Birders: Myth and Reality

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: As amazing as this might seem, there are still some people out there who are so totally uninformed that they think of birdwatchers as nerdy, dorky, or dull. (Of course, there are some people who think the earth is flat. When the real information is so readily available, at some point the ignorance becomes the fault of those who carry it.) For anyone who is so backward that they still cling to a belief in the "nerdy birder" stereotype, I wish I could have plunked them down in Mango Mama’s last night.

Our band, 6-7-8-OH, was playing a gig at Mango Mama’s in Port Clinton. Unlike some of our gigs, this wasn’t a fund-raiser for anything, just a Saturday night of playing in a bar. And there was a very good crowd there most of the evening. But what was most noticeable to me was the fact that it was the birders who packed, and rocked, the house. Birders made up only one-third of the band, but probably more than three-quarters of the action in the place.

Where was the stereotypical birder that you might see in a magazine cartoon? Certainly not in this crowd. No, we had the real birders. Three of the sharpest young bird experts in the state, Jen and Phil and Ethan, all twenty-something or barely-twenty, were there to rock all night after birding at Magee Marsh all day. Rebecca and Laura and Michelle were there from the National Wildlife Refuge; we’re accustomed to seeing them as professionals in the conservation field, but here they were lively pretty girls, drawing looks from all the non-birding guys in the bar. Several fun couples from the birding scene were here: Bob and Blake (the Killer Bs), he looking studly, she looking glamorous; likewise Tim and Dana, and Hugh and Judy, still amazingly energetic after all the work they’d been doing at the bird observatory. Another bird observatory mainstay, the amazing Karen, was there, a total live wire as always. Tough guy Henry and his cute daughter Olivia had been out birding all day at Magee Marsh but they came to listen to the music for half the night. Iain, Josh, and Sam, professional tour leaders from Tropical Birding, tanned and rugged and lean, probably danced with every lady in the place, and Michael and Matt may have done the same. But the dance floor was filled with birders practically the whole night.

The month of May has been a high-energy time at Black Swamp Bird Observatory, with crazy numbers of birds and birders in the area. Kim and I are both pretty well fried by now, and it felt good to just get up there on stage and rock out. No one has worked harder than Kim, and she should be absolutely exhausted by now, but she was so wound up and so full of life that no one would have guessed. With her beautiful voice and powerful delivery, she knocked everyone out as always. When we launched into a Joe Walsh tune, instead of "Spent the last year the Rocky Mountain way," Kim sang, "Spent the weekend birding at Magee," and everyone went crazy. At least, all the cool people did -- all the birders.

My beautiful Kim rocking out on stage

That's me on bass, adding to the driving foundation of the songs. Photo courtesy of Kevin Loughlin at Wildside Nature Tours.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

It's spring, the Red-winged Blackbirds are all pumped up and making music, and so are we.

From Oak Harbor, Ohio, Kenn writes: In my most recent book, Flights Against the Sunset (published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008), there was a whole chapter ("Nightland") that was an extended essay on sleep deprivation. None of our friends were surprised about that. For Kim and me, sleep is usually pretty far down the list of priorities. There are always too many other interesting things to be doing.

Right now we're a little more crazed than usual. This weekend is the big annual banquet / celebration of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory (BSBO), and we've been swamped with trying to prepare for it. The observatory has a great staff and a lot of wonderful volunteers, without whom nothing would ever happen (come to think of it, I'm a volunteer). But still, Kim has been going like crazy all week, like a hummingbird on overdrive, dealing with a zillion details relating to the weekend. I never move as fast as she does, but I've been preoccupied with prep for the weekend as well.

Most of the action is taking place in Port Clinton, on Ohio's North Coast. It kicks off tonight (Friday night) with a show by our band, 6-7-8-OH, playing classic rock from 8 to 11 in a benefit concert for the observatory. Tomorrow morning (Saturday) I'm teaching a workshop on field identification of ducks, geese, and swans, a two-hour intensive course (and no, I'm not finished preparing for it yet). Saturday afternoon there's a tour of local businesses in Port Clinton, focusing on the many who have offered support to BSBO. Then in the evening we have the annual banquet, with awards, silent auction, etc., and a featured presentation by Norm Smith from Massachusetts Audubon, showing pictures and talking about his amazing research on Snowy Owls. Then Sunday morning we have field trips followed by a celebratory brunch.

