MYgration
It’s 4:30 AM. I am in Portland and the airport shuttle bus is playing Zac Brown’s “Homegrown”. I’ll be back in New Jersey this afternoon and migration will be over.
It started in January. In the heat of Panama, in a village called Gamboa near the canal. On Pipeline Road, through rainforested trails looking for birds like the Wilson’s Warbler, whom we affectionately named WIWA after its bird acronym. Everything, everywhere, has an acronym.
It ended on Mount Adams in Washington, with a late May snow squall, looking for many of the same birds we saw those many months ago, now nesting in the tall pines of the Pacific Northwest.
612 birds. Four months. 16,000 air miles. New beard. New friends on the trail. Messed up ligaments in my right foot. More skill at recognizing sight and sound. The need to be home. And the need to see even more birds. That feeling never goes away.
Panama
Nothing can prepare you for this. You downoad some birding apps. You study the field guide and the travel guide. You put Duolingo and Google Translate on your iPhone. You count down the days. And all of a sudden you are in Panama.
You didn’t come here for a regular vacation. No spa. No pool. No boat drinks. No tour of the canal. You came here for the birds. Small country, many birds — plenty of which you may never see anywhere else.
And so it happens that you find yourself standing swivel-headed staring into the trees at dawn beside eight other people who you’d get to know pretty well over the next 10 days.
And the birds start to come at you in waves.
You remember the first one from the field guide — Crested Oropendola. But all you see is that brilliant yellow tail before it darts off into the woods. You hear a high-pitched rattling sound and your guide calls “Blue-headed Parrot!” and you think, “Great, I want to see that,” but the pair of them are flying fast overhead and before you know it you’re looking at a Blue-Gray Tanager and then an Emerald Tanager and then a Flame-colored Tanager and you’re thinking “How am I going to keep all of these tanagers straight?” and that’s before you’ve started worrying about all those flycatchers and ant birds and ant shrikes and ant wrens.
It won’t be quiet for hours, but by mid-day the gaudy sights and spiraling sounds give way to a peaceful silence like a Spanish cathedral after mass is over and the candles put out. It’s still now, you can replay the scenes in slow motion, and most of all you can smile.
Later you are walking down the famous Pipeline Road, feeling like a walking ad for breathable fabrics and DEET and sunscreen and thankful you have them all. The Americans built Pipeline Road during the Second World War. Fearing attack on the canal in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, a hasty pipeline was assembled to transport oil between the Caribbean and the Pacific. It was never used, never needed. Today you are likely to see a team of Smithsonian tropical researchers along the road as you are birders, hikers, even school kids out for a day.
For us, Pipeline Road was 94 species of birds on a two-mile walk, not counting the Great Tinamou two young Americans hikers spotted on the road on the road ahead of us. There it was, on their iPhone, in between their Panama selfies. We didn’t get the bird, but that’s a reason to go back again.
For every tinamou that got away there was a Pied Puffbird right in your face. For the Green Shrike-Vireos that were heard only, there were half a dozen species of tanager showing brilliant colors and trogons showing off for the cameras.
In the down times we told stories and made fun of bird names. If a Frigatebird can be Magnificent and a Quetzal Resplendent, how do you think it feels to be a Paltry Flycatcher, or a Least Flycatcher, or a mere Yellowish one? Would you rather be a Pheasant Cuckoo or a Squirrel Cuckoo? A Streak-headed Woodcreeper, or a Plain Brown one?
And we ate. A lot. Mostly family-style meals, eggs with corn tortillas, chicken that was just as good in a stew as it was roasted or fried, pescado entero, the best bananas ever, hot sauce that gave the right kick without burning your lips.
We birded at a coffee plantation. We birded over breakfast, getting up from our table to look at a Spot-breasted Woodpecker (a lifer for many of us) while the locals looked at the gringos locos with the binoculars and cameras (lifers for them as well?). We birded after dinner (a Tropical Screech Owl so close you could touch it). We birded in our sleep (I am still dreaming about chasing a Mustached Antwren — yes, that is a real bird — that taunted us with its calls in the rainforest trails off Pipeline Road, heard like it was shouting in our ears but never to be seen).
