Eyeballing The Birds
Japan, as you almost certainly know, is a long archipelago located in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Being longitudinally elongated, the island matrix covers a reasonably varied climatic range; from the boreal, or coniferous, to a kind of sub-tropical type. There are also considered to be two ecological lines dividing the country’s flora and fauna, its plants and animals: the Blakiston Line (between Hokkaido and Honshu) and the Watase Line lancing through southern Japan.
As a result, Japan’s “avifauna,” or birdlife, is incredibly rich—although this is in comparison with Europe not necessarily with, say, the Atchafalaya Basin – which alone hosts perhaps 200 species. Thus, about 600 species have been recorded to date in all Japan (it is unclear how many may have been lost or will be lost to heavy industrialization and the incredible concretization of habitat in the nation, an ongoing concern). Because most of these species are migratory (more than 60%), with about 60 endemic or sub-regionally endemic, including the internationally famous Okinawa Rail, Blakiston's Fish-owl, Japanese Murrelet, Red-crowned Crane, Prier’s Woodpecker and Width’s Jay, flyway habitat is vitally important.
The largest nature conservation NGO (non-government organization), the Wild Bird Society of Japan, claims a membership above 50,000 and there are of course birders who don’t belong to any organized group. If you are curious, as of 2005 the number of species formally listed in Japan was 623, with endemics enumerated as the:
Copper Pheasant Syrmaticus soemmerringii Japanese Woodpecker Picus awokera Okinawa Woodpecker Sapheopipo noguchii Japanese Scops Owl Otus semitorques Okinawa Rail Gallirallus okinawae Amami Woodcock Scolopax mira Ryu Kyu Serpent-eagle Spilornis perplexus Lidth`s Jay Garrulus lidthi Ryukyu Minivet Pericrocotus tegimae Amami Thrush Zoothera major Izu Thrush Turdus celaenops Bonin Honeyeater Apalopteron familiare Japanese Skylark Alauda japonica.
South Louisiana is blessed with an enormous wetlands area, the Atchafalaya Basin, an extraordinarily verdant region and flyway for avifauna, home to those 200 species of endemics, including playing host to ½ of America’s migratory birds. It has been a long-time struggle to save the Basin from ruination, but some of the best of Louisiana’s folks have been putting up the good fight.
Aside from the feathered bi-peds of Japan and in the United States, I’ve seen some of the most interesting birds of my life thus far in Southern Africa. Suspended from the tiny tip of a twig way at the end of a yarn-thin branch, extending from an itself slender limb of a bristling thorn tree, I spent hours watching weaver’s nests bob—the nests, not me.
"No uninvited guest, ‘dinner’ guest at that, much bigger than a butterfly is likely to lite on that nest," I’d think, marking a quick entry in my notebook.
Africa, I read later, is home to more than fifty types of weaver birds, and India hosts a dozen or so more. I don’t know yet if there are any weavers in Japan. In spite of frequent similarities, the weaver birds are prone to fascinating variety. They tend to be active "anters," for one thing. They will clutch up an ant and apply it vigorously to their plumage. No one is exactly sure why.
Still, as a group, they are probably most famous for weaving their chicks a good, solid nest. I watched a bright yellow, black-faced Masked weaver, Ploceus velatus, swoop in, with a flick, to cling upside down to the woven nest I'd been keeping an eye on near a foot path not that far from down town Habarone, capital of Botswana. Near by, a handful of other small nests, all about the size of large grapefruit, were similarly sited with offspring security in mind.
For five dollars (US) I could pay one of the beautiful Zimbabwe hookers to model nude for me in the scrub, and practice my drawing. Or, for free, I could take field notes of the weaver birds. Life is always full of such difficult decisions.
In any event, I did often choose to take notes. One creature landed, immediately his caterwauling began: an insistent call, demanding the attention of females. Distinctive parts of the call sound to my ear like the rapid metal-to-metal tapping of a tack hammer on the end of a dangling steel rod. Although sometimes they just hang while calling or perhaps sway a bit, the suitors also frequently snap their black and yellow, narrow wings open and shut adding visuals to their audio display.
