|
The bird walk has started inauspiciously. As guide Cynthia Fox leads a group of binocular-toting birders through the back trails of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, the birds seem to be sleeping in. The dozen or so people who have gathered early on a chilly April morning wonder whether they should have followed suit.
Suddenly, a rustle in a shrub, and a flurry of binocular action. Cardinal. Then a screech in the woods. Blue jay. A robin hops along a clearing in the Asiatic Arboretum. A mallard waddles along the trail, looking for a handout. Then, quiet again.
Overhead, a bird croaks, "Uh-oh," as if taunting its audience. "Now that's a fish crow," says Fox. As twelve sets of field glasses focus on the crow, it flies into a treetop, calling insistently, and another larger and browner bird emerges. The two birds wheel across the canopy, clearly in conflict, as people murmur, "Hawk, it's a hawk."
"Red-shouldered," announces Fox.
The hawk outraces the crow and lands in the crook of a massive oak, in a disorderly pile of leaves and branches.
"It's a nest!" Fox hastily sets up her spotting scope, a telescope on a tripod that is one of the key tools of serious birders. One by one, the members of the group step up to the scope and study the hawk as it settles on the nest.
Suddenly, the morning has turned promising. Birds are everywhere, and not just the typical backyard species. An Eastern phoebe flies off a branch by a small pond, grabs a fly, and returns to its perch, bobbing its tail. The more experienced birders help novices pinpoint a green heron, a smaller and prettier relative to the great blue, as it fishes from a shaded bank of the pond. As people meander through a stand of pines, Fox hears the squeak-squeak—"like a rubber duck"—that announces the presence of a brown-headed nuthatch. It is about thirty feet up, circling the trunk in search of bugs. Of the so-called Southern specialties—birds that people travel to the South to seek—the brown-headed nuthatch is the only one found in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle.
In two hours, Fox's group records thirty-four species, a respectable number for the month before bird migration reaches its peak in North Carolina.
Fox owns the Wild Bird Center store in Chapel Hill. Two Saturdays a month, she leads bird walks in Triangle hot spots, including Duke Gardens. It's a great place to introduce people to birding, she says, because of the mixture of habitats—lawns, forests, ponds—and because the trails are easily maneuvered. But experienced birders, many of whom join her groups regularly, will also find rewards at the gardens, she says, citing the nesting red-shouldered hawk and recalling sightings of a yellow-billed cuckoo and Swainson's thrush—feathers in the cap of any birder in North Carolina.
A few weeks later and a few miles away, a smaller group assembles on another crisp spring morning. Will Cook and Jeff Pippen have consented to guide a visitor along the Shepherd Nature Trail, a one-mile loop in Duke Forest, just off N.C. 751. Compact, yet meandering through varied habitats including streams, brush, loblolly pine stands, and mature hardwoods, the trail can offer up a surprising number of species during an hourlong excursion.
Cook and Pippen, both research associates at Duke—Pippen in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences and Cook in the biology department—are serious birders, each with a life list in excess of 600 North American species. (Most accomplished birders keep a life list, an ongoing tally of all the bird species they've identified with certainty during the course of their birding.) Like many experienced birders, they trust their ears more than their eyes. As they wander the trail, they rattle off identifications based on songs and calls, rarely raising their binoculars.
• continues on
page two.
|
