“You must have the bird in your heart before you can find it in the bush.” -  John Burroughs

“Sometimes I think that the point of birdwatching is not the actual seeing of the birds, but the cultivation of patience. Of course, each time we set out, there's a certain amount of expectation we'll see something, maybe even a species we've never seen before, and that it will fill us with light. But even if we don't see anything remarkable - and sometimes that happens - we come home filled with light anyway.” ― Lynn Thomson

Some 66 million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid called Chicxulub slammed into the waters off what is now Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It was a bad day for life on Earth; the impact catalyzed a mass extinction that killed off more than 75 percent of Earth's species. Among the casualties were the dinosaurs. Giant sauropods and theropods that had thundered across the earth for millions of years were wiped off the Earth. Sauropods included the likes of vegetarian apatosaurus, diplodocus, and stegosaurus. Theropods consisted of bipedal carnivores with hollow bones, tyrannosaurus rex, oviraptor, and velociraptor. All were thought to have gone extinct in a geological instant. Except some theropods survived. Today we call them birds.

While lizards, beetles, butterflies, cats, and dogs (wild and domestic) each have their cadres of ardent followers, all pale in comparison to birdwatchers, “birders,” or what they call in Great Britain “twitchers.” They could also be called “dino spotters.” In the U.S. alone there are now some 45 million people who watch birds, a number that has doubled in the past six years. Why birds?

I can think of lots of reasons, and near the top of the list is that birds are everywhere. Birds thrive on every continent on Earth, from the ice fields of Antarctica to the vast dune systems of Africa, from pristine wilderness to city parks, to fast food restaurant parking lots. That makes birds accessible to everyone wherever you are. Another reason that birds are so popular is that birds want to be seen and heard. Their songs and often striking plumage are not designed to attract people, we are simply collateral beneficiaries of their efforts to signal to others of their kind. Birds also do amazing things. Tiny chickadees survive sub-zero winters in their alpine habitats. Sand grouse in the Kalahari Desert fly miles and miles to isolated water holes and then soak up water in specially adapted breast feathers so they can fly back into the middle of the desert to provide a daily life-giving drink of water to their chicks. Crows on the island of New Caledonia can solve multi-step puzzles in order to access a peanut prize.

Another reason birding is so popular might be that it can be enjoyed and at the same time be challenging. A novice twitcher might visit a pond or marsh and be very pleased to distinguish ducks from coots, herons from cormorants. The seasoned birder might visit the same pond and also hear the reclusive rail calling from deep within the reeds, notice the age specific plumage variation in the gulls, maybe pick out the neotropical cormorant “slumming” with the hoard of double crested cormorants, and notice the chip note of the first spring migrant yellow warbler. Birders can also be extremely competitive. How large is your list of sighted bird species (a question I was once asked in a job interview for a preserve manager position in Arizona)? Who has the biggest list of birds seen in their yard, their county, their state, North America, in a single week, month, year, in your lifetime?

Such competitive behavior, with a seemingly infinite number of permutations for keeping species lists, may seem as an arcane, analytic approach to communing with Nature. Perhaps, but it is more importantly a means of getting people outside. And in enjoying birds in nature, these birders give value to forests, meadows, marshes, and deserts. Additionally, their bird lists when uploaded to platforms like eBird are an invaluable community science archive. Scientists accessing those archives will have a powerful data set providing unequivocal evidence for where bird species occur, where populations appear stable and sustaining, or where their abundance is changing over time.

There are roughly 10,000 bird species on Earth. About 800 of those are found in the U.S. (8%). Of those found in the U.S., 450 species, or about 56%, can be found in California. California, with its amazing diversity of landscapes is a twitcher’s heaven. That said, the number of bird species that are true desert birds, birds that breed and thrive year-round in primarily natural desert habitats, is more modest. Gambel’s quail, black-throated sparrows, Abert’s towhees, Costa’s hummingbirds, Cactus wrens, rock wrens, canyon wrens, black-tailed gnatcatchers, Bendire’s thrashers, Le Conte’s thrasher, crissal thrashers, ladder-backed woodpeckers, and verdins are our true desert birds, but comprise just 3% of the California total. Add in those birds that live in the desert seasonally or thrive in or adjacent to uncommon “wet” habitats (palm oases, riparian forests), the numbers of desert birds rise accordingly, with some of our most striking species such as vermillion flycatchers, summer tanagers, and phainopeplas worthy of mention. Phainopeplas are members of the silky flycatcher family, one of just four species in that family whose members otherwise occur in the Central American tropics. Phainopeplas winter in our deserts, breed here in the early spring, and then fly toward the coast to avoid the summer heat. Within the oak woodlands of the coastal mountains, if the conditions are right, they will then nest a second time. They are the only bird I know of that breeds in two completely different habitats and climatic zones in the same year.

While our deserts’ resident birds are relatively few, much of the rest of California’s (and western North America’s) birds depend on a healthy desert. Many of those warblers, vireos, grosbeaks, flycatchers, and tanagers winter in Mexico, Central America, and South America. When they migrate north in the spring, mostly in March and April, they desperately need “fueling stations”, places with abundant nectar and insects to replenish the calories spent in flight. These migrants reach our deserts just when the mesquite, ironwood, and paloverde “forests” are in full bloom and a buzz with pollinating insects. Breakfast is served. If these fueling stations were lost due to conversion to solar energy production, agriculture, housing, or a changing climate, the impact on migratory birds would be tragic.

Similarly, the ancient Lake Cahuilla (now the Salton Sea) has played a critical role for wintering and migratory water birds. White pelicans, double-crested cormorants, eared grebes, western grebes, gull-billed terns, black skimmers, along with dozens of species of sandpiper, duck, and geese species, have all depended on this body of water for many thousands of years. The Salton Sea has already passed a salinity threshold that has left this inland sea too salty for fish to survive. What that means it is that it is no longer habitat for the pelicans, cormorants, western grebes, terns, and skimmers. The impact of that loss has yet to be fully understood; can these birds that have been wintering there for countless generations adapt, and change and find succor elsewhere?

Birding continues to grow in popularity. And birders spend money on binoculars, telescopes, and other equipment, as well as transportation, hotels, restaurants, tours, bird seed, and exotic travel. Even the pandemic has had an impact on this popularity. The Audubon Society reports that visits to its website jumped 23% in the spring of 2020 as shelter-in-place orders found many of us seeking connections with nature. As more of us become “dino spotters” the positive impacts will increase, from personal satisfaction to economic benefits. And, more twitchers will likely become active in environmental issues, whether enhancing their garden to attract birds, contributing data through local bird counts, or speaking up in support of habitat conservation efforts to ensure that the diverse and beautiful birds that inhabit our world can persist.

Nullius in verba                                                                                                                                       

Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a modern-day feathered dinosaur), think like a mountain, and be safe.