“Pssh, pssh, psshhht!”
A birdlike whistling came from a soft faced, gray haired man who stood by an innocuous thicket of stinging nettles along the Five Brooks trail on the Point Reyes National Seashore. He was attempting to lure out a yellow-rumped warbler, and giving me birding advice at the same time.
Birds are curious, Rigdon Currie explained in an undertone. Often they respond to an unfamiliar sound such as his “pishing,” or to a predator’s call. A semi-retired venture capitalist, Currie is a board member of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (PRBO), and an expert birder. Last week he and his friend Will Wilson took me on a mock bird-a-thon, a daylong tally of species that requires a birder to use all their wiles.
“You have to be very careful about how you use sound. You can pull a bird off of its nest in the springtime,” said Wilson, a slim and quiet man whose easy smile breaks through a whitening beard. He has been birding for only 14 years, compared to Currie’s 48, but both men keep “life lists” of all the birds they have seen, and are well acquainted with West Marin’s tremendous avian diversity.
I had been negotiating with PRBO for almost a month in an effort to join a team of birders participating in the organizations 30th annual bird-a-thon fundraiser. Each team selects a 24-hour period between September 1 and October 15, during which they identify as many species as they can, raising a per species donation from sponsors.
Last year, almost 90 birders spotted a total of 200 different bird species, raising $113,000 for the organization said Anne Joly, spokeswoman for PRBO. This year’s numbers are still trickling in, she said, but are expected to be roughly the same.
Currie and Wilson had already done their bird-a-thon but said they were happy to show me the ropes. Within half an hour, I was grateful that scheduling hadn’t worked out for the real deal. In the informal setting I was able to take notes, listen, and learn as they guided me through some of their favorite birding spots in Point Reyes.
“If this were a real bird-a-thon, we would never stop moving,” Currie told me while we watched a drifting wood duck on Five Brooks pond. “People take the whole process very seriously,” said Joly. “They plan out everywhere they go according to the weather, the tides, the time of day.”
In our slower paced setting, Wilson trained his high powered telescope on what they described as “one of the most beautiful and noteworthy birds in North America.” Currie wanted to be sure that I, the novice, got a chance to appreciate the wood duck’s remarkable palette of plumage.
Minutes later, Wilson and Currie stopped to peruse a tangle of fir trees where they had heard chickadees raising a ruckus. On the bird-a-thon, up to 15 percent of the identifications are made just from listening.
Point Reyes is a destination for birders from all over the world, in part because the point itself acts like a funnel, drawing in vagrant migratory birds who may be tired or off-course in its path over the ocean.
There is a “bird box,” or public voicemail, where people report unusual bird sightings. People like Wilson, Currie said, will come screaming out to the point from his home in San Francisco to see a new bird. Wilson corroborated this with a somewhat pleased “yep.”
After finding what waterfowl and songbirds we could at the pond, we moved on to the Duxbury Reef overlook, where Wilson and Currie set up their scopes on the precipitous cliff edge, peering below at the partially exposed tidal flats.
The overlook is good for spotting rocky shorebirds, they told me, and in the right weather you can see birds out at sea. With their help, I saw some turkey vultures feeding on a seal carcass, and a brown pelican flapping regally past. A black turnstone rummaged quickly among the exposed rocks, overturning piles of seaweed with its long bill. Willits and Western gulls wandered the shore at a more sedate pace.
“Willits are tall, gray, dull-looking birds,” Currie said. “But when they fly their wings are striking, pure black and white. It’s an amazing metamorphosis.”
Our next stop was the series of hummingbird feeders in the unassuming paved yard behind the museum in Bolinas, operated by gallery owner Keith Hansen.
“He’s had over 200 birds in this little space,” Wilson said. “This year, he’s seen some extraordinarily rare hummingbirds.” Though we sat on the bench facing the feeders for some minutes, all we saw was a busy assemblage of fairly common Anna’s hummingbirds, whose delicate neck feathers go from a flat black to a vibrant red depending on the angle of light.
As we pulled away from the museum, my guides were distracted by a great blue heron on the mudflats and we got out of the car. I was more intrigued by the tall sand-colored marbled godwits, especially after Wilson told me their long, straight bill is flexible. “They can actually move the tip and grab things like lips can. It’s the strangest thing,” he said.
Several greater yellow legs, one heron, one killdeer and a black phoebe later, we were back in the car and on our way to Pine Gulch, our final stop. This forested stream outlet feeds into the salt marsh on the northern edge of the Bolinas Lagoon.
It struck me how these men know the birds in their favorite places almost like friends. They greeted a falcon sitting on a lone fence post like a regular at their favorite bar – pleasant to see but not surprising, since it is so often there. Later, they gossiped about the happenings of the two kingfishers at Five Brooks, and the acorn woodpecker at the visitor’s center.
“Naming them isn’t so important,” Wilson told me in his understated way, “except the name is the window to the story.”