Semi-Tuft
Forget your Dallas cowboys and your Houston Astros. Texas’ real champions count birds once a year at freeport. They’re not bird watchers, they’re birders. And therein lies a tail.
(Page 4 of 4)
As we ate, I met or had pointed out the luminaries of the crowd: Jerry and Nancy Strickling, who had recently returned to Houston after several years in St. Louis. David Marrack, a clinical pathologist at Baylor Medical School. Margaret Anderson, whose life list was only one bird shorter than Victor Emanuel’s. Ben Feltner, a large, burly man whose wife provides primary support for the family to allow him to give full time to birding; for his part, Feltner has assumed the household duties and serves as a professional guide on birding tours. Jim Tucker, editor of Birding magazine and a highly skilled, apparently indefatigable birder. A great deal of attention was going to Kenn Kaufman, a young man who dropped out of school for the whole of 1973 in an effort to break the American record for species spotted in a year. (626. Ted Parker, 1971). Kaufman backpacked around the country, walking and hitchhiking almost 70,000 miles, sleeping in fields or with birders who would put him up for a day or two, and eating canned dog and cat food to save money. With a week still to go, he had logged a record-smashing 672 birds and had spent less than $300 (Approximately 4¢, per mile, or 45¢ a bird.)
In addition to his singular life-style, Kaufman gained attention at Freeport for having been swept off the jetty during the afternoon by a huge wave. He had cut his hands, lost an expensive telescope, and come dangerously close to drowning, which would have taken the edge off setting the American single-year bird record. His colleagues tried to find something redeeming in the incident: “Did you get any new birds? That might have made it worthwhile.” “Do you remember what you were thinking when the wave knocked you off?” I suppose they hoped for, “My lifers passed before me” or “If I have to die, this is the way I want to go—on a Christmas Bird Count.” Kauf man’s actual response was somewhat less grand—”Yes. I thought, ‘Oh, shit!’”
Victor Emanuel began the tally by running through the list of “regular” or “expected” birds to see how many of these had been sighted. As he ticked off the names, we roller-coastered along between the thrill of victory when we learned that a bird missed last year had been spotted and the agony of defeat as the absence of upraised arms told us the sad news that an expected bird, one we always count on—indeed, one we could scarcely do without if we were to have a chance against Cocoa Beach—had been missed.
“The Horned Grebe.”
“Yes.”
“Marvelous! John got the Horned Grebe. We missed that last year.”
“White-Fronted Goose.”
“Yes. We saw a party of them.”
“Wonderful, David! You saved the day!”
For awhile, Emanuel ripped along without a miss. Then, alas, we learned no one had sighted a Ross’ Goose. Too bad the Anahuac Refuge was not in our territory.
A missed Rough-legged Hawk drew an anguished “Ouch!” from Emanuel. No Bald Eagle. A Bald Eagle had been spotted the day before. We should have gotten it. Emanuel put his head in B his arms.
No Caracara.
No Osprey, though one had been in the area for two weeks.
The killdeer got us back on the right track, as only one person on the entire team had missed it. As part of the new trend, someone reported having gotten the Woodcock. Noel and Dan sighed in relief. Our group would not be singled out for public shame at having missed the Woodcock. John Tveten had spotted the Black Skimmer, and someone else had seen two Whitewing Doves, a sighting that brought more enthusiasm than I thought it deserved. Out at Delavan’s Tank between Devine and Hondo you could pay a dollar a gun for the privilege of shooting Whitewing Doves all afternoon during dove season. I started to mention this but decided it was perhaps not appropriate, they being so scarce in this region.
Jerry Strickling had gotten the Groovebilled Ani, the Barn Owl, and the Screech Owl, and Victor allowed he was glad the Stricklings had moved back to Houston. Ben Feltner got the Hairy Woodpecker, another good bird—apparently better than the Downy Woodpecker I had seen, although the major difference is three little stripes on the tail, which I do not consider a mark of clear superiority. Another personal letdown came when I learned that six people had seen Vermilion Flycatchers. It was still a lifer for me.