As is general with his clan, this weaver knits up a lavish home for his potential spouse, carefully building a tough yet airy nest by skilfully "weaving" fresh, flexible grass or palm fibres. At first bright green, his construction dries, like a sphere of tiny steam-bent canoe ribs, into a resilient yet wonderfully light habitation.
Some weaver birds choose to create their baskety nests above standing water to thwart predators, others set up housekeeping near protective neighbours: wasp nests or nests of bigger, aggressive birds. Really nervy weavers have taken up residence dangling beneath eagle eyries.
In Botswana, and indeed all around in Southern Africa, the weavers often have a place analogous to cardinals or robins in the United States. Their presence is enjoyed by many members of the regular population, entirely outside organized birders and biologists. Home owners try to attract them, and conversation may be about the changing locations of the remarkable, basket-like nests.
Not all nominal weavers--cone-billed, generally seed eating birds including sparrows and their allies in the family Ploceidae--are welcome, certainly. The so-called red billed weaver or dread quelea have been a scourge in East Africa. When food is fairly plentiful, usually from well into until the end of the rainy season, the attractive little birds travel in large flocks. In times of scarcity, these communities coalesce into cities on the wing with populations sometimes, terrifyingly for the farmers, into the millions.
And, just as the benefit of agriculture, with its routinized cultivation and its irrigation practices, is the maximization of food productivity for human consumers, this benefit exists for the quelea to the farmer's detriment. Quelea, settling like smoke on millet and sorghum fields, can denude them of food in an hour. Such ruthless avian reaping has stimulated the human victims of quelea infestation to reply equally ruthlessly. The pest species has been fire bombed, air assaulted with powerful toxins, net trapped, and suffered roost after roost put to the torch. None of these brutal methods serve the desired end: the vast hordes still arrive to chow down on hundreds of tons of agricultural produce.
Buffalo weavers of East Africa use press-gang tactics, adolescent non-breeding males helping build group nests from thorny acacia twigs. Each member of the dominant bird's harem gets an individual brood chamber. In Kenya, the communal nests of the white-browed weaver are fashioned with two openings in order to frustrate would-be predators.
Obviously, among many weavers, nests have taken on deeply social and physiological implications. Once the male masked weaver has selected a site--and unlike some cold climes when the short breeding season demands quick action, the climate in Botswana allows great indulgence--he turns out a nest. Then he literally hangs around whistling at the girls.
It's generally assumed that females, who certainly scope out the guys in the fashion of teenagers around a poolside, use the colour of the nest as an indicator of competence. Young males must devote a meaningful period to practising nest construction before entering the mating fray. In any event, a complete nest finished and still green may signal quickness, health, and dexterity--to say nothing of enthusiasm. Golden brown, drying nests are scorned.
Written sources sometimes say the female weavers will unweave nests they particularly don't like (because these things are tight, this is a real chore, involving undoing the labour which went into the original weaving). I never saw this among the many Masked Weavers and far fewer Spottedbacked Weavers, Ploceus cucullatus, I observed. But nests were certainly torn up, abandoned, or apparently duplicated. Some weavers did seem to strip leaves from the twigs they intended to use, and perhaps just stripped leaves as a nervous habit—maybe this is the bird parallel of smoking at the night club?
With so many species in Africa it’s easy enough to find the nests. Often sociable, weavers frequently cluster in colonies making the nests yet more prominent. Within the nominal weavers, there's lots of variation in method, strategy, and behaviour. For example, if the Masked Weavers lean toward architecture to impress mates, the exotic Red Bishop, Euplectes orix, relies on what looks like a fuzzy, bright-red balaclava and distinctive, attention-getting fancy flights. Its unforgettable seeing the vividly red-headed Bishop flying that bobbing, up-an-down mating drill.
