If Ranger Mike was a bird, his abbreviation would be RAMI and his call would be cafeeeeeeeeeeine, cafeeeeeeeeeeine

So this is what 5am looked like, I thought as I started up my station wagon. Staring bleary-eyed through my windshield, I was surprised at the amount of light in the sky.

Why, you may ask, was I getting up at this un-Godly hour on my first day of the weekend?


To go birding, of course.

I was to shadow the Landbird monitoring team as they honed their field skills in Marblemount. Their spring training was nearly complete and they were practicing for an exam that, in order to pass, they needed to recognize 49 out of 50 birds by sight and song. Since their subjects were most active during the early dawn hours, we too had to wake up with sun.

And I guessed, with the light brushing the underbellies of the clouds a bright pink and the valley aglow in a golden haze, there was something special about being awake while the rest of the world was still sleeping. Well, the human world at least. The birds, as I soon found out, were already engaged in a full symphony of twitters and trills.

The six-member team met me at the boat launch along the Skagit River and I was surprised at their age. Everyone was in their twenties and I was impressed at their ability to function before 10:00 on a Saturday morning. Good-natured and quick to laugh, they clearly enjoyed their jobs. The requisite binoculars hung around their necks and I imagined that they probably felt naked without them. The group greeted me warmly and I quickly found out that two of the birders were from Ann Arbor, where I recently graduated from college.

Walking with birders was like walking in a foreign country where your companions all spoke the language and you didn't. Their hyperawareness to the audible world was uncanny and they often stopped mid-sentence or mid-stride to follow a sound that flitted through the branches nearby. The group would raise their binoculars together in what appeared to be a choreographed movement and it reminded me of sleeping geese who would raise their long necks in unison whenever startled.



They tried to explain this world that they are privy to and offered the mnemonics that helped them remember the bird songs. The Black-capped Chickadee goes chickadee-dee-dee and cheeseburger. Cassidy pointed out that many phonetic spellings have to do with food and he imagined it was because of researchers going hungry while waiting out in the woods (Olive-sided Flycatcher chips a quick, three beers!). I listened intently but couldn't quite organize all these new sounds.

Mandy Holmgren, the team leader, stopped to do a 5-minute point count. This is similar to the work that they will be doing in Mount Rainier, Olympic, North Cascades and Fort Lewis and Clark this summer. For a set amount of time, they stand still and record every bird they see and hear. The teams, working in pairs, will do this through July, working 7 days on and 3 days off. They’ll cover a wide variety of habitats and by the end of the season, will have amassed enough data to determine the health of the bird populations. But that analysis is the job of other researchers. For these six, they get to work outside in some of the most beautiful parts of the country.

In addition to recording the species, the team has to note the distance between them and the bird. It’s an inexact science and Mandy used a rangefinder while the rest of the group trained their eyes to estimate the distance.

“See that tree, not the close one, but the one to the left and behind it?”
“The shrubby one?”
“Yeah, the green one”

They guessed 82 meters. 90. 53.

“Actually,” Mandy revealed, “It’s 105.”
“Are we talking about the same tree?”

Usually the group was eerily dead on, Kara especially, and I thought that they could make good money as caddies in the off-season.


By the end of their point count, their notebooks were filled with scribbled notations. They will eventually use official government forms but for now, each team member had a matching Spiderman spiral notebook. The birds were jotted down in four letter abbreviations. Like National Park shorthand, you take the first two letters of each word; American Robin becomes AMRO. There are exceptions of course, like the Yellow Warbler.

Zach mentioned that when he was watching President Bush give a speech in the Rose Garden last month, he couldn’t help but hear the migratory warblers singing in the background (behind Zach, Cassidy made the classic science geek hand signal of pushing imaginary glasses up the bridge of his nose). Is it coincidence, we mused, that the Yellow Warbler’s abbreviation is YWAR?

We did a few more point counts throughout the morning and walked a distance of maybe one mile in two hours. What struck me most about my first birding experience was the different perception of time and space. Compared to the high-energy buzz of urban life everything seemed slower, more pronounced. When, during our normal daily routine, do we ever stay still long enough to listen? This awareness to one’s environment feels more natural and it's refreshing.


We said our goodbyes in the parking lot with promises to follow up later in the season. When I turned on my car, I couldn't believe that it was only 10:30 am. I still had the whole day ahead of me. Or I could take a quick nap. I chose the latter with the light notes of bird songs still ringing in my ears.

Special thanks to: Mandy Holgren, Kara Kuhlman, Cassidy Grattan, Zach Wallace, Andrew Wicks, Andrew Tillinghast, and Bob Kuntz.