The Last Word
Rothschild, Matthew
THE LAST WORD , Matthew Rothschild Taking Wing I was out birding early one May morning I at Picnic Point in Madison, Wisconsin. I It's a favorite spot: A slender finger of land slips out into...
...I didn't even know what one was...
...I could no longer pause for the chestnut-sided warbler...
...It's just jot and run...
...My invidious desire to reduce bird-watching to a contest is not a personal quirk...
...The great competitive spirit, the good old college try, has spilled over into the unlikeliest of fields...
...Not age as in Shakespeare, but hustle as in baseball, has bared ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang...
...Then, at some point, time became important...
...But when I came to Madison two-and-a-half years ago after a grueling job in Washington, D.C., I reacquainted myself with the pleasures of loitering in the woods or along a marsh—just me and the birds...
...Instead of enjoying the birds for themselves, for their beauty, I had sullied the pastime by turning it into a petty competition...
...I was like the precocious high school student who asks each classmate, "How did you do on the test...
...And when the competitive spirit somehow gained on me again, the woman at Picnic Point set me straight...
...Last spring, the New Jersey Audubon Society sponsored a "Second Annual World Series of Birding," in which twenty teams of bird watchers set out to identify as many species as possible in a Matthew Rothschild is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...While my brothers and sisters played ball with the neighborhood kids, I'd go off to the woods and sit on some moss for hours, waiting for the birds to visit...
...Ibegan watching birds when a covey of ring-necked pheasants wandered into the backyard of my family's suburban Chicago home one snowy afternoon...
...We no longer have to discuss the beauty of a scarlet tanager in hushed tones, lest someone think we're weird...
...I gave up the hunt after a while, not because it struck me as silly but because I was stalled...
...I asked...
...She was right, of course...
...In the freshness of dawn, with the dew on the grass and the jonquils in bloom, I had seen my share of old friends—red' starts, blackburnian warblers, and rose-breasted grosbeaks...
...I had wanted to see if I'd missed any spectacular species, but more important, I'd wanted to boast of the many birds I'd spotted...
...Then there are "life lists," on which bird watchers keep a running tally of the different kinds of birds they've seen...
...the winners notched 244 species— a new record, though it included birds that were only heard, not seen...
...For fifteen years, I did hardly any birdwatching...
...The game exhausted, I hung up my binoculars...
...My favorite was the chestnut-sided warbler, which would flit and sing within five feet of me...
...And in Texas, the National Audubon Society held a "bird-athon...
...It had been a good morning...
...The pros have checked off 600 species, and they jostle for position in the rankings like Henry Aaron chasing after Babe Ruth...
...Oh, do you have to play that game...
...the woman answered with a tired expression on her face...
...Quantify, quantify: Increasingly, that seems to be the motto of contemporary birdwatching...
...What'd you see...
...I needed to capture every bird I could and place it on my list...
...But it was beautiful, and I was captivated...
...I It's a favorite spot: A slender finger of land slips out into Lake Mendota, attracting myriad species each year at migration time...
...I'd seen about as many birds as could be found in my area...
...No time to enjoy the solitude of nature, no time to admire the blue of an indigo bunting or the elegance of a whistling swan...
...With any luck at all, our champions will appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, if not on a Wheaties box, and our washed-up stars can look forward to their very own Miller beer commercials...
...We can swap statistics, play in tournaments, even hold season-long races to see who's the best bird watcher, or birdwatching team, in the country...
...Bird watchers, long belittled as eccentric or frail, can now flex their muscles the American way...
...I'd never seen a pheasant before...
...I began to pore over my Peterson's guide and took to checking off the species he listed in the front...
...twenty-four-hour span...
...We can now recite scores and records with the best of them...
...A middle-aged couple, carrying heavy binoculars (not the new, light, expensive Nikons) and a faded green hardback copy of Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds, walked slowly down the path toward me...
...So it goes in America...
Vol. 49 • September 1985 • No. 9