Although forming in colonies might be viewed as risky, advertising the bird's presence to predators, some benefits are clear. Once the hen is brooding, the nest entry may be extended, tube-like. Then, if a wily serpent stops in for a bite, its dangerous fore end is sheathed in woven grass while its end hindermost is all too vulnerable to colony-strong pecking. Usually it gets the mob's message and heads off for a less troublesome repast.
Also, the general brouhaha of a colonial group helps vivify reproduction while the many adults provide excellent role models for chicks. The sites I visited in Botswana routinely ranged from a handful of nests, some of which were invariably disused, to many dozens. In South Africa colonies of many hundreds are fairly common.
My enjoyment watching nature puts me in pretty good company. Observing, recording, and commenting on nature has been the pastime of the elite and the intellectual—as well as the goof-- since the dimmest antiquity. The entire arcade and later the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman philosophers relied on the natural world for anecdotal support, example, and metaphor. Pliny, in his famous treatise, called by wags an "ancient storehouse of error," claimed that Moose lacked knees, so were best hunted by chopping away the tree against which they slept. Aristotle relied on our general understanding of birds to define human beings as "the featherless biped."
Later, the 19th century brought about what can only be called the great, Golden Age of amateur naturalists. Almost magically, a host of factors accidentally came together to stimulate this wonderful blooming. An explosive increase in public education, buttressed by the burgeoning Sunday School movement rolled unprecedented waves of readers into being right as printing innovation brought cheap books to market.
Meanwhile labor reform reduced the work week hand in glove as the expanding rail system crept over the rural landscape like mold veining on the crust of a discarded loaf. Reliable, economical bicycles became available and hiking as a pastime gained popularity. It was easy and cheap for day trippers to shuck the urban coil and spend the day frolicking in God's wonderland--and to bring samples of it back in presses, zinc cases, and bail-topped jars. Darwin was in the air.
In the heady days of the mid and late 1800s hardly a community existed without its Geography Union, its Naturalist's Lyceum and its occasional nights hosting scientists, adventurers, and notable travellers on the lecture circuit. Best of all, even the tiny burg's natural scientists were doing, often enough, meaningful work.
Impressive collections were developed, and massive taxonomies of all sorts were compiled. With a ruthless zeal which would be wholly unacceptable today, astonishingly full sets of representative examples of rocks and minerals, mammals, fossils, birds, reptiles, plants and herbs--you name it (and back then, so did they)--were developed with which to settle or ignite countless debates spinning off from the new fangled idea of natural selection.
Today amateur naturalism is just a spectre of its former self, a shade of its halcyon past. Perhaps only bird watching maintains that rich legacy. It would be idle speculation why bird watching has continued its hold on the popular imagination, and, indeed, expanded its niche among leisure pursuits while rodent tagging and grass pressing has fallen into desuetude.
Yet, speculate we might as well.
For one thing, leisure scholars will point out that (there are scholars to study everything, and leisure is no exception), bird watching has what laymen might call "leg." Specialist call it vertical and horizontal cohesion, but it means the same.
It is supposed that human beings travel through a "life course," and that various behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable, becomes easy or difficult, is considered proper or improver at different stages in life. The vast majority of leisure options are horizontal. That is, most are closely associated with one or another place in the life course.
In addition, most leisure is vertically limited. By this the scholars mean that participation is resistant to enrichment. One can usually easily participate in more of the same, but not easily with more depth. A relative handful of leisure options do exhibit great vertical depth and horizontal robustness. Common ones are military modelling, philately, reading, walking, and of course bird watching.
WHY BIRD WATCHING?
We don't know why watching birds is as likely to enthral an individual Boy Scout on a day hike at the community reservoir as a 60 year old captain of industry with resources enough to charter an Otter in order to reach an isolated rookery. Some participants come to bird watching in youth, some later, and some at the autumn of life. All seem to be ensnared by some ineffable fascination.
