Homer Alaska - Oped -

I didn't start out a bird nerd. When I lived in Florida, like one of the best places in North America to bird, I couldn't be bothered to pay attention to birds. Gulls were pests that begged for food at the beach and I couldn't tell one from the other. Many years later I returned to Florida, to the same beaches, and discovered I'd really been seeing Bonaparte's gulls, royal terns and black skimmers.

Moving to Alaska made me a birder. Maybe the shock of seeing nature in all its power and beauty opened me up to noticing birds. My first summer up here I spent seven weeks at an archaeological field camp in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in the Brooks Range foothills overlooking Demarcation Bay. My friend, Ted Maitland, taught me about birds, birds I'd never seen before, like a rough-legged hawk. We saw gyrfalcons and Lapland longspurs and dozens of willow ptarmigan.

In the summer of 1981, I lived in Barrow, working on another archaeological field project. My tent mate, Jake Kilmarx, birded. After work we'd slog around the wetlands on the edge of town, looking for jaegers and snowy owls. I didn't know it, but I was in birder paradise.

That fall, I bought my first bird book, the Golden Press "Birds of North America," and my first binoculars, some cheap Nikons. I became friends with a birding couple, Janet Clarke and Dan Gray. Janet and Dan ran sled dogs, and they were so into birding they named a litter of pups after warblers. They gave me a sled dog, my first Alaska husky, named Ouzel, after the water dipper.

When you have a sled dog named after a bird, how can you not become a birder?

I met and married a birder and made more birder friends. Wherever I travel, I pick up the local bird guide, "A Checklist of the Birds of the Mull of Galloway" or whatever. My NatGeo bird guide has become my field book, with scribbled notes and dates of first sightings next to every entry. On my travels I seek out birders we're easy to spot with our binoculars and vests and ask them what they've seen. Experienced birders, the kind with life lists in the high three digits, love to talk about birds and show off their knowledge.

Every time the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival rolls around, I ask myself why I bird, why I discovered birding in Alaska and not in Florida. (Did I mention that Florida is like one of the hottest birding spots in North America? I kick myself for all those wasted birding years.) Alaska made me a birder because birding is how I mark the seasons it's how I celebrate spring.

Alaska has year-round birds, those hardy sourdoughs who tough it out, my favorite of which is the raven. I think ravens kick butt and are the toughest, coolest birds around.

Come April, though, when the daylight hours really get longer and I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, winter might be done, that's when the spring birds start arriving. I first notice the birds by their calls. Spring has its visual impact, but for me, it's the new call every day of an arriving bird that thrills me. That first varied thrush singing like an old rotary dial telephone? That swoosh of a snipe's feathers rustling in its dive-bomb mating call? That first rowdy chorus of a sandhill crane flock? Those calls mean we've broken the back of winter.

It took me a while to appreciate the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival, too. I used to think those birders hunched over spotting scopes in a howling rain were idiots. Once I realized they looked at brave little birds finishing thousand-mile journeys, I understood those birders. Sitting on the edge of Mud Bay, watching thousands of peeps digging for clams, watching great auroras of sandpipers swirling in the sun, well, whew I was hooked.

I am a bird nerd, and like thousands of bird nerds, I'll be out watching birds this weekend, squinting into spotting scopes, looking for that elusive red knot or bar-tailed godwit.

Bird nerds of the world, unite, and celebrate this most peculiar, most amazing hobby.

Michael Armstrong is a reporter for the Homer News. He can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.