And then maybe we sleep, or at least lie around on the floor with our tongues hanging out.

Ah, Spring! It's such an exciting time of year, the birds are all jazzed up, and so are we! But if you've called or written to us recently and haven't heard back, this is my attempt to explain why!

Birders Rock, version 09.2

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: When we came back from the Antarctic, with a million things to do after a month away, I wasn't that thrilled about the fact that our band had a performance scheduled just over a week later. But as it turned out, our gig last night was a total blast. The band has a new sound system and it inspired us to play our hard-rocking best. Our month without practice seemingly was erased by three intense sessions in the last week, and in fact we were able to add several new songs to the set list. Kim was amazing as always, and no one who heard her soaring vocals would have guessed that she was fighting off the remains of a cold.

Once again, Mango Mama's in Port Clinton was packed for the event. This town provides great support: the mayor was there again, and three county commissioners, and a couple of hundred other people who know how to have a friendly good time.

I was pleased to see that once again, in addition to having a couple of serious birders in the band, there were several out in the crowd -- including long-time friends of ours like Delores, Laura, Hugh, and Judy, and others whom we've just met for the first time, like Linda, Jim, Dave, and Sal. Thanks, fellow birders, for supporting the music. And here's a salute to our friends Julie and Bill, who, with The Swinging Orangutangs, will be rocking the walls off of the Whipple Tavern down in southeastern Ohio on February 13th.

I repeat: Birders Rock!

Random Bird: Blackbird

Kenn wrote this back in December: (Today, January 7, we're supposed to be boarding ship in Tierra del Fuego to head toward the Antarctic, and we set this post to be published in our absence.)

So who would call a bird simply "Blackbird?" The British. Look at bird books from England, especially older ones, and you’ll see bird names like Blackbird, Heron, Wren, Jay, Swallow, etc., as if there were only one bird in each of these groups. Those British sometimes act as if they had invented the English language!

Anyway, The Blackbird (which Americans often refer to as "Eurasian Blackbird") is not at all related to the blackbird family (Icteridae), a strictly New World group which includes our familiar Red-winged Blackbird as well as grackles, cowbirds, American orioles, meadowlarks, and others. In fact, the (Eurasian) Blackbird is a very close relative of the American Robin (which is not closely related to the European Robin ... Got that? There will be a quiz in the morning). The Blackbird is native to Europe, Asia, and North Africa, and has been introduced into Australia and New Zealand. There are a few records from eastern Canada, but there are some doubts about how those birds may have arrived there. The Blackbird shown above is one that we watched in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2005. Aside from the color of its feathers, it looked for all the world like an American Robin, and acted like one, too, perfectly at home in a tiny park in the big city.

Not only is this blackbird very widespread in the Old World, it’s also culturally important. "Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie" would have been this species. The Beatles' song "Blackbird," with the lines about "Blackbird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly," was referring to this species. But when it comes to the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the answer is unclear; Stevens was an American but some of his blackbirds seem to have a European tilt.

Ice, Ice, Baby

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: We braved the intense cold and the ice-covered roads last night to go to band practice, and then the weather socked us anyway: Sully, our lead guitar player, was called away for an emergency having to do with pipes freezing and bursting. The rest of the band spent a while working out chord progressions of new material anyway before calling it a night.

At some point, messing around, I started playing the famous bassline from the hit "Under Pressure" by David Bowie and Queen -- the same bassline that was lifted, essentially note for note, by Vanilla Ice for his hit single rap classic "Ice Ice Baby." Kim had performed this song a couple of times with her old band, Four Thorn Rose, not as a planned part of the show but to fill in time while someone changed a broken guitar string. Sure enough, as soon as I started playing the bassline, Kim jumped in with the lyric, delivering it with tons of rapper attitude: Will it ever stop, yo -- I don’t know ... Deadly, when I play a dope melody, anything less than the best is a felony ... Girls were hot wearin' less than bikinis, Rockman lovers drivin' Lamborghinis ... ice, ice, baby ... On and on, a rap anthem, all the more authentically gangsta-ish because it’s based on a stolen bassline. Fletch jumped in on drums, and the handful of other people hanging around at Mango Mama’s watched in awe as Kim rapped out this long long song without missing a beat.