The most obvious part of bird watching is watching birds; but for many, perhaps most, that's by no means all of it. Birding as a hobby is supported by a colossal text foundation and a huge social infrastructure. Even actual observation, with its quaint emphasis on counting, identifying, and listing is richly textured. Some bird watchers are primarily collectors, chitting off species. Some are engaged in understanding behaviour and thus focus perhaps on a single nest or a small section of real estate. A great many simply set up a feeding table and informally watch the antics of birds while quaffing sundowners.
Birding's text foundation, like that of philately and military modelling, is lushly rich. Birders can choose among big, beautiful coffee table books filled with heavily clayed illustrated pages, facile, basic field manuals and intimidating, thorough ornithological tombs, memoirs of lifelong field naturalists, and slender belles-lettres of sappy ain't birds grand essays. Monographs, "The Barn Owl," "Hawks," and "Weavers," are available in both narrowly scientific and broadly general, for us regular folk, species.
Many glossy magazines, in many languages, serve the birder while both university and scientific society journals, and journals by strong regional bird clubs, chink what few cracks may exist in the wall of avian oriented print matter.
At home, birders may well join the local club so that when not off on an outing, they can still ogle vivid slides, hear or discuss bird related topics, and later cool their heels during the social free for all. As a further extension, many bird clubs also foster a forward thinking, pro active policy of advocacy activity.
During holidays or vacations, birders can easily integrate their at home leisure into a new or novel setting. In fact, many birders plan holidays around birding opportunities or, for example on a business trip, enjoy an early morning birding jaunt prior to work. Bird watching is so popular that many natural settings now host professional guides explicitly shaping their offerings in concordance with the desire of bird watching visitors. Commercial bird tours are now commonplace world wide.
While golf may be described as a good walk ruined, birding, or indeed any interest in amateur natural history, is one of the very few ways that a stroll out of doors might likely be improved. Birding offers participants indoor and outdoor, local and exotic, aesthetic and practical options.
As suggested above, it's impossible for us to say just why birds are interesting to so many human beings. It's much easier for us to examine the features associated with "bird watching," and understand its success. As a leisure pursuit it is both solitary and social, it may be frivolously simple or engagingly complex, it lends itself to extreme frugality or to consumption of costly professional support, and participation is possible virtually throughout the life course.
XXX XXX XXX
As a result, Japan’s “avifauna,” or birdlife, is incredibly rich—although this is in comparison with Europe not necessarily with, say, the Atchafalaya Basin – which alone hosts perhaps 200 species. Thus, about 600 species have been recorded to date in all Japan (it is unclear how many may have been lost or will be lost to heavy industrialization and the incredible concretization of habitat in the nation, an ongoing concern). Because most of these species are migratory (more than 60%), with about 60 endemic or sub-regionally endemic, including the internationally famous Okinawa Rail, Blakiston's Fish-owl, Japanese Murrelet, Red-crowned Crane, Prier’s Woodpecker and Width’s Jay, flyway habitat is vitally important.
The largest nature conservation NGO (non-government organization), the Wild Bird Society of Japan, claims a membership above 50,000 and there are of course birders who don’t belong to any organized group. If you are curious, as of 2005 the number of species formally listed in Japan was 623, with endemics enumerated as the:
Copper Pheasant Syrmaticus soemmerringii Japanese Woodpecker Picus awokera Okinawa Woodpecker Sapheopipo noguchii Japanese Scops Owl Otus semitorques Okinawa Rail Gallirallus okinawae Amami Woodcock Scolopax mira Ryu Kyu Serpent-eagle Spilornis perplexus Lidth`s Jay Garrulus lidthi Ryukyu Minivet Pericrocotus tegimae Amami Thrush Zoothera major Izu Thrush Turdus celaenops Bonin Honeyeater Apalopteron familiare Japanese Skylark Alauda japonica.
South Louisiana is blessed with an enormous wetlands area, the Atchafalaya Basin, an extraordinarily verdant region and flyway for avifauna, home to those 200 species of endemics, including playing host to ½ of America’s migratory birds. It has been a long-time struggle to save the Basin from ruination, but some of the best of Louisiana’s folks have been putting up the good fight.
