Fiercely focused Fitz

May 2007

Despite the fiercest competition in the 24-year history of the World Series of Birding, Team Sapsucker pulled off a dramatic repeat win at the World Series of Birding in New Jersey on May 12, proving that last year’s victory was no fluke. In fact, we did one better than last year, identifying 230 birds—a new team record. Two outstanding teams (who were, we learned later, conspiring to beat us) tied for second at 227, and a record 8 of the 107 World Series teams finished with more than 200 species. Cornell’s first student squad, the Redheads, did an amazing job in the Cape May County competition, tallying 174 species to take second place in their division. We expect our efforts to bring in more than $160,000 in pledges for the Lab’s conservation and education programs.

Funds will be used to expand the eBird project in Latin America, study the illegal capture of Painted Buntings for the bird trade, and track wintering bird populations in Latin America via the new Priority Migrant Monitoring Project. A portion of our proceeds will also support undergraduate student research in bird conservation.Thank you to everyone who pledged support!

What follows are excerpts from our post-event ruminations to give you a bit of the “flavor” of Big Day 2007—the last competitive World Series event for some of us.

John (Fitz) Fitzpatrick: I'll remember this Big Day vividly all my life. If we were ever to write a handbook on great Big Days, this year’s performance would be the model.

Scott hones in.

Scott Haber (Redheads): It was just a great time all-around...the student team jived very well together, and most of the birds fell into place easily.

Brian Sullivan: It was harder to plan a route this year because the birds were widely scattered. Part of the game was trying to figure out what the other teams were going to do. And staying awake. I think Ken was asleep from 2:00 to 4:00 A.M.

Ken Rosenberg: I couldn’t have been asleep—I whistled in a Saw-whet Owl at 2:35, and I called in a Long-eared Owl at 3:00. Anyway, our start in the Great Swamp was phenomenal. Right away we got Sora, Virginia Rail, King Rail, Eastern Screech-Owl, Swainson’s Thrush, Black-billed Cuckoo and Yellow-billed Cuckoo.

Fitz: Three rails before three minutes go by is a heck of a way to start.

Scott: The Redheads started at Jake’s Landing—Marsh Wren was our first bird.

Brian: Ken executes the Sapsuckers’ northern route with surgical precision every time, and then we’re out of there. Fifty percent of the birds on our route are in the north only.

		Guerilla birding.

Chris Wood: I’ve never been carsick before in my life, but my stomach was heaving on the northern route when Ken got behind the wheel on those winding roads.

Ken: Well, Fitz kept pulling too far off the road in the Great Swamp.

Steve Kelling: Chris laid some rubber a couple of times.

Ken: Oh man, your turn at Wildwood…

Brian: And then we were listening for Vesper Sparrow and Ken hit the panic button on the van. There were 25 teams out there listening for the sparrow and all you heard was “beep-beep-beep-beep!”

Ben scoping at sunset.

Ben Winger (Redheads): We had a special moment. Our van had a rather unharmonius meeting with a tree thanks to Glenn (Seeholzer)! It added some “character” to our bumper.

Fitz: Oh, I didn’t hear about this!

Scott (Redheads): Well…it was nothing that really affected the performance of the van. It was in the name of a good bird anyway—a King Rail.

Brian: We did miss some things, like the Pied-billed Grebe. I heard one in Beaver Swamp but nobody else heard it. Then I wasn’t sure if I really heard it or it was just in my head. We couldn’t count it, because the rules require at least two people to identify every bird.

What are the voices saying now, Brian?

Steve: Brian hears a lot of things in his head. Sometimes there are little people in there.

Chris: Those are terrifying!

Fitz: Whatever he was hearing in his head, though, Brian made some amazing picks—like the Iceland Gull high atop the landfill “mountain” across the river at Florence. That gave us four key birds to pay for our difficult decision to route in Florence, and a huge morale boost during the long trek to the south near midday. And we still got into Steve’s area ahead of schedule!

Brian: As it gets to the end of the day, sometimes you’re not even sure if you said something out loud. The problem is, we know what we’re targeting all week. Before we get out of the car Steve says, “Blue Grosbeak, Summer Tanager,” so we immediately dial in those two songs in our heads as we jump outside. Steve’s route to pick up the southern landbirds is really awesome.

Fitz: Yup, and we’re always ready for the unexpected down there. This year we heard Kentucky Warbler (one of the hardest southern birds) singing at a totally new place for it…and thank goodness, because Kentucky wasn’t singing later, at the spot we expected to get it.

Watch that first step, Ken.

Ken: We’re not allowed to play back bird recordings, but we make lots of noises. I do a terrible Pied-billed Grebe. (Listen here and judge for yourself.) Chris does the best pishing. (Listen here.)

Steve: But you’ve got to move out of the way—it’s a full-body spray.

