Seeing half the birds — and more

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, bird watching, birding, obsessions, travelogues

Everybody collects something…or several somethings. Collections of small things are most popular because the collections don't take much space. A collection of 50,000 postage stamps takes up a few cubic feet; 10,000 worldwide coins would be of a similar size. These days, if one foregoes printing photos and putting them in albums, a collection of tens of thousands of high-resolution photos will fit on a single 64- or 128-Gbyte SD Card.

At the other end of the spectrum, H. F. du Pont, defining what it means to be filthy rich, collected salons. Not just "rooms", but the very large rooms used for large scale entertaining, complete with all furnishings, from 175 American mansions at his "home" in Greenville, Delaware, now known as the Winterthur Museum. A typical tour at Winterthur takes up to two hours to show just five of the rooms. I wonder whether many of the rooms have ever been toured; I don't think they have nearly enough unique tours.

Bird watching, bird listing, and other facets of "birding" can take up very little space, if one collects mainly memories. Just seeing and getting to know the habits of a few or a few dozen—or a few hundred—species of bird is very rewarding to many people. Lists can be made of the birds that visit your yard or neighborhood, or a certain town, county, state or country. Or the whole world.

Noah Strycker decided to take a whack at the all-time one-year record list of world birds by planning to see at least one-half of all species of bird in one year. 365 days. There is more than one "official" list of all species (biologists differ on a few percent of species, whether they are truly one species or more than one). Anyway, the number of known bird species in 2014 was roughly 10,500, so Noah set out to see at least 5,025 if possible, and possibly more. He traveled upwards of 40,000 miles, spent time in 41 countries in all seven continents, at a cost of about $60,000.

Just to get ready, he had to collect as many bird handbooks as possible. This photo shows the stack. Its volume is greater tha most stamp or coin collections…and that's just his prep work. How did he carry it with him? He scanned every page and stored them in his phone. It must have taken months! My guess is that the stack represents about 20,000 pages. I hope he had several backup copies, including one "in the cloud" in case his phone was lost, stolen, smashed by a Cassowary or whatever.

As chronicled in his book Birding Without Borders, An Obsession, a Quest, and the Biggest Year in the World, he eventually saw, including verification by other bird enthusiasts that were with him, 6,042 species of birds. The prior record for a year's quest had been about 2/3 of that.

Creating such a world record is amazing in itself. To Noah, it was secondary to the memories of the birds, the stories about many of them as told by local birders who helped him along the way, and the relationships he built with literally hundreds of bird enthusiasts in every one of the 41 countries.

I had a vague thought of putting a lot of photos in this post. But I took Noah's example; he didn't put many photos in the book. Just 22. So I'll confine myself to just one more picture, of the world's most famous bird, a Giant Antpitta in Ecuador, that one of his new-found friends, Angel Pax, had half-tamed so visiting birders would actually get a chance to see one of the shyest bird species.

Birding Without Borders is astonishing. For one thing, Noah had much less trouble overall than he or anyone else would have any right to expect. When you share an obsessive fascination with people around the world, and you call on them for help, stand back! you're going to get help. Many of the local birders who accompanied Noah went out of their way to show him the rarest species they knew how to find, while keeping in mind the pace he had to maintain.

Just to see 6,000+ birds in 365 days requires a pace of 16-17 new species every single day. Since there are bound to be a few unfavorable days, and Noah even had a couple of "zero" days, seeing 30-40 birds on some days is practically a requirement. This is hyper-endurance marathon stuff.

The reading is much more enjoyable than running a marathon (at least for me, with my poor joints!). I consider portions of this book to be micro-biographies of a few dozen of the wonderful people Noah met all around the world. There's a lot of good stuff packed into this book.

One shovelful at a time

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, lexicography, memoirs, obsessions

In a dearth of faith, how is one to move a mountain? One shovelful at a time. Depending on the "mountain", I suppose we are fortunate that this or that person might find such shoveling enjoyable: it is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

As to obsessive reading, the "shoveler" I have in mind is Ammon Shea, who has read through the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED), as he writes, "so that you don't have to." The OED has 21,730 pages and nearly sixty million words of print. To read it in a single year, one must read 418 pages each week: nearly sixty pages every seven days or more than eighty pages daily if one takes weekends off…and those are rather large pages!

Shea finished reading through the OED in July, 2007. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 pages is his memoir of the experience, with a nifty sampling of words that struck his fancy. During that year, his eyes got worse (he had to procure eyeglasses after the first few weeks), his skin got paler (ten hours daily in a library basement), he became composed of coffee (a quart or so daily), and he learned that blinding headaches do eventually go away. And, he writes, he loved the experience.