Aside from the feathered bi-peds of Japan and in the United States, I’ve seen some of the most interesting birds of my life thus far in Southern Africa. Suspended from the tiny tip of a twig way at the end of a yarn-thin branch, extending from an itself slender limb of a bristling thorn tree, I spent hours watching weaver’s nests bob—the nests, not me.
"No uninvited guest, ‘dinner’ guest at that, much bigger than a butterfly is likely to lite on that nest," I’d think, marking a quick entry in my notebook.
Africa, I read later, is home to more than fifty types of weaver birds, and India hosts a dozen or so more. I don’t know yet if there are any weavers in Japan. In spite of frequent similarities, the weaver birds are prone to fascinating variety. They tend to be active "anters," for one thing. They will clutch up an ant and apply it vigorously to their plumage. No one is exactly sure why.
Still, as a group, they are probably most famous for weaving their chicks a good, solid nest. I watched a bright yellow, black-faced Masked weaver, Ploceus velatus, swoop in, with a flick, to cling upside down to the woven nest I'd been keeping an eye on near a foot path not that far from down town Habarone, capital of Botswana. Near by, a handful of other small nests, all about the size of large grapefruit, were similarly sited with offspring security in mind.
For five dollars (US) I could pay one of the beautiful Zimbabwe hookers to model nude for me in the scrub, and practice my drawing. Or, for free, I could take field notes of the weaver birds. Life is always full of such difficult decisions.
In any event, I did often choose to take notes. One creature landed, immediately his caterwauling began: an insistent call, demanding the attention of females. Distinctive parts of the call sound to my ear like the rapid metal-to-metal tapping of a tack hammer on the end of a dangling steel rod. Although sometimes they just hang while calling or perhaps sway a bit, the suitors also frequently snap their black and yellow, narrow wings open and shut adding visuals to their audio display.
As is general with his clan, this weaver knits up a lavish home for his potential spouse, carefully building a tough yet airy nest by skilfully "weaving" fresh, flexible grass or palm fibres. At first bright green, his construction dries, like a sphere of tiny steam-bent canoe ribs, into a resilient yet wonderfully light habitation.
Some weaver birds choose to create their baskety nests above standing water to thwart predators, others set up housekeeping near protective neighbours: wasp nests or nests of bigger, aggressive birds. Really nervy weavers have taken up residence dangling beneath eagle eyries.
In Botswana, and indeed all around in Southern Africa, the weavers often have a place analogous to cardinals or robins in the United States. Their presence is enjoyed by many members of the regular population, entirely outside organized birders and biologists. Home owners try to attract them, and conversation may be about the changing locations of the remarkable, basket-like nests.
Not all nominal weavers--cone-billed, generally seed eating birds including sparrows and their allies in the family Ploceidae--are welcome, certainly. The so-called red billed weaver or dread quelea have been a scourge in East Africa. When food is fairly plentiful, usually from well into until the end of the rainy season, the attractive little birds travel in large flocks. In times of scarcity, these communities coalesce into cities on the wing with populations sometimes, terrifyingly for the farmers, into the millions.
And, just as the benefit of agriculture, with its routinized cultivation and its irrigation practices, is the maximization of food productivity for human consumers, this benefit exists for the quelea to the farmer's detriment. Quelea, settling like smoke on millet and sorghum fields, can denude them of food in an hour. Such ruthless avian reaping has stimulated the human victims of quelea infestation to reply equally ruthlessly. The pest species has been fire bombed, air assaulted with powerful toxins, net trapped, and suffered roost after roost put to the torch. None of these brutal methods serve the desired end: the vast hordes still arrive to chow down on hundreds of tons of agricultural produce.
Buffalo weavers of East Africa use press-gang tactics, adolescent non-breeding males helping build group nests from thorny acacia twigs. Each member of the dominant bird's harem gets an individual brood chamber. In Kenya, the communal nests of the white-browed weaver are fashioned with two openings in order to frustrate would-be predators.
