Old Man Sports: Birding Is Not for The Birds

There were only a couple material objects my Father coveted like they were golden idols to his brand of masculinity, one was a Mercury outboard motor propped on sawhorses in a corner of the garage I wasn’t supposed to linger near, and the other was his pair of 10x50 Bildwinkel binoculars with their felt lined, hard “leather” case on he kept on the top shelf of an entryway closet which none of us ever entered. Even though its doors were easily slid open, it was rumored to be sealed by a spell that would inflict 1000 horrors onto whomever attempt to quietly open it. My Mother would tempt fate regularly by choosing to keep one object in this closet, a rarely used ironing board, no doubt as a reminder to him of her shared reign over their home.

Dad let me peek through those binoculars occasionally, but not for long, and he never let me hold them. They were too heavy and precious for my little hands. I could feel the weight of them hovering over the bridge of my nose as he steadied his hold while I peeped through them. I got to look through them for a split second before whatever creature he was examining flew away, then the old man would pull them back to where they would rest against his chest, hanging from a hard plastic lanyard like modern day explorer traversing the depths of the great American west.

He told me in his cowboy Texas drawl, “A man has got to have a good pair of binoculars.” Apparently, so coveted were these objects that a man wouldn’t let his kid hold them.

I understood why he coveted them, they meant adventure, the wild outdoors, and the wisdom to see beyond what the eye allows on its own. I knew then and there that I wanted to grow up to be the kind of guy who owned a pair of binoculars.

I was 25 when I bought my first pair of binoculars from a Big 5 Sporting Goods store before my third quarter. I was enrolled in a two-year Parks Management program in the Skagit Valley region of Washington. Our class load was heavy on the “ologies”, basic biology, mammalogy and ornithology to name a few. I needed the goggles to ogle birds for ornithology class. My student loan check had cleared the day before our first birding class, and with it I purchased a small pair of not so fancy binoculars.

I marveled at how lightweight they were compared to my old man’s while discussing the optics of them with the salesperson, but I had no clue how they really worked. Just to have them was enough for me, I didn’t need to know the mechanics of their magic. They didn’t come in a shiny leather case, just a small nylon and Velcro case with a corded string strap to dangle from your neck. Not the most macho version to buy like the old man had, but a pair I could afford. I walked out of the store sure that I had just passed a milestone on the road to becoming a worldly sort of fella.

I’ve never been a competitive person. I played sports when I was younger, but I never had that drive to be the best at something, beat someone at a game. I was that “Let’s just try to have fun” sort of teammate. I’d clap and say good job for the other team and mean it. Being a good sport about things was just in my nature. I didn’t really care who won or lost, which never really endeared me to those that did. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to Old Man sports as they are generally not a team sport.

Weeks before class started, I had already poured over each critter in our recommended book, Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Jon L. Dunn. I tried to memorize every species, even the ones not found in the Pacific Northwest where I would be birding. My normally docile nature was overcome by a suddenly overly ambitious mind. I imagined that I would be called upon to name a rare bird, one that I, the best birder in my class had spotted first. Flipping through that bird book unleashed something fierce in me. Something unrecognizable.

After much reading and dreaming the first day of ornithology class finally arrived. Our professor was a bespoke mixture of rugged outdoorsman and intellectual, not that the two aren’t one in the same, but their distinctions fused in him. He was a sturdy man of ginger complexion, but permanently tanned from spending a considerable amount of time out of the classroom in the wild. He always wore a button-down shirt, but it was tucked into a pair of worn denim, and lassoed tight with a handmade, hand tooled belt. Bespeckled with rounded scholarly glasses and punctuated a working man’s pair of Irish setter boots, I was immediately in awe of the man. I wanted to prove my worthiness for any expeditions he might proposed. Retrace Shackleton’s path across the Antarctic? Sign me up. He was the kind of Old Man other old men hoped to be.

After a quick curriculum overview followed by an hour or two of his stories of flint napping in New Mexico and his years working as a Range Manager for the Bureau of Land Management, he finally led us out of the classroom and into the scrub at the end of a soccer field on campus. Hardly the boreal forest I had envisioned that he would lead us through. I was a little disappointed.

My newly sparked ego thought that this was his way of weeding out the less interested or gifted in our class. Perhaps he decided that he needed to cull the herd of us early, like maybe my classmates wouldn’t hold up to highly important task of identifying birds in the wild. I thought that surely this jogging trail was just a testing ground before leading this lot of citified folks off campus and dragging them through the wilderness where we would have to make sacrificial decisions of unspoken sorts when the weather turned. The bravado of these thoughts is embarrassing to admit now, but I had a fire lit in me to impress this man, and anyone else for that matter, with my assumed infinite knowledge of all thing’s birds having read just one book.

I soon realized that my fantasies of finding the rarest of birds my first day of birding would sink my bruised ego like quicksand. The following humbling experiences I had that day are to be expected in one’s first-time birding and provided as guide and the smallest of warning.

“There it is.” He would point into a thicket, tree or bush. It was to keep up. There were 20 of us twenty-somethings positioning ourselves around our professor like we were in a Rugby scrum, jockeying for his favor. No one saw a thing, although someone would always claim. It seemed that I wasn’t the only one lit with the desire to be the next Audubon.