I sympathize with him about halfway. I do read dictionaries and encyclopedias for enjoyment … from time to time (There is one dictionary that I have read from cover to cover, but it is far smaller than the OED). It seems that at least for the past ten years, Shea has read nearly nothing except dictionaries. His girlfriend is a professional lexicographer. He has a collection of hundreds of dictionaries, and is in awe of an older friend named Madeleine who has thousands.

It is the existence and work of people like Alix, the author's girlfriend, that makes this all possible. The oldest half or better of the OED is the work of James Murray, who famously defined a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge." Thirty-four years of his life, and a much greater sum of years for hundreds of other people, went into producing the massive, twenty-volume work (to find out more, see The OED Online. It is not free to use, but a "word of the day" is offered freely; today's word is downthrow, whose current meaning is overthrow or usurp, except in Geology, where its meaning is more literal. They have, literally, a million more where that came from).

Let's see: iatrogenic, impedimenta, matutinal, painstaker, peccability, recrudescence, sitzfleisch, upchuck, wailer, xerostomia. These ten comprise a few percent of the "interesting" words that Ammon Shea has offered up, with short definitions and his own quirky commentary, to accompany each of his 26 chapters. These ten are all the ones that I already knew.

I cannot say that now I have learned a few hundred new words, for two reasons: Firstly, many of the words denote stuff I don't think of as needing a word. For example, nefandous means "too odious to be spoken of". When "the kid" points and says, "What is that?" we don't reply that it is nefandous, we say, "Hush, it isn't polite to point," or "I'll tell you when you get older," hoping the tyke will forget all about it. Secondly, many, many words are so out of date they haven't been used for generations and some have been replaced. A great many are rather forgettable anyway. Thus, nobody today mentions charientism, since tact is now current, and is loads easier to pronounce.

This points up the greatest attraction and value of the OED, and why it should be taken in larger amounts than just looking up a definition. It is a historical record of hundreds of thousands of words, whether current or not, particularly of how each has been used throughout its history of usage in print. While upchuck is a mere fifty years old, mumpish was used for being sullenly angry for some three hundred years before being replaced by sulky a generation or two ago, and many a word still in use, such as amorous, is little changed from a Latin word of twenty centuries past.

Shea mentions that seven words are defined as hiera picra, with no further explanation. I hope he has since found that this term means "priestly bitters" and refers to a certain type of traditional medicinal dose.

Now that he has finished reading the OED and written this enjoyable book about it, can you guess what he'd like to do next? You got it: to read it again, but more slowly. His web site doesn't mention if he's doing it.

Well, it is fortunate there are only about 10,000 known birds

kw: book reviews, natural history, ornithology, bird watching, bird listing, obsessions

After finishing To See Every Bird on Earth: a Father, a Son, and a Lifelong Obsession by Dan Koeppel, I spent a couple days thinking about it. So now it is late on Christmas day, and I still don't know what to think about someone who has seen a life total of nearly more than 7,500 birds (to date), yet cut himself almost wholly off from his family to do so.

Richard Keoppel, the author's father, is one of the top twelve "Big Listers." Sixty years mostly spent obsessively seeing and listing bird after bird, between periods of a year or two in which his shame kept him from going after any; sixty years of saying, "I'm done, I've seen enough," at 2,000, 3,000, 4,000...

To be a Big Lister means lots of travel. Just to get to the first thousand, one must travel overseas; there are 914 bird species in North America by the latest count. To see 70% or 80% of the species in any area, one must go a few times. At different times of the year. As you might imagine, a Big Lister doesn't have much time for anything else. Most are pretty much failures in the Family Life department.

It took the author decades to come to a kind of peace about bird watching, and listing. Then he could go with his father to Brazil, to witness the sighting of his 7,000th listed species. I find this is the rule; whatever someone's obsession, if you want to relate to that person, you must enter their world. They are unable to leave it.

Thirteen birds. The book's thirteen chapters each begin with an episode from Richard Koeppel's memory, about seeing the species, and the chapter content is woven about the time period in which that particular sighting occurred, usually a period of a few years. From the Brown Thrasher—which got young Richard started birding, and the first he recorded, though the 24th species he could recall seeing—to the Saw-Whet Owl—the smallest owl known, and his 726th—to the Harpy Eagle, #4,706; the tales tell the man.

Researching and writing the articles that make up the book, and taking the journeys that led to the culmination of the research, and the final healing of the relationship, the author developed a fondness for the birds, learned quite a bit of birding lore, met most of today's Big Listers, and came to grips with his own personality and development. Whatever may become of his father, Dan Koeppel has been bettered for it.

For myself, the question arises, "Do I have an obsession that is harming my family?" Being able just to ask the question is helpful.