Pete C. wants to make one thing very clear:
“When people hear bird-watching, they think ‘Oh, you’re gonna go out and see a pretty bird, and stare at it for like two hours, and then lollygag around.’ Well it’s actually pretty intense—you get a bird, then you’re like ‘Okay, let’s go get something else, let’s go see what we can find.’”
He expounds from behind the wheel of his late-model Oldsmobile, cruising along a pastoral road in Jamestown, RI. His friend Scott Winton occupies the passenger seat, staring idly out the window at the passing farmland. A Guns ‘N Roses song plays quietly from the stereo, and for most of the ride, Pete and Scott sit in comfortable silence.
Pete scrabbles for a set of Mapquest directions between the seats and glances at them as he drives. “I think we’re getting close—it should be this road up here on the right into Fort Getty,” he says hopefully.
A minute later, he hangs a right near sun-dappled Mackerel Cove onto a two-lane road with a wide grassy margin. Two cars are parked about a quarter mile down from the entrance, and four people stand in between the lanes with binoculars raised, looking intently into thick brush along the right side of the road.
“Holy crap, there it is!” shouts Pete, and slams the car into Park. He and Scott, both juniors at Brown, bound from the vehicle. They swing fragile binoculars haphazardly up and out of the back seat and hustle down to the little group, scanning the brush as they go for the hi-liter yellow flash of a Western Kingbird.
That’s the only reason Pete’s here in Jamestown on a Wednesday afternoon. He’s never seen a Western Kingbird, never “gotten” one, and he wants it. Badly.
Pete grunts with satisfaction when he spots it, about 200 ft. away, perched in a leafless tree. He focuses in on the bird with his binoculars.
“Scott, you see the coloring? The bright yellow breast, with the buff-colored neck? This guy’s from Texas. He must’ve been blown off course on the migration.”
The birders gathered at this spot have all been alerted by email of this unexpected presence thousands of miles away from its typical range in Texas. The Kingbird isn’t groundbreaking news, though: certain bird sightings can prompt avid birders from states as far away as California to jump on the fastest plane to Providence just so they can add another to their “life list.”
The Kingbird seems to enjoy its celebrity status. It takes wing, and flies toward the group, rising and falling in the stiff wind. When it lands on a tree limb directly above the road, everyone gasps in unison, except for Pete. He’s already running back to the car.
He returns with an expensive digital SLR camera with a foot-long lens and raises the unwieldy contraption to his eye. Stalking around the base of the tree, he sets his compact 5 ft. 9 in. frame like a bipod and squeezes off bursts of six shots at a time. “I know the camera seems really expensive—and it is—but in the five years I’ve had it I probably would have spent the same amount in film alone,” he says. “If I want to get the really good shots I need a wide margin of error. I could use a whole roll on one bird.”
Satisfied with his shots, Pete begins to get impatient. He’s ready to get going, down the road to the end of the peninsula, to get some Common Loons for Scott. This mentality defines “birders” from “bird-watchers.” A birder thinks a successful day is one in which they see 100-150 species of birds; a birdwatcher thinks a successful day is when they’ve seen lots of pretty birds in the great outdoors.
Pete’s been birding since he was 13. A friend of his grandfather’s named Hugh Willoughby, now 75, has been his mentor. They met playing tennis at the Kindbren Swim & Tennis Club in Riverside, RI. “He was still in pretty good shape, for an old guy,” says Pete.
As their friendship grew, Willoughby took Pete canoeing in local rivers and lakes. It was on these trips that Pete was first exposed to birding.
Willoughby, Brown class of 1953, has been birding for nearly his whole life, and helps edit a number of birding publications. He’s a retired teacher and devotes much of his time to birding.
These credentials made him an ideal mentor for Pete, who also got his high-school friend Tom hooked. The trio traveled to Texas, Arizona, Florida, and California in search of new species to add to their life lists. “I can walk around here and know what everything is, so it’s cool when you go to a new place, like California, and you can see new stuff everywhere.” says Pete.
In those early years, Pete was interested in adding as many birds to his life list as possible. When he wasn’t birding, he was reading the Audubon Guide to North American Birds to brush up on his male, female, and juvenile color patterns, or species’ seasonal ranges.
Once Pete had a solid base and a life count of about 300 birds, he began to get interested in nature photography. Over five years, Pete’s amassed an impressive array of tools. In his camera bag, he usually carries two camera bodies, five lenses, two tele-extenders, two sets of binoculars, a scope, a tripod, extra memory cards, and a cable release. Total value: $5200 on his back.
Pete’s life count has leveled off at 519 bird species. “There’s only about 1000 species in the USA. I’ve been at about 500 for the last two years or so, adding two or three a year.” Worldwide, there are more than 10,000 species—if he really wanted to boost his life count, he could go to Brazil and get 120 new birds in a day.
Few people realize the intensity of elite birders—when they’re outside they always know where the birds are, and can identify them unconsciously—“like colors,” as Pete says. There are celebrity birders, known for their stunning ability to discern bird-songs. “Paul Eamon, Mike Tucker, David Sibley—once you get that good it’s mainly hearing. They can pick up stuff that’s like six-tenths of a second long, flying overhead at night,” he says with awe.
A wealth of birding-specific merchandise is available to enthusiasts and there are numerous publications dedicated to the hobby, the largest of which (Birding Magazine) has a circulation of about 20,000. One of Pete’s recent shots of a Red-Necked Stint was accepted by the magazine, and will be published later this month.
“Birding’s really all about reputation—people can make up stuff, say they’ve seen a bird, and get caught. And their credibility just disappears,” says Pete. “There are some people who are no longer believed by anyone.”
Pete doesn’t seem to mind that birding isn’t a normal collegiate pursuit. “I don’t think there’s anyone at Brown who’s as involved. It’s a pretty uncommon thing to do,” he says. With Scott he’s started a 10-member Brown student group, called the “Brown Boobies,” devoted to the hobby. They try to get out at least once a week, and at meetings they watch nature documentaries devoted to birds and talk photography techniques.
Other than this atypical hobby, Pete’s a normal college student—he’s a Geology-Biology major, plays intramural sports and poker with the guys, and likes to have a few drinks on the weekends. But most Sunday mornings he’ll be up at 7 to ready his camera gear, hangover be damned.
After graduation, Pete hopes to follow his passion for birding into a full-time job leading birding tours. There are dozens of tourism outfits devoted to birding around the US and the world, and he aspires to be a guide for one. “I’d like to start a birding tourism company, because it’s pretty amazing—you can get paid to go around the country and take people birding. There’s a lot of money in the industry,” says Pete. “You just organize a trip and take people out to all the good places. And they pay you for it”
Pete squints into the oblique sunlight glancing off the turbulent Wednesday waves. He plants his feet, raises the Bausch & Lomb binoculars to his eyes, and squints again behind the rubber rims. He’s perched twenty feet above the pounding, angry surf, at the very edge of the point at Beavertail, looking 300 yards out to sea beyond a bounding buoy, and he looks steady as rock.
To a novice birder, the area he’s examining looks unremarkable. Through a $700 pair of binoculars, the scene becomes clearer.
Dozens of black shapes dot the heaving water. They rise and then disappear behind cresting waves. Pete scans the floating flock, and begins talking to himself.
“Ruddies, lots of Ruddy Ducks. I wish they were closer in, it’s hard to see them in the sun. There might be a life bird in there, you never know. Damn it.”
He lowers the binoculars and turns towards the craggy rock.
Time to move on.