I will say this now, and perhaps I have lured you in like this simple bird class did me, like birding does to the whole of us helplessly captivated by its allure, birding is not the tranquil poetic lingering of Waldon Pond, it is most definitely a competitive sport. Yes, it is an Old Man sport, and yes, I said in my introduction to this Old Man Sports thing that old men don’t care what you think really, but that doesn’t mean their bloodlust for winning doesn’t still exist. Old men are fiercely competitive, and if they don’t think they can win, they will dismiss you with the downward side of a goodbye wave like they are swatting away a fly.

Birding seems innocuous at face value, a simple pastime of those that live the pastural life. Maybe you thought it was just old men puttering about in the park while you run past them training for your marathon, but it is not as it seems.

Birding evokes the heart of the hunter in the most peaceful of its participants. Online boards and apps require your diligence and accurate listing of birds to be considered legitimate in the field. Sightings of the rare bird require verification by two or more known regional birders to before they are considered confirmed sightings. Friends turn to foes, and foes pretend to be friends.

We were babes in the woods, some of us fumbling with our binoculars, bumping them into our noses, brows and eyes, and others were pointing in the completely wrong direction as the birds he pointed out. None of us knew what we were doing, and all of us assumed with overconfidence that we did. This wasn’t a first day of class, this was a trial, a lesson in humility.

As we walked along the trail, the Sun began to push through the clouds, glistening gold on dewdrops clinging to last summer’s blackberry leaves. I could feel the trickle of sweat run down my cheek having overdressed for the deepest of forest and outskirts of the soccer field. In boldness, I stepped forward and away from the group just in time to catch a flicker of leaves and feathers in the bramble ahead. Carefully, I lifted the binoculars to me eyes and fumbled with the dial until I locked in on a brown bird.

“You got something there?” The Professor called to me from the warble of excited students flitting about him. “Yeah.” I answered, “Uh, some little bird that came up from the ground.” By now I’m sure his eyes were on it, but he proceeded to ask me to describe it from head to toe. He came up and stood next to me as I peered deeply through the lens, “You see it?”

I lost it for a moment and then all I saw were leaves. “I did, but… “ Frustrated, I kept searching for it. As I looked, he turned towards me and explained that we are to think of the object the bird is in, whether tree or bush, as the face of a clock. “You describe where you see it as the hands of the clock.” The bird jumped to a higher branch within the brambles, and I locked onto it. “It’s at two o’clock.”

He replied, “Good. Now describe it for us.”

“Brown.” They all look plain brown in the bush at first look. He chuckled, “Let’s look at its markings. Check around the eyes, see anything?” My eyes strained at first, my binoculars shook a little as I could feel myself holding my breath.

“Looks like maybe a brown stripe, and a little bit of white too. Stripes on the chest as well.” I reported as the other students started to thumb stiffly through the pages of their new books.

While I described it, I began to realize that this little brown bird was more than brown. It had streaks of reddish brown across its chest underlaid in white, with stripes like the highlights of a well-coiffed woman fresh from the salon.

“And about how big?” He asked. I answered slowly as my mind had to reconfigure the size in the lens verses distance from viewing and size of comparable branch, “Maybe 6–8 inches?”

He smiled at me and asked me to check again. I landed on 3–4 inches. It let out a giant song for such a small thing and flew away in protest as my classmates approached where the professor and I were standing.

“Good. Can anyone identify it?” He turned towards the group. Everyone had their noses in their books, dumbfounded where to start. I thought about the size and remembered the sparrow family. I hurriedly reached into my backpack and pulled out mine. I spotted it, but I did not yet identify it. In birding, the win is in the identification, there are no half points earned for spotting a bird.

I flipped the newly dogeared pages of my guidebook. Finding my courage, I spoke “Um, Song Sparrow?”

“Good, good.” He confirmed and walked further along the path. I fell in line behind him. I had earned my place near the front and my classmates trailed behind me for a while. As the morning wore on, my classmates threw out the niceties we had been operating under. This leisurely stroll became a scramble over the rocky terrain of all our young egos. I had learned what it felt like to want to be the best at something, to win and from that moment on I was hooked on that feeling.

As the inherent responsibilities of “adulting” start to weigh you down, one can easily slip away from the things that bring one joy. This fact and about a decade of being laughed at by acquaintances and lovers about my endeavors into what they referred to as the “Old Man” sport of birding made me put down the yearly practice of training my ears to songs Neotropical birds in anticipation of their annual Spring arrival. I stopped keeping a documented journal of my sightings and put my binoculars, long since upgraded from my first pair, on a shelf.

It wasn’t until both my parents had passed away that I felt a shift in myself towards wanting something more out of my life then just working towards my own inevitable ending. As I was clearing out my parents’ home of some 30 plus years, I slid open the door to that tomb like entryway closet that held my dad’s prized possessions. There on that top shelf, as reliable as the old man himself, were those behemoth binoculars. They were still heavy to me, much heavier than what I would carry into the field for a day of birdwatching, but I felt a pull to try them out.

I left that task of clearing out the closet of my dad’s existence and fled to wildlife reserve some miles from their home. How many years had it been since I had come here? I pulled those binoculars from their carrying case unleashing a flood of memories of times spent outdoors appreciating the wonders of life with my old man. As I held them up to my eyes and brought the bushes in front of me into focus, a little brown bird jumped into my view. I could feel the approach of nearby birders, no doubt looking to see what I was looking at.

Someone spoke, “Song Sparrow?”

“Yep.” I replied, walking off towards the woods like a lone champion.

Author’s Note: You don’t have to buy anything fancy to get started and you can literally bird right outside your door. You set the pace, but your heart will indeed race when you realize the wonders that are all around you.