain point with your list you enter an unnamed, undescribed race (with yourself) for the most lifers. In North America, lifers is often grafted onto the description “birds you have seen for the first time in North America which includes Canada and Alaska but excludes Mexico and Hawai’i, they being outside the North American bioregion as defined in the American Birding Association (ABA).” My list reached 350 (out of a possible 800) very quickly. The next hundred was almost as fast. Trips to Florida, Alaska, and the upper Midwest, swelled the list to over 500. A trip to Arizona in 1995 put me over 600 with hummingbirds, owls, and the elegant trogon.

Meanwhile, I had started an email correspondence with a man in California who, like me, liked birds. He spoke about the canyons in the East Bay and the song of the black-headed, rather than rose-breasted, grosbeak. Like me, he had an awesome respect for shorebirds and sparrows, the hard ones. His voice, through the screen, sang loud and clear and I was drawn west, a migration back to my birthplace.

I still keep a life list but I don’t fly anywhere special in an attempt to make it grow: I am content, these days, to watch the birds as they return each year, on their way to the Sierra or staying here for a season. I keep a list of the birds I see on the way to work. I keep a list of birds I’ve seen in dreams (the most spectacular was a yellow ptarmigan-type creature). We keep a joint list of the birds we’ve seen or heard from the house.

My ABA-area list stands at 667 (I was stuck on 666 for an awfully long while, which didn’t feel like a good place to be stuck). I don’t anticipate getting to 700 any time soon, to join that elite group known as the 700 club. My focus has changed. But the report of a rarity within 100 miles does get my blood going again!