03784 - West Lebanon, N.H.
Dan Hopkins, 42, is a research biologist with master's degrees in zoology and biochemistry. A past president of the Mascoma Chapter of the New Hampshire Audubon Society, he currently leads the Wednesday Warblers, a weekly bird-watching walk to Boston Lot Lake near the Wilder Dam. The following is an edited interview.
At first it was just something to do, I think. If I went out hiking I'd bring the bird book and it was just something else to pay attention to. Then each bird I didn't recognize became another problem to be solved, and somehow I just got pulled into it.
For some, birding is a list. There are people, the extreme birders, who just go nuts, like collectors, trying to find every bird they can. I'm not a list person. It's not like counting license plates when you're driving, there's one from Colorado, there's one from California, I mean that kills the time, but what's the point?
For me, it's about being aware of your surroundings. Like traveling or reading, birding is about discovering something new about the world around you. In school you have visual problems, you have word problems, but you never have sound problems. So learning to understand the bird song you're hearing and then describe it to someone else is incredibly difficult. "It goes up and it goes down, it goes chk, chk, chk." There's just no vocabulary for it.
There are a number of mnemonics to help you. "Drink your tea, teacher teacher, teacher." Or, "Trees, trees, murmuring trees." They're all really inefficient ways of trying to describe what we can never describe, but it gives you a handle on the rhythm and the pattern.
On these bird walks when you see an uncommon bird it's like a celebrity sighting. Everyone gets all excited about it. It's funny, but I get caught up in it too. Like the wood thrush we saw this morning? They're common, there are wood thrushes all over and you hear them all the time, but they live in the underbrush and you just never see them. So to finally spot one in broad daylight with a completely unobstructed view, singing in the sun, that's just great.
There's that cliche about people communing with nature, trying to find some deeper connection. But when I'm doing it, I don't feel that connected. I'm not feeling, "Oooh, this is wonderful." I'm like, "Wait, what color was that? What kind of markings? Was there an eye ring?"
Part of me will be thinking like a scientist: "Am I hearing a different dialect because it's a different sub-population? Is it temperature-dependent because it's a cold morning?" But there's another part of me, too. Like last year, when I saw a scarlet tanager — a red bird with black wings, the colors were just amazing — I just stopped and thought, "Man, that is a beautiful bird."