We can’t help thinking about ice right now. It has been wickedly cold the last few days; on Sunday, when we had expected to do the Fremont Christmas Bird Count, the temperature went down to 4 Fahrenheit with wind chills of 25 below zero. The ice storm that we had Friday morning -- the last time the temp was barely above freezing -- coated everything with thick ice that’s still there. In a separate post, we’ll talk about how the birds are faring in this weather. But for anyone who keeps bird feeders, this is the weather in which the birds need help the most. They can find food under snow, but when ice locks things up, the birds can be in serious trouble.

After all this cold weather, we’re looking forward to going away -- to Antarctica! I know from previous experience that the weather is surprisingly mild at this season. We travel by ship along the coastline, and the temperature rarely gets much below freezing. It would be different, it would be unimaginably cold, if we went to the Antarctic interior, but we wouldn’t be seeing birds there. So we’ll explore the islands and the coast, and we’ll see lots of ice, but we won’t encounter the kind of intense cold that has hit the American Midwest the last few days.

Coronation Island, in the South Orkney Islands, off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Kenn took this photo on his third Antarctic trip in 1992.

Keep on Rockin in the Bird World!

From backstage : ) Kim writes: I wanted to add a bit to Kenn's post about our Friday night gig. The funkiest, most far-out part about our band is the way we came together and got this community ROCKED on to the fact that birds are a major driver of ecotourism dollars in northwest Ohio.

Get this. In addition to me and Kenn, our 6-7-8-OH Band members include:
On drums - Larry Fletcher, Director of the Ottawa County Visitors' Bureau;
On rhythm guitar and vocals - Bob Hille, Ottawa County Treasurer;
On rhythm guitar, keyboards, and vocals - Ron Miller, Lake Erie Vacation Rentals;
On lead guitar - (and layin it DOWN, brotha), Pat Sullivan, a local entrepreneur

How we all came together is a trip.
Last spring I launched the “BSBO Business Alliance” initiative. For the most part, the local business community had no idea of the numbers of birders that are starting to pour into our Magee Marsh / Crane Creek area to witness the all-out binocular-burning migration sensation that pumps through here during the month of May. So, with help from one of the most dynamic volunteers on the planet, Delores Cole (who I affectionately refer to simply as, D), I put together a very simple plan to connect the dots for the local business people.

The plan was indeed simple. Kenn had put together the Kenn Kaufman’s Best Bets for Birding blog that offered updates on migration, weather, and sightings for the Magee Marsh / Crane Creek area. To that, D & I added a series of links to local hotels & restaurants in the area, focusing on those within a half an hour from the major birding hotspot, Magee Marsh Wildlife Area, which is where the Observatory is located. And finally, we designed “Birders' Calling Cards” and handed them out to every birder who came into the Observatory, asking them to leave them with the businesses they visited during their stay.

Within 4 days I started to get phone calls from business owners who were absolutely blown away at the number of birders in their establishments! Now that I had their attention, I selected several well-connected business owners and invited them on a tour of the marsh. We did two trips. The first was a few days before International Migratory Bird Day (IMBD), and the second was actually on IMBD, which is typically celebrated on the second Saturday in May. I loaded everyone up in the BSBO Bird Bus and drove them back to the boardwalk to see the spectacle. I arranged for Toledo’s Channel 13 News to cover the story.

IMBD at Magee is probably the largest bird festival--that isn’t called a bird festival--anywhere in the world. It has never really been promoted, and it isn’t called a “festival,” but, it IS a festival. There are vendors, field trips, and bird banding demonstrations, a Big Sit fundraiser, and BIRDS! If the weather isn’t a total washout, you can see 20+ species of warblers. Oh, yeah, we also have BIRDERS! We can have more than 10,000 people come through Magee on IMBD weekend, and more than 50,000 during the month of May. (Or May-hem, as I often say.)

BLOWN AWAY….is all I can say. When the tour rolled up to the east end of the parking lot and an ocean of cars and people came into view there were audible gasps from everyone. I’d say there were at least 400 cars in the parking lot. The camera man nearly went berserk. He kept saying that he had no idea this was so huge, and almost before the bus stopped he was bailing out to run through the parking lot to get shots of all the state license plates. (At one point during the second week in May last spring we counted 24 different state license plates in the parking lot---in one day!) Believe it or not, most of the tour participants had never even been to Magee Marsh. Oh, they'd heard of it, sure. But they had no idea what was really going on out here.

