Photos by Susie Nishio and sketches by Alison Kent; produced by Sylvia Wright, UC Davis News Service
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People with affinity for things with wings flock for fun
There is something fantastic (as in not quite real), and yet utterly tangible (whiskers on a flycatcher), in a wild bird beheld at close range.
An Anna’s hummingbird is an iridescent rose-and-green helicopter that swoops and arcs between sugary blossoms; it hums and crackles with clicks and squeaks.
A Western scrub-jay is a streak of blue and gray that dives, squawking loudly, into a clump of shrubs. It hops to the ground, head turning this way and that, bringing left eye, then right, to bear on branch or sod, focused solely on acquiring the next meal for itself — or, in this season on this campus, its offspring.
As one might expect from a university with an extraordinary record of studying and solving environmental problems, the UC Davis community includes many who know about the science of wild birds.
Standing around, necks craned
But until lately, it did not have people who met regularly for the simple pleasure of standing around, necks craned, watching a downy brown ping-pong ball pick bugs from oak leaves.
These UC Davis birders are a companionable flock with varying jobs on the campus, from engineering professor to micro-imaging specialist to fundraiser. Since last summer, they have been meeting every Thursday at noon in the UC Davis Arboretum to observe, photograph and sketch wild birds.
A few, such as Alison Kent, are veteran birders, with the skills to distinguish an orange-crowned warbler from a yellow-rumped warbler by the metallic quality of its call.
Kent, publications coordinator at the UC Davis Wildlife Health Center, plus president of the local chapter of the National Audubon Society, has birded on three continents, saw 173 bird species from her bicycle last year, and is also the group’s artist-in-residence.
Green recruits
Some of the UC Davis birders are green in another way — fresh recruits to the recreational sport of birding, which a December 2008 report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service showed has become as popular as all spectator sports (yes, even NASCAR), amusement parks and arcades, non-hotel casinos, bowling centers and skiing facilities combined.
In 2006, nearly 71 million Americans age 16 or older spent $45 billion observing, feeding and photographing wildlife.
And one UC Davis birder, graduate student Bobby Walsh, is both professional and recreational bird-observer. Working on a doctorate in ecology, he counts baby birds in nest boxes along the banks of Putah Creek every spring.
In October, when the newly established UC Davis birders spotted a white-breasted nuthatch with tiny red and silver tracking bands around its leg, he pulled that particular bird’s life history from the banding records: It had hatched five months earlier with five siblings, two of which were eaten by predators before they left the nest.
On the UC Davis home page: Birders at UC Davis can always count on seeing the Anna’s hummingbird. (Susie Nishio/UC Davis photo)
Fantastic yet tangible: A wild bird, born six miles away, now just a dozen feet overhead, probing for food in a furroed owak trunk, so close you can see that a tiny feather hangs from its breast, set to untether on the next takeoff.
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