When the heat was too fierce in the Darien, we birded 7000 feet up in an area called Nueva Suiza, where we could see our breath while we waited for a pair of Resplendent Quetzals to put in an appearance at their favorite avocado tree. When the humidity got to us, our antidote was thousands of shorebirds on the move in the mudflats that were the Pacific Ocean at low tide in Panama City.
As the trip fades you remember fragments. Dozens of Wood Storks streak past a blazing sun while you’re having a Coke at a rest stop in town. The watering hole at Torti where we looked for birds while local people crossed the stream on horseback, on mules, with machetes, in trucks and even a plow. The Toucans, whose colors were only as remarkable as the fact that they could somehow fly with those beaks weighing them down in front. The hummingbirds — we saw 25 of the country’s 59 species — one more colorful and animated than the next.
In the end what stitches all these images together are the people, from our guides Guido and Luis who seemed to know everyone in Panama, to those who invited us to their homes to share a piece of their world — their birds, their feeders.
There was the indefatigable Father Wally, the American missionary priest who has brought fresh water to thousands of rural Panamanians while maintaining thousands of acres of prime bird habitat (you can Google “Father Wally” for his amazing story). And there was the young man Misael, who we met at a gift shop in the middle of the mountains and who could not wait to show us the birds in his neighborhood, including a pair of nesting Fiery-billed Aracaris and a Brown-throated Parakeet perched near the foundation of the home this young man was building by hand.
There was the expat couple from Connecticut who go through 6 pounds of sugar a day to feed their hummingbirds. And the family who served us in their roadside restaurant, smiling when you said the breakfast was just right.
Nearly 1000 species have been recorded in this remarkable land that joins the two American continents. In a little over a week, we saw about a third of them. That makes over 600 reasons to return.
Southeast Texas
It’s different here. It’s Texas all right, but it’s the Gulf Coast, and the shore breezes bring out something different in people. Migration is a tourist spectacle here, chronicled in a pile of bird literature about big days and fallouts, those magic moments when migrating birds drop down by the thousands once they hit land, exhausted from crossing the Gulf and starving for food and water.
The spring rains are hitting Houston hard, and the Gulf isn’t faring that much better. The wind and rain are pelting us. Ponds grow up on the sides of the roads and shorebirds quickly fill them in, wet and cold but hungry all the same.
They are beautiful in their spring colors, all rufous and buffed up and looking for love.
You can cover a lot of ground quickly here — from shore to maritime forest to piney woods to plains in no time flat, with straight roads and high speed limits. Birder’s paradise.
And the birds were blowing in. A clearing in the woods dotted with blue — Indigo Buntings. Wet trees dripping with wet red birds — Scarlet and Summer Tanagers. Warblers darting everywhere — yellow buzzing all around. We met guys from Japan, the U.K., a couple from California wearing Cape May hats, birders everywhere.
Victor Emanuel Nature Tours, the big bird and nature travel company, was celebrating its 40th anniversary here, and big-time bird celebs like Kenn Kaufman and Pete Dunne were here to pay homage to the man who has done as much as anyone I know to make birding the global phenomenon it has become. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 20 million birders and they spend more than $55 billion annually on their passion — much more than fishers or hunters but without all their PR.
On one day alone, May 14, 2016, 15,953 birders in 145 countries recorded 6263 bird species, the biggest one-day total in history.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that of the 1,154 native bird species that occur in Canada, the continental U.S. and Mexico, 432 are in trouble and risk extinction due to population loss, range reduction, and threats to habitat. And this is in a part of the world where the three countries have a migratory bird treaty in place to protect them. The numbers are likely be higher in parts of the world where birds have no formal protection and it’s still basically ok to shoot them.
Here in Texas, it was hard to tell the birds were in trouble from anything more than bad weather. The Houston Audubon has done an amazing job amassing land for preservation along the Bolivar Peninsula and into High Island. Anahuac is one of the finest wildlife refuges in our national system. And the Piney Woods of east Texas are managed with care and skill by a consortium of interests ranging from the US Forest Service to Texas A&M. It is efforts like these across communities and countries that will keep the planet safe for birds — and that is a leading indicator for the health of people too.
