I could never understand the fascination that some people have with bird watching. Bird people go out in all types of weather, spend enormous amounts of money on binoculars, cameras and zoom lenses and visit places where no one usually travels, just because they might spot a rare bird. Every time I read about Christmas bird counts and life lists and dedicated bird tours I think how silly.
Now I am turning into one of those people. OK I am not an avid birder, and I do not have a life list but I do have a pair of beat up ancient binoculars and have a Chilean bird book. In May 2011, when we arrived in Valdivia, I recognized very few of the birds flying around the marina. Most of them looked different than North American birds, the ones I grew up with, so I decided I needed a book. My first step down the slippery slope. Luckily a fellow sailor recommended an excellent book, Birds of Chile by Alvaro Jaramillo, and this was available from
Amazon. Interestingly the author was born in Chile but was raised, and became a birder, in Canada. The illustrations and the text are excellent and, although I find the ordering
of the species somewhat confusing, I am slowly getting the hang of using it. The preface of the book states that "the basic aim has always been for this book to be a field guide, the work to which you turn to put a name to the bird you are observing". I have yet to take this book along on walks but I have spent a lot of time browsing through the plates and I now recognize birds that were a mystery to me only one year ago.
At first all I did was see a new bird, determine it's name by looking through the book, and annoy GG with my cries of delight: "look a Chilean pigeon!". Then when I saw a new bird I started writing the date and location name next to the bird's
description, slowly sliding further towards birdy nerdiness. I also started to take photos, not as easy as it looks because birds are pretty darn shy and fly away almost before I can click the shutter. Besides being colourful the photos are helpful because I can use them to assist me with bird identification. It is much easier to look at my bird book and compare the coloured plates
with my photos because I invariably seem to remember things about birds that are not very useful. For example, I will see a bird and remember that it was small, had a reddish breast and a black head. Then
I look in the book and discover that there are several small red birds with black heads. Instead I should have been looking at the shape of it's beak or the colour of it's legs. Observing a bird for three seconds and remembering everything about it is not a skill that I have mastered, and probably never will. Thank goodness for digital cameras and instant photos.
Sliding still further down the slope I am now carrying binoculars while on dog walks, and I really should have used them before, but I did not want to become
known as the geeky birder. With binoculars, "that yellow coloured bird" which could have been any one of four species, is easily identified as a Grassland Yellow-Finch (Sicalis luteola) because I can now see that it's back has a pattern of streaky feathers (according to my book the only Chilean yellow-finch that is noticeably streaked above). These smaller birds flit around too fast and too frequently for a photo and without the binoculars my list of "birds I have seen" would be a lot shorter.
For about a week I seriously thought of trying to spot all 460 birds pictured in my book. This would have been difficult as some of them only live in the far north of Chile and a few have only been sighted once before. Then I thought I would just try to see all of the birds living in the part of Chile where I am now, but even that is proving to be impossible - partly because I am unwilling to go crawling through dense bamboo thickets to see the Black-throated Huet huet. So far I have seen 55 species and my new bird
sightings are becoming scarcer. Hmm - maybe I should go on a bird tour.