The tour was a smash success! Channel 13 did a great job of capturing the essence of the experience in a segment, titled Bird Migration boosts local economy. The best part for me? The fact that NOW the local business community has a vested interest in preserving these wildlife areas.

Ecotourism is alive and well in northwest Ohio.

On our first tour was Larry Fletcher (aka...our drummer), invited, of course, as the Director of the Ottawa County Visitors' Bureau, and not for his mad thumping drum skills! At that point, I had no idea that Larry was a musician, but for people who love music, it eventually finds its way into any conversation. A few weeks later, in a follow up meeting about the birding tour, we discovered our mutual music madness.

Larry was telling me that, yes, he was a drummer, but the band he’d been playing in was on hiatus because they had lost their bass player and lead vocalist. He jokingly says to me, “You don’t know any bass players or lead singers, do you?” You should have seen the look on his face when I said: “Ummm….Yes. I sing and Kenn plays the bass.”

History is of that which happened next, as they say. : ) The local papers have all been running stories on the band, and Kenn and I have gotten extreme kicks out of the fact that they introduce us as: Kenn Kaufman, bass guitarist and bird expert, and Kim Kaufman, lead singer and Director of the Black Swamp Bird Observatory.

Smashing stereotypes never sounded so good.
Rock on…

Rocking With The Mayor

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: A few years ago I was the keynote speaker at the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival in Homer, Alaska. It was in May, before the rush of tourists that flock to Homer in summer but at the peak of the shorebird migration. The crowd at the festival was getting an eyeful of huge numbers of birds, in addition to educational programs, the spectacular scenery of the surroundings, and the hospitality of the locals. In the spirit of America's last frontier, that was the first time I recall giving a keynote talk wearing jeans, sweatshirt, and hiking boots! But another thing that struck me about the festival was that the mayor of Homer recognized the value of having all these visiting birders in town. The mayor came to my keynote talk, said a few words of welcome to the crowd, and he even came out birding with us the next day.

I concluded, right then and there, that it's a good thing if you can get the mayor to attend your special events.

Tonight our band rocked the walls at Mango Mama's, the big party hall at the Kokomo Bay Restaurant here in Port Clinton. A good crowd braved the cold to come out and hear us, which was a doubly good thing because this gig was a fund-raiser for the Salvation Army. A contingent from the fire department showed up, and fire chief Kent Johnson got up and played guitar with us on a couple of songs. And the dynamic mayor of Port Clinton, Debbie Hymore-Tester, was there for the entire evening -- mingling with the crowd, supporting the cause, moving on the dance floor. Her Honor The Mayor even got on stage with us and sang lead on a couple of songs, rocking out in duets with Kim. After the show was over, of course, Kim and I spent some time talking with the mayor and her husband about the importance of birding to the local economy. Port Clinton is catching on to the fact that thousands of birders come here in spring and fall, but we've been able to draw attention to that in a completely unexpected way through this musical connection.

Birders and Rockers

From Port Clinton, Ohio, Kenn writes: So, yeah, we're crazed about birds, but that's not the only thing in our life. We're also crazed about everything else in nature, from butterflies to bats, from fish to ferns, from reptiles to rocks. Especially rocks. We spent last night rocking out with our classic-rock band, 6-7-8-OH, playing a major gig at Mango Mama's in Port Clinton. There were probably more than 200 people there at the peak of the night. Kim is the lead singer, and I'm not exaggerating when I say she's fabulous; people go crazy when she launches into hits from Led Zepplin or Pat Benatar or Bon Jovi. I'm the bass player, so I get to hang out on the back of the stage with the drummer and enjoy the scene from that perspective. The local paper did a story about the band a couple of nights before the gig, and it was the first time I'd seen myself referred to in print as "a noted bird expert and bass guitarist" -- no kidding! But there are surprising numbers of keen birders who are also rock musicians. Maybe we'll write about that in more depth at some point. In the meantime, we're going to be playing at Mango Mama's again on December 5th, for anyone who happens to be in the area.