Ken: You start getting this vibration and the spray when he really gets into it. And the birds just go nuts.

Ben (Redheads): Jay (McGowan) doing a Virginia Rail grunt imitation is always entertaining!

Steve: Even though my responsibility is for the southern birds, I did get one good bird in the north. We were driving down the road—everyone was out the windows. I was sitting in the front door window and a Tennessee Warbler sang. I yelled, “Tennessee Warbler!”

Ken: And we all said “shut up.” But he was right!

Ben (Redheads): Our worst “dirty bird” (a bird not identified by the entire team) was a turkey. Late in the morning, one called really loudly and everyone was on it, we thought we had it, and then two turkey hunters walked out of the woods!

I need some brown liquid.

Chris: With experience, you’ll learn that’s just “a coincidence.” Our experience with the Northern Shoveler was rather unique. There’s an injured one at the Cape May County Zoo. We found this shoveler every time the week before, but on the Big Day we couldn’t find it, and this is on a small zoo pond.

Ken: Here were are, five highly trained ornithologists and program directors, and we spend hours trying to find an injured shoveler.

Chris: I stumbled on it by accident when I took a “nature break” in the woods!

Fitz: A huge thrill was Chris picking out the Curlew Sandpiper right away at the Heislerville impoundments. It had been there off and on all week, but the problem was finding it amidst thousands of Dunlins, Semipalmated and Least sandpipers, and plovers.

Brian: Yeah, but then we spent 20 minutes looking for White-rumped Sandpiper, and whiffed.

Fitz: OK, so here’s a classic Big Day decision. Having missed it there, we decide to route in a quick, long-shot stop at another impoundment in Cape May, and Chris picks out a white-rumped.

Birder on edge.

Steve: Right, which you scared away with your war-whoop before the rest of us got to the scope.

Fitz: Oh, man, was I glad that bird landed again and you all got it. I felt like an idiot.

Ken: Our last bird of the day came at 8:22 P.M. and it’s one we never got before, the Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow. Their songs are so weak. They’re such poor singers, they don’t even sound like birds.

Chris: Steve actually picked it out as we drove up—we just didn’t believe him.

Fitz: Big Day sounds like fun, and in a broad sense, it is. But it’s also a day of adrenaline-fueled decision-making. For nearly every minute of the Big Day, we’re all worried. I came away with major lessons from this Big Day: Never give up, for one. Another one: Stay at the perimeter of your perception as much of the time as you can because you can see things that you otherwise wouldn’t see. Just one example: Brian picked out a raft of scoters through the scope at last light, way off in the distance…and it had a few Surf Scoters in it—a key bird for us almost literally at the last second of daylight.

Ben (Redheads): I learned that you shouldn’t order horseradish on a sandwich from the Wawa supermarket—it was the most miserable eating experience of my life.

Glenn, a Redhead at the ready.

Ken: I’d like to compete one more year, along with Chris and Brian. I’ve been doing this 20 years and next year is the 25th anniversary of the World Series. That’s going to be pretty big, so I’d like to be there.

Steve: This was my 14th year and last year as a Sapsucker. The experience of birding with these guys for the past couple years has just been spectacular. But I think it’s time to get new people involved—there are so many good birders at the Lab.

Fitz: I’m stepping down too—it’s been a real treat to serve for 12 years on the Sapsuckers team. It’s time for younger ears that can hear all the registers of the Grasshopper Sparrow…so I’m looking forward to next year when I will be down in Cape May on a lawn chair enjoying the day.

Brian: Don’t let these guys fool you— they’re still razor-sharp. They pioneered the route that took World Series tallies into the 220s.

Ben (Redheads): As future student teams streamline the route, I’m sure they can win and the Redheads will become as dominant as the Sapsuckers!

Our deepest thanks to scouts Tim Lenz and Jeff Gerbracht and to all who pledged their support to Team Sapsucker and the Redheads! Many thanks to Swarovski Optik for their extraordinary optics and financial sponsorship. And a huge thanks to Taughannock Aviation for contributing our championship plane ride home from Cape May the next day.

Stopping in the Woods on a New Jersey Evening

By Steve Kelling (with a nod to Robert Frost)

Where these woods are, I do not know.
But Ken knows them like his, though.
He hopes that by us stopping here,
These birds will make our tally grow.

Anyone would think it very queer
To see five men as we appear,
Hanging from the car like some strange fruit,
On the birdiest evening of the year.

We pish and whistle, strain, and hoot,
Yearning for a saw-whet’s toot,
The only other sounds come from the sky,
From thrush or cuckoo as they pass by.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But we have Big Day pledges to keep.
And birds to list before we sleep,
And birds to list before we sleep.

Sleepy scout Tim Lenz catches a catnap. Photo by Ken Rosenberg