The Game I Play

I received for Christmas the photography book, Waterbirds, by Theodore Cross, a collection of his striking pictures of my favorite type of bird. His text includes enough oddball information about the birds to make it just interesting enough to read, though I found myself skimming through a lot of information I already knew.  The book got me thinking, again, about bird photography and why, apart from the documentary aspect, I have so little interest in doing it.

Our scope is often mistaken for a camera when we’re in a place where there are non-birders, like when we’re walking on a beach or through a park. When we tell people that it is a telescope for looking at birds we’re met with a mixture of disappointment and incomprehension, as if they’re thinking, “You mean you’re lugging that thing around just to look at a bird? You take nothing back?”

Yup.

When we found the Roseate Spoonbill at Brigantine this summer, hundreds of miles out of range, I stopped a photographer because I wanted him to take picture of it to document it. I didn’t care if the bird posed for him or if the light was right—I just wanted some proof that we had seen what we reported.

Later, that photographer returned with a longer lens and got some excellent photos of the bird. And he can add those pictures to the hundreds of thousands of other pictures of spoonbills. Even the rarest bird is extensively photographed—there are millions of pictures, I’m sure, of Whooping Cranes (including some we took) of which there are less than 500 in the world.

I suppose part of the impetus for most people is the same as the need to take a picture of the Eifel Tower or the Statue of Liberty—to prove you were there, to prove you saw that Wood Stork, Limpkin, Painted Bunting. And of course, there’s the urge to capture the beauty of the bird, to make a beautiful photograph. But how many beautiful photographs of the Snowy Egret or the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset do we need?

But the stronger reason I’m not interested in taking pictures of the birds we see is really because that’s not the game I play.

When I first got interested in birds, during my vacations on Martha’s Vineyard 30 or so years ago, what fascinated me was the diversity of birds I could see just sitting on the deck. An Osprey on its nest, constantly calling. Swans sailing along the pond. Egrets wading on the edges. The Black-crowned Night Herons coming down out of the tree at dusk. The kingfisher rattling in flight. The towhee in the bushes. The marsh hawk (the Northern Harrier was the marsh hawk then) swooping along the line of dunes. Red-tailed Hawks nesting in the yard next door. It was a parallel universe taking place in front of me.

And living in the city it is even more fascinating to me to be able to go to Prospect Park, not one mile from here, and easily find 30 species of birds and, with a little more effort, 40 or more species. Mostly the birds (aside from the geese, ducks,  & gulls fed by the dimwits who think they’re doing them a favor) are ignored. I’ve watched people walk under a tree where a hawk is perched not 10 feet over them. There are hundreds, if not thousands of birds at any one time in the park and they are either in the background or completely invisible to most of the people in the park.

So my game—and by no means is my game exclusive to me—is to find as many species as possible every time I go out birding. How many can I find in the park? How many can I find in a day? How many in a month? How many in a year? How many in a lifetime? It just never ceases to amaze me how many different kinds of birds are out there to be found, right next to us, so to speak.

There’s a Northern Shrike at DeKorte in the meadowlands. I’ve never seen a Northern Shrike and I’d love to see one. But tomorrow, instead of twitching along Disposal Road in Bergen County, we’re going to Brigantine. Why? Because there’s no guarantee I’ll see the shrike and I know there will be lots of birds at Brigantine, more than at DeKorte, (and who knows what surprises we’ll find) and even more than twitching, that is the game I like to play.