Beginnings

I was only about nine or ten years old when my family made annual visits to Sylvania, Ohio to visit family members there. My maternal great grandparents lived on a farm along a road that dead ended at the Ohio/Michigan state line. My great uncle, who lived two houses up the road, would walk down to the end of the road with me and I would get a kick out of standing at the state line with one foot in Ohio and the other one in Michigan. I would hop back and forth, proclaiming my new discovery, "Ohio, Michigan, Ohio, Michigan, Ohio ...!" Little did I know at the time that I would lean toward Ohio when it came to college football. Another reason we walked to the end of this street was to feed the horses. Uncle Joe, my great uncle, would show me how to lay my hand flat so that my fingers wouldn't get bitten, and feed apples from the nearby apple orchard to the horses. There were small birds flying around the pasture, metallic blue above, rich creamy to orange undersides, red faces and long forked tails. I asked him what they were. He told me they were Barn Swallows. I don't remember the date, but when I began keeping detailed records of birds about four years later, this was one of the first birds I had added to my life list.

Uncle Joe also used to impress me with his whistling of "Bob-white!" The birds nearly always responded to his calls, but it wasn't until the early 1980's, when I lived with my grandparents in Cincinnati, Ohio that I actually got to see one. The adjacent half acre woodlot behind our backyard, owned by a neighbor on an adjacent street, was rarely mowed. He had left it overgrown and it attracted several species of birds. However, as of this writing, it is owned by my grandparents, both of whom just turned 90 years of age, and is mowed continuously. I was only able to enjoy bobwhite quail in our yard and adjacent woodlot through the mid to late 1980's, and then my grandparents decided they wanted to clear the brush and tidy up the woods. There is no longer an understory. It looks more like a lawn now, interspersed with walnut, hickory and maple trees. Once I had an American Woodcock in the yard.

These were the beginnings of my interest in birds. Yet, I wasn't hooked on the hobby of birdwatching until the winter of 1977-1978. You see, this was a special winter. We had some of the more expected winter visitors to our feeders on a daily basis, such as Pine Siskins and Purple Finches. However, what really got me hooked on birding were the large flocks of Evening Grosbeaks. We had them coming daily to our feeders, sometimes in flocks of 20 or 30 birds. These are gorgeous birds that look like overgrown American Goldfinches. The males are bright yellow with large white wing patches, and a rich dark brown hood, yellow eyebrow stripe and large cardinal-like beak. The females are a drab version of this, but no less intriguing. Couple this with daily visits by Red-headed Woodpeckers, Cardinals and Yellow-shafted Flickers (I like that name better than Northern Flicker) and we had a colorful array of birds to enjoy that winter. Little did I know, as a fledgling birder, that the grosbeaks were not a species to be expected here annually. Had I known, I would have kept better records, with exact dates of occurrence and numbers.

It wasn't until May 9, 1979, shortly after the passing of my great grandfather, whose binoculars I received as my first set, that I began keeping a life list with dates and locations of each species I had seen. I do not have specific dates for first sightings of the Barn Swallows and Evening Grosbeaks, and I did not record a date for Northern Bobwhite until I actually saw one in my grandparents' backyard. On May 9, 1979 I recorded Killdeer and Northern Mockingbird on my life list. Since then I have traveled extensively throughout the eastern United States, and three states west of the Mississippi River, to accumulate a life list of 420 species for the ABA (American Birding Association) area. Moreover, I've seen a combined total of 441 species in the world, with my only travels out of the ABA area coming from a western Carribean cruise with stops on Isle de Cozumel, Mexico; Georgetown, Grand Cayman; and Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

Even though I keep a life list, I still enjoy birds that I've seen many times. I'll never tire of seeing Evening Grosbeaks, Red-headed Woodpeckers, Barn Swallows and other interesting birds. Look for a future post about an article I wrote in the Cincinnati Bird Club's newsletter, The Passenger Pigeon, in the 1990's, entitled, "Beyond the Lifelist."