Obviously, among many weavers, nests have taken on deeply social and physiological implications. Once the male masked weaver has selected a site--and unlike some cold climes when the short breeding season demands quick action, the climate in Botswana allows great indulgence--he turns out a nest. Then he literally hangs around whistling at the girls.
It's generally assumed that females, who certainly scope out the guys in the fashion of teenagers around a poolside, use the colour of the nest as an indicator of competence. Young males must devote a meaningful period to practising nest construction before entering the mating fray. In any event, a complete nest finished and still green may signal quickness, health, and dexterity--to say nothing of enthusiasm. Golden brown, drying nests are scorned.
Written sources sometimes say the female weavers will unweave nests they particularly don't like (because these things are tight, this is a real chore, involving undoing the labour which went into the original weaving). I never saw this among the many Masked Weavers and far fewer Spottedbacked Weavers, Ploceus cucullatus, I observed. But nests were certainly torn up, abandoned, or apparently duplicated. Some weavers did seem to strip leaves from the twigs they intended to use, and perhaps just stripped leaves as a nervous habit—maybe this is the bird parallel of smoking at the night club?
With so many species in Africa it’s easy enough to find the nests. Often sociable, weavers frequently cluster in colonies making the nests yet more prominent. Within the nominal weavers, there's lots of variation in method, strategy, and behaviour. For example, if the Masked Weavers lean toward architecture to impress mates, the exotic Red Bishop, Euplectes orix, relies on what looks like a fuzzy, bright-red balaclava and distinctive, attention-getting fancy flights. Its unforgettable seeing the vividly red-headed Bishop flying that bobbing, up-an-down mating drill.
Although forming in colonies might be viewed as risky, advertising the bird's presence to predators, some benefits are clear. Once the hen is brooding, the nest entry may be extended, tube-like. Then, if a wily serpent stops in for a bite, its dangerous fore end is sheathed in woven grass while its end hindermost is all too vulnerable to colony-strong pecking. Usually it gets the mob's message and heads off for a less troublesome repast.
Also, the general brouhaha of a colonial group helps vivify reproduction while the many adults provide excellent role models for chicks. The sites I visited in Botswana routinely ranged from a handful of nests, some of which were invariably disused, to many dozens. In South Africa colonies of many hundreds are fairly common.
My enjoyment watching nature puts me in pretty good company. Observing, recording, and commenting on nature has been the pastime of the elite and the intellectual—as well as the goof-- since the dimmest antiquity. The entire arcade and later the whole pantheon of Greek and Roman philosophers relied on the natural world for anecdotal support, example, and metaphor. Pliny, in his famous treatise, called by wags an "ancient storehouse of error," claimed that Moose lacked knees, so were best hunted by chopping away the tree against which they slept. Aristotle relied on our general understanding of birds to define human beings as "the featherless biped."
Later, the 19th century brought about what can only be called the great, Golden Age of amateur naturalists. Almost magically, a host of factors accidentally came together to stimulate this wonderful blooming. An explosive increase in public education, buttressed by the burgeoning Sunday School movement rolled unprecedented waves of readers into being right as printing innovation brought cheap books to market.
Meanwhile labor reform reduced the work week hand in glove as the expanding rail system crept over the rural landscape like mold veining on the crust of a discarded loaf. Reliable, economical bicycles became available and hiking as a pastime gained popularity. It was easy and cheap for day trippers to shuck the urban coil and spend the day frolicking in God's wonderland--and to bring samples of it back in presses, zinc cases, and bail-topped jars. Darwin was in the air.
In the heady days of the mid and late 1800s hardly a community existed without its Geography Union, its Naturalist's Lyceum and its occasional nights hosting scientists, adventurers, and notable travellers on the lecture circuit. Best of all, even the tiny burg's natural scientists were doing, often enough, meaningful work.