Clearly, things were not as bad as they had seemed, and the early negativism was giving way to a ripple of feeling that the count might not be as bad as had been feared; still, the doubters insisted we would suffer mightily when we got to the warbler page. But marvelously, wonderfully, fantastically, one or two people kept coming up with birds feared to be missing. Somehow, we had managed to find 182 birds on the regular list. On paper, it was sure to (be a good—though probably not great—count, but one had a feeling things were going to be rather worse one of these years soon, not only for our crowd but for a few warblers.
Now, the real drama began as Emanuel went around the tables to get reports of birds not on the “regular list” and to challenge those who reported the sightings to satisfy their peers that their report was accurate. Birders have this compulsion about accuracy. Most of them feel not many of their number would deliberately lie about seeing bird they had not seen, but they do believe some birders want so much to see a bird that their eyes may fill out features that are not really there. To avoid misreporting, the Freeport count utilizes a rigorous and potentially embarrassing cross-examination procedure. I learned rather quickly that if one is going to report an unusual sighting to this crowd, one had better know one’s bird, for it is in the challenge round that birders seek to exhibit their competence and enhance their prestige.
“Did you see the bird in a good light?”
“Did other members of your party see the bird?”
“What color were its legs?”
“Did you see the top of its wings? Can you describe them?”
“What kind of area was it in? What kind of grass? Were there seeds on the grass? Did it run or fly when you chased it?”
Several challenged birders defended their haziness over such details by claiming “I know this bird so well that I didn’t even bother to look at it closely. I was looking for something rare.” Sometimes this appeared to work and sometimes it didn’t. Inevitably, some birders got off with less questioning than others. People did not press Ben Feltner or Jerry Strickling or Jim Tucker too much. After all, they would be the jury who would eventually decide which birds to keep and which to give away. Emanuel admits that the better birders get off easier in the cross-examination. “If Jerry Strickling reports he saw a bird, you can ask him two or three questions and be confident he saw it. Someone else might get asked fifteen questions about the same bird. Some complain this is favoritism, and perhaps it is, but it is just a fact of birding that some observers are better than others. When we question a birder extensively or decide that he did not see a bird he reported, we are making a basic judgment about the competence of the observer. That is just the way things are.” The challenge round continued until every unexpected bird had been described and defended, then the jury retired to a vinyl booth in the main dining room to reach their verdicts. There was tension and speculation among those who remained. Nobody seemed to think a reported Pectoral Sandpiper would survive, especially since none of the judges had ever seen one in the area at this time of year. Others fretted that their credibility had been challenged. In general, the air was filled with an interesting combination of wanting the identifications to stand, for the sake of the count, but a willingness to see fellow birders lose a bit of face, if that seemed appropriate.
The jury struck some birds—just which ones is a loosely-kept secret until the final report is published in June—and wound up with a final list of exactly 200 species, a remarkable number for a fifteen-mile circle, but probably not enough to take the prize.
In the days that followed, Victor Emanuel learned that at least two other counts had outspotted Freeport. He fretted over what might have been. “The wind hurt us. We should have gotten the Chipping Sparrow, the Ruddy Turnstone, the Henslow, the Purple Finch, and the Pine Siskin. We haven’t missed those in years. We also missed the Caracara, the Peregrine Falcon, and the Black Rail, and they were all likely in the area. If we had used a marsh buggy this year, like we have before, we might have seen them.” He also wondered if perhaps the jury should have allowed some of the birds they had eliminated. “I think one or two of them might have been legitimate. Next year, we are going to stay in the area the day after the count and look for the birds the jury questions. If we find them, that could help the count.”
Now you’re chunkin’ in there, Victor! Just wait’ll next year. You’ll get ‘em. We’ll get ‘em. I don’t mean I’m promising to make the next count, but if it’s a pretty day and I don’t have anything else planned... .
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