The North Lookout at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania
I was in my pioneer-woman era when I first started going to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, just a few miles from where I then lived in Pennsylvania.
Hawk Mountain is a dogleg of a ridge in the Appalachians. Tens of thousands of hawks, falcons, ospreys, eagles, and countless monarch butterflies and ruby-throated hummingbirds follow that ridge on their spring migration. Meanwhile, wood warblers and vireos and other small birds migrate through the trees, also following the ridge.
It was a wonderland, and I loved it.
The sharp turn at Hawk Mountain means the birds are in perfect position to view—or to shoot, in a shameful period in the early 1900s. That senseless slaughter was the reason this ridgetop became a sanctuary way back in the 1940s.
Becoming a Regular
Thirty years ago (well, more like 40, if I want to admit to being the seasoned age of 61 now), when I became a regular at Hawk Mountain, the place was much less sissified than it is today.
Primitive steep, narrow, rocky trails led to the open area atop the mountain called the North Lookout, and when I was young and agile, I could scamper up them with my eyes closed.
You did catch that “pioneer woman” reference?
Yep. Back then, my everyday dress was an antique ankle-length Victorian lace-edged petticoat that weighed about 10 pounds, under a length of tweed wool that I used as a wrap skirt over it. Lace-edge petticoat peeking out, of course.
It was the height of the hippie era, and although I eschewed tie-dye, I sure looked weird.
Often, I’d wear cheap, flat, black cotton Chinese shoes instead of practical boots.
Like I said, I was young and agile.
And back then, before Hawk Mountain became a popular destination with improved access, I was usually the only female on the mountain.
Looking back, I’m sure my mode of dress sure didn’t help, when it came to being taken seriously.
Worse yet, I had a bit of history with Hawk Mountain.
Mistaken Identity
My first encounter with the sanctuary staff had been a year or so earlier, when I was young and dumb.
I was trying to match up the birds at my feeder with the pictures in my very first field guide, and one sparrow simply didn’t fit.
Knowing Hawk Mountain was a place staffed by people who knew birds, I phoned them to describe my oddball bird.
“Might be a Harris’s sparrow,” I suggested. “I know they’re not supposed to be around here, but that’s what it looks like. Sort of.”
They hurried right over to see for themselves.
It was an English (house) sparrow, with an aberrant black bib.
The bird folks were kind, although I’ll bet there was plenty of groaning laughter on their ride back. “You have to look at every detail.” they cautioned me. “Sometimes plumage differences can fool you.”
“A Rare Bird! No, Really, It Is!”
A few weeks later, I came across another weird bird.
A tiny heron-like critter, only the size of a robin, was poking around in the muddy edges of the leech-filled turtle pond down the road.
“Oh my…” I breathed, trying to sneak closer for a better look. The little guy looked like a toy.
Turned out, no sneaking was needed. The bird was tame as could be, completely unafraid of me. Sitting quietly, three feet away, I watched him all afternoon as he feasted on leeches. Sometimes the sticky creatures would wind themselves around his toes or beak, and he’d have to work to extricate himself and gulp them down.
Then I walked home, looked at my poster of “marsh birds,” and called Hawk Mountain again.
“There’s a least bittern down here. At the turtle pond.”
“No way!” This time the scorn was evident, but, given my previous track record, understandable. “You must be mistaking something else. Least bitterns don’t show up here.”
Still, the knowledgeable bird folks came down. Again.
And this time, I was right.
Fifth least-bittern sighting in Berks County, ever.
I was mighty proud of myself.
And I loved the little bittern.
The next day, at the crack of dawn, I went down to watch him again.
Our narrow country road was lined with vehicles. A whole bunch of people were at the pond, and the least bittern was awkwardly flapping away towards the creek, with several people in pursuit.
That’s when I learned how important it is to “birders” to add a rare bird to their list.
And, by the way, every one of those people was male.
“My” least bittern at the turtle pond, painted from a snapshot I took, by renowned artist Douglas Wiltraut.
The Birder Fraternity
I was as serious about birds as any of the males atop Hawk Mountain. I’d spent most of my life outside, noticing things. Even if I didn’t know their names, I knew which bird was which when I saw them or heard them.
But I was still learning to use a field guide. So I asked a lot of questions.
“What are those little tiny gray birds with the reddish bellies that come through, the ones that go upside down on the trees and say ank-ank?”
“Red-breasted nuthatches?! You saw red-breasted nuthatches?? No way! Where??”
Husband Matt hand-feeding one of our red-breasted nuthatches.
Often, peering dimly through my cheap used and (I now know) laughably huge binoculars, I’d ask something like, “What’s that hawk out there, the one with the really pointy wings that’s flying so fast?”
“Looks like he has Elvis sideburns,” I’d laugh.
Ten pairs of binoculars held by male hands would whip in the direction I pointed.
“Peregrine!”
Eventually, the small group would grudgingly accept my sightings even if they had missed seeing the particular bird themselves.
I felt like a king.
Make that, queen. Because it was still the males that were the inner circle, with me on the outside.
Their discussions during lulls in hawk sightings ran towards what were the best binoculars, the best backpacks, the best boots. Where they’d been (California, Texas, England—places that to me may as well have been Mars; the only other state I’d been to back then was New Jersey), and what birds they’d seen.
Eavesdropping, I quickly learned they were “birders.”
“Birding” was what they did.
And as far as I could tell, that mostly consisted of traveling to see birds, so they could check them off a list. A “life list.”
Bragging about how many birds were on one’s list was a big part of the conversation.
“Got 360 last week, red-faced warbler.”
