A Class Trip: The Beauty and Science of the Outer Banks
Imagine You Are On The Water
It is roughly 8am, the day is frigid (it’s roughly 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and you’re on a ferry crossing from Ocracoke to Swan Quarter, leaving the North Carolina Outer Banks behind after a three day, adventure-filled excursion with your college Ornithology class.
There is an imposter on this trip, though, your twin sister who doesn’t go to your school, but who is a bird fanatic who signed away her life (a waiver to let her ride in the car with Catawba students) to be a part of this Outer Banks trip (she’s gone two times before). She stands beside you at the head of the boat, watching magic fly across the sky.
After the trip, my sister, Angelina, says one of her favorite memories was this last ferry ride, specifically the wave of Double-Crested Cormorants that flew over the water. “When we were like on the ferry and they were like all in a row, just hundreds and hundreds of Cormorants, that was really cool.”
When asked about her favorite bird of the trip, she couldn’t give me a straight answer. As a whole, we identified over two dozen species of birds, from White Pelicans to Surf Scoters, a kind of duck. But why do all of these birds come to the Outer Banks at all?
What A Bird Wants (What A Bird Needs)
Joy Crist of IslandFreePress.org writes that the North Carolinian Outer Banks are located along the Atlantic Flyway, a migration path which stretches from the Artic Islands (Greenland) all the way to the Caribbean Islands. Birds migrate down this path and take a pit stop at the Outer Banks, not looking for warmth (as many, including myself, believe), but instead looking for food and shelter.
With plentiful fish, small sand crabs — and in other habitats, insects, rodents, and winter berries — there is something for every bird that stops by. Nearly 400 species of bird pass through the Outer Banks, and about 17,000 individuals in just a week.
Birding Isn’t Just For Old People
There is no place quite like it on the Eastern Seaboard. This trip was not my first time to the Outer Banks, but even more so than my trip two years before, I was astonished.
The sheer amount of birds that gather in one place, kinds of birds you’d never see in the wild in North Carolina otherwise, will amaze even those who are not obsessed with birds. As said eloquently by my sister: “One important aspect is to realize birds are super cool and you should be a birder and should also be obsessed with birds.”
The Pea Island Wildlife Refuge, one among many of the stops we took on our trip, is still one of my favorite places to go. It’s a big lake right by the ocean, surrounded by hills of sand pushed aside by big machines to stop it from covering the road, with a walkable path all the way around.
On this trip, we saw a great number of birds at and close by to the Pea Island Wildlife refuge, including White Pelicans, American Coots (no, they won’t give you cooties if you touch them), Hooded Mergansers, Marbled Godwits, and a particularly strange Great Blue Heron (my favorite bird, even though you can see them in many other parts of the state.)
The Marbled Godwits in particular were a favorite memory of my sister and I, not only because the birds were little and very cute pecking around in the sand, but because of how my Professor, Dr. Joe Poston, reacted to seeing them. In Angelina’s words: “he swerved off the road to go look because he was so excited.” Dr. Poston described it as one of those moments in which “students realize ‘okay, this guy’s kind of nuts’.”
While this may have been our favorite memory, Dr. Poston’s was more sentimental. “I always enjoy the opportunities,” he said, “For students to see things. The first night when all the Swans were coming in and I could see the students getting excited about it, that was really cool.”
Even for Dr. Poston, aka “The Bird Man”, a chance to see his students react to and enjoy the beauty of the Outer Banks’ birds was more special than anything.
The Lasting Effect of Birds
Dr. Poston told me about how students from the Ornithology class he taught in 2009 (15 years ago!) met up with him when he took a trip to the pacific northwest after his son graduated college. These two students, one of them a musical theatre major, “got obsessed,” with birds, as Dr. Poston described it.
Not only the beauty of the Outer Banks, but the practice of birding itself makes even the smallest parts of life more beautiful, as it formulates connections between unlikely people, just like how it did between an Ornithologist and a musical theatre major 15 years ago.
A fellow student in my class told me about how birding has affected other aspects of her life. “Like, I’ll be outside and I’ll hear a White-Breasted Nuthatch, and I’ll pause for a moment and say ‘look a White-Breasted Nuthatch,’ then I’ll continue my thing.
Seeing my classmates out around campus, as well as experiencing the Outer Banks with them, really goes to show the effect birding has had on them, as well as myself. One of my key memories from the Outer Banks is being so amazed at how devoted birding my classmates were. I didn’t expect this from them, and I was impressed.
The Outer Banks, In Conclusion
After spending three days in the cold, my fingers frozen around my binoculars trained on some Bald Eagle or Northern Shoveler in the distance, staying in a shabby hotel and then a tiny motel, and going from site to site in a van packed with six other of my classmates, I can’t wait to go back to the Outer Banks next year.
I’ll miss the van and my classmates, as next year’s trip will most likely be just my sister and I, but I look forward to the next round of amazing birds.