Impressive collections were developed, and massive taxonomies of all sorts were compiled. With a ruthless zeal which would be wholly unacceptable today, astonishingly full sets of representative examples of rocks and minerals, mammals, fossils, birds, reptiles, plants and herbs--you name it (and back then, so did they)--were developed with which to settle or ignite countless debates spinning off from the new fangled idea of natural selection.
Today amateur naturalism is just a spectre of its former self, a shade of its halcyon past. Perhaps only bird watching maintains that rich legacy. It would be idle speculation why bird watching has continued its hold on the popular imagination, and, indeed, expanded its niche among leisure pursuits while rodent tagging and grass pressing has fallen into desuetude.
Yet, speculate we might as well.
For one thing, leisure scholars will point out that (there are scholars to study everything, and leisure is no exception), bird watching has what laymen might call "leg." Specialist call it vertical and horizontal cohesion, but it means the same.
It is supposed that human beings travel through a "life course," and that various behaviour is acceptable or unacceptable, becomes easy or difficult, is considered proper or improver at different stages in life. The vast majority of leisure options are horizontal. That is, most are closely associated with one or another place in the life course.
In addition, most leisure is vertically limited. By this the scholars mean that participation is resistant to enrichment. One can usually easily participate in more of the same, but not easily with more depth. A relative handful of leisure options do exhibit great vertical depth and horizontal robustness. Common ones are military modelling, philately, reading, walking, and of course bird watching.
WHY BIRD WATCHING?
We don't know why watching birds is as likely to enthral an individual Boy Scout on a day hike at the community reservoir as a 60 year old captain of industry with resources enough to charter an Otter in order to reach an isolated rookery. Some participants come to bird watching in youth, some later, and some at the autumn of life. All seem to be ensnared by some ineffable fascination.
The most obvious part of bird watching is watching birds; but for many, perhaps most, that's by no means all of it. Birding as a hobby is supported by a colossal text foundation and a huge social infrastructure. Even actual observation, with its quaint emphasis on counting, identifying, and listing is richly textured. Some bird watchers are primarily collectors, chitting off species. Some are engaged in understanding behaviour and thus focus perhaps on a single nest or a small section of real estate. A great many simply set up a feeding table and informally watch the antics of birds while quaffing sundowners.
Birding's text foundation, like that of philately and military modelling, is lushly rich. Birders can choose among big, beautiful coffee table books filled with heavily clayed illustrated pages, facile, basic field manuals and intimidating, thorough ornithological tombs, memoirs of lifelong field naturalists, and slender belles-lettres of sappy ain't birds grand essays. Monographs, "The Barn Owl," "Hawks," and "Weavers," are available in both narrowly scientific and broadly general, for us regular folk, species.
Many glossy magazines, in many languages, serve the birder while both university and scientific society journals, and journals by strong regional bird clubs, chink what few cracks may exist in the wall of avian oriented print matter.
At home, birders may well join the local club so that when not off on an outing, they can still ogle vivid slides, hear or discuss bird related topics, and later cool their heels during the social free for all. As a further extension, many bird clubs also foster a forward thinking, pro active policy of advocacy activity.
During holidays or vacations, birders can easily integrate their at home leisure into a new or novel setting. In fact, many birders plan holidays around birding opportunities or, for example on a business trip, enjoy an early morning birding jaunt prior to work. Bird watching is so popular that many natural settings now host professional guides explicitly shaping their offerings in concordance with the desire of bird watching visitors. Commercial bird tours are now commonplace world wide.
While golf may be described as a good walk ruined, birding, or indeed any interest in amateur natural history, is one of the very few ways that a stroll out of doors might likely be improved. Birding offers participants indoor and outdoor, local and exotic, aesthetic and practical options.
As suggested above, it's impossible for us to say just why birds are interesting to so many human beings. It's much easier for us to examine the features associated with "bird watching," and understand its success. As a leisure pursuit it is both solitary and social, it may be frivolously simple or engagingly complex, it lends itself to extreme frugality or to consumption of costly professional support, and participation is possible virtually throughout the life course.
XXX XXX XXX
posted by Donlon at 12:27 AM
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