New Jersey
Nine times out of ten, in New Jersey I am headed south, to the Raritan Bay, the shores of Sandy Hook, Barnegat Bay, Brigantine and ultimately Cape May. The Parkway and 287 can suck the life out of you, but when you get to one of these destinations it’s like CPR for the soul.
Thirty-four years ago, Pete Dunne set out to memorialize The Garden State’s rightful place in the annals of birding by starting what he grandly termed The World Series of Birding. A simple concept, but pure madness in execution — you have 24 hours, midnight to midnight, to score as many species as you can, from High Point in the north to Cape May in the south. Seeing is great but just hearing the birds is ok too. Apart from the bragging rights, it’s all about raising money for conservation.
It was only the intrepid birders in the beginning, scouring New Jersey from stem to stern, with the winners scoring up to 230 birds for the day. The intrepid still rule the day, but more and more we have teams that just want to have fun — county teams, teams on bicycles, senior teams, youth teams, teams that stay in one place, teams from places as far as Israel.
Early on the morning of May 14, I set out with a team of New Jersey Audubon ambassadors including Pete Dunne, Bill Boyle, Eric Stiles, the head of New Jersey Audubon, several Audubon board members and staff, and a few state legislators. We found 130 birds — from the call of a Chuck Wills Widow before dawn to the flight of distant shorebirds at dusk on the Delaware Bay.
It was fun. It was tiring. And above all it was a place to soak in the habitats that make the long tough ride worthwhile — Belleplain, East Point, Heislerville, places far removed from the refineries that greet you when you leave the Newark Airport. And through it all, some of the best birds you could hope to see, all in their spring colors and in full song, seen and heard with people acting out a shared romance for the natural world.
Washington
Morning mass among the oaks and redwoods near the Columbia River. Western Tanager presiding with grosbeak, bushtits and towhee serving as acolytes. About as far away from New Jersey as you can get and still be in the United States, in geography and state of mind.
WIWA is back. The same warbler that was putting on its spring colors in Panama is in full breeding plumage now, nesting in the bushes beneath the tall green Ponderosa Pines.
Most of the birds here have a distinct western flare — the red of the Red-tailed Hawk is darker and deeper, the blue of the bluebird more iridescent, the woodpeckers and sapsuckers more varied and multicolored, the hummingbirds more plentiful and earlier to arrive.
It strikes you how green this place is, how it smells of citrusy pine, how the windflowers accentuate all that green with ribbons of purple and blue. Sandhill Cranes are nesting here, far from their winter homes in Florida and the southwest. Hundreds of swifts and swallows circle and dive in a feeding frenzy over a grassy field, Ravens complete with Bald and Golden Eagles for territory, Peregrine Falcons soar over towering basalt cliffs.
Some birds come to us easily and pose and preen in front of us — a Spotted Towhee with a juicy bug, a Black-Throated Gray Warbler with a distinctive little spot of yellow where you and I have an eyebrow. The air is clear and thin and in some places the snow line never goes away. Everywhere you go, Mount Adams and Mount Hood loom craggy and white on the horizon. The canyons and river gorges cut their way through your heart and dare you to fall in love.
The weather lurches through some extremes. A mid-May snow squall. Lots of rain. A sudden jump into the 80s. On a chilly night you sit by the fire and tell stories with other birders. You feel at home, but you know it’s fleeting. You know you have to go back to work, to the bills and the cares of the day, yet you know that the everyday joys of life are what make adventures like this stand out.
Spring will give way to summer and summer to fall, and a new migration will take hold. New places beckon. Australia, New Zealand. Maybe Cuba some day soon. More adventures for the migrant in all of us.
Walls can’t keep birds and spirits from soaring.
One last word
Memorial Day weekend. Back in New Jersey. Temperatures are cranklng up to August levels. The bays are crowded with boaters beginning their season-long love affair with the water. Sunbathers in their winter skin skip the sunscreen and go straight to burn. Birds and those who follow them are wilting. All but the nesting warblers are on their way north. Flycatchers are here. I swear they are panting in the heat.
The pace slows. Summer birding is here. I’ve followed spring migration halfway around the world. It’s time to enjoy my own back yard.
Note: The Panama section originally was written for The New Jersey Audubon Society, which organized the Panama trip.