“If the weather had been better on that pelagic trip, I would’ve had 512. But the ancient murrelet didn’t show.”
Even the hawk-watching seemed to be all about the numbers. One guy held the clicker, a little device with a plunger to push, to up the tally at every one of a particular species.
Ah, how I lusted after that clicker.
But even after two years of regularly being on the (often cold, windy, rainy) lookout, and being just as sharp-eyed as anyone up there, I was never honored with its possession, even for a minute.
Nope. The clicker was part of the man’s world I’d infiltrated.
Maybe it was the pioneer-woman garb.
Years passed, I moved away from Hawk Mountain, I traveled, I saw new birds myself and learned more every day about the old birds I already knew. I stopped wearing wacky clothes and dressed in practical jeans and boots.
And I still wasn’t accepted as a birder by the men.
Fine. I didn’t want to be a birder, anyway, I’d tell myself. Who cares about how many species? I just wanted to learn about birds so that I knew them as well as I knew my human friends. Their behavior, why they did what they did, what they used to make their nests, what they liked to eat in the wild, and on and on—the learning never stopped, and that’s what I loved best.
I was lying to myself, of course.
It still stung, to be at some birding hotspot or other, and have to overcome the initial dismissal merely because I was female.
Cape May, New Jersey. The Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. Big Bend, along the Rio Grande. The whooping crane breeding grounds in Aransas, Texas.
If I was with my then-husband, they directed their conversation to him, even though he was way less knowledgable than me.
If I was by myself, they turned their backs and ignored me, no matter how friendly my greeting.
A fraternity. That’s what it was. And no amount of knowledge or friendliness could budge that bar of being female.
The ferry ride across Delaware Bay from Cape May, NJ, to Cape Lewes, DE, is a great place for birdwatching.
A gannet, seen on our last trip from the Cape May, NJ, to Lewes, DE, ferry.
Proud to Be a Birdwatcher
Lots of water has gone over the dam since those days, and plenty of women are now excellent birders, keeping life lists of their own, or observing birds in their yards and at their feeders.
I’m also sure that some men, maybe even many men, have changed their attitude towards women in the field.
Yet the problem persists, as far as I can tell.
Groups formed to go out for “Big Day” counts are heavily male, although nowadays there’s often a female or two—or even three! (yes, that’s sarcasm)—among them.
“Serious” bird websites, like the American Birding Association’s rare-bird Facebook page, are loaded with male contributors, with females making up a definite minority.
All of the “household names” in birding are those of men. (Ever hear of Margaret Morse Nice? Probably not, although she wrote a two-volume set about song sparrows in her backyard that’s still used as a reference book.)
People who want to talk about what they saw at their feeder or in their yard—women, mostly—are still dismissed by many male birders as not on the same level as those with high-number checklists. And penises.
Competition is fun, for sure, and I have a strong streak of it myself. Just ask any of my Scrabble opponents.
Yet, for some reason, the how-many-birds part of birdwatching has never appealed to me.
I’d rather learn something about how a bird lives its natural life—any bird, “even” an English sparrow or a starling—than add to the number on a list.
Sorry to toot my own horn, but I can bird with the best of them, recognizing hundreds of species by ear alone, picking out birds by species by their chips during nighttime migration, identifying “confusing fall warblers” at a glance, having several accepted records for rare species. Here’s our latest:
Acknowledgment of our most recent “rare bird” reports to the state of Colorado. (The mountain chickadee mentioned is not a rare bird, per se; he’s a leucistic bird, with a pink bill and feet.)
And I’ve written a bunch of books about birds, including lots of fresh information about behavior that I witnessed firsthand.
But I don’t think of myself as a birder.
I’m a birdwatcher.
I. Watch. Birds.
I watch them at the feeder. In the forest. In the fields. In the city. Everywhere. And anywhere in the country.
And that’s where gardening comes in.
Watching the interactions between birds and plants, especially native plants, is a great way to learn a lot—about both the plants, and the birds, not to mention the insects. It gives us a way bigger picture than “How many birds have I seen?”
Our native birds are just as dependent on native plants as pollinating insects are.
Even more so, I’d say, because their lives are timed to an abundance of insects that hatch on those native plants, or to the berries, seeds, flowers, or fiber-rich stems for nest materials.
And their migrations—when food is paramount—rely on the appearance of, say, nectar flowers for hummingbirds or lipid-rich fall berries for thrushes. Same deal in winter, when natural food is scarce.
Clark’s nutcrackers eat seeds within the cones of pine and spruces. Look for them atop the trees in fall and winter, fattening up and cacheing thousands of seeds to last through the lean times.
Sure, our feeders and ornamental non-native plants help fill in the gaps. But North America is a mighty big area, with plenty of isolated places where people and their feeders are scarce, and native plants are what birds need for their very survival.
I like to think that being a birdwatcher is a whole different thing than being a birder. We birdwatchers know birds, because we spend lots of time watching them. And we know plants, because we watch the birds use them. And we know how the world is changing, because we’re seeing with our own eyes the effects of pesticide use, modern farming, habitat destruction, and climate change.
Maybe that’s it, at the core: “Birding” and “birdwatching” might simply be two different animals. The way I see it, there’s plenty of room for both. There’s simply no reason for the lack of respect I’ve seen from birders towards birdwatchers.
Enough ranting. What interesting things have you seen lately?
And, if you’re keeping count, how many birds are on your life list? I think I’m somewhere above 600, but I wouldn’t swear to it. One of these days, maybe I’ll go through the field guide and take a count, but right now? Hey, I’ve got birds to watch 
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