by Ian Lynch

It is 1:45 PM on Friday, I’m sitting in the passenger seat listening to a Grateful Dead concert from the year before I graduated from High School and trying to concentrate on blogging instead of birding!  No, I haven’t given up the fight, Ken and I are headed north to Carl’s house to eat, sleep and start the Big Day.  We’ll have lots of discussion between now and whatever time we steal a nap, then we will have even more when we finally gather the team to start birding at midnight.  The night hours do hold a decent number of species, but it is much slower than most of the rest of the day, so we will have time to discuss strategy and routing choices.  We have divided up the scouting into discreet sections so for the most part the important decisions in any area are made by the team member who scouted the area.  For me that means rolling around a half dozen possibilities in my head including a number of “emergency exits” if time and/or species demand evasive action. 

The southernmost scouts on all the teams share the same plight, we have no control over how much time we will be dealt, we simply have to play the cards we are given.  I’m actually starting to relish the role, it requires a cool head to face the challenge and fanatical drive to overcome.  Last year I said, “Just get me to Millville Airport by 1:00.”  This year I’m willing to take 2:00 for a start time if the team scouting “the middle” can convince us to go for it and try for a half dozen or so species in Salem County.  Since I’m not sure that any of them are convinced that we should attempt it I doubt that we will be there this year.  There is also the problem that the weather (as well as the scouting reports from the north) seem to indicate that we may need more time up there this year.  In any case, I’m ready to find my inner type A personality and take on the southern challenge.

This year’s hotspot is definitely Heislerville.  Lots of teams will find themselves spending an hour there picking up most of the shorebirds and good number of ducks.  That is, of course, as long as the refilling of the impoundment at Matt’s Landing doesn’t completely obliterate the shorebird habitat.  I’m planning a coastal-north-to-south-first route for Cape May this year.  We’ll see how well we do picking up species early on the route so we can buy time to spend looking at the ocean in Cape May Point, before blasting north to Brigantine where we will watch the sun go down.  Last night’s swap meet provided some tantalizing information as did a couple of phone calls and conversations in the field.  Unfortunately, this can serve to overwhelm, so I’m trying to stick to finding all the birds we can in locations where I can expect to connect the dots in the time provided.  Today’s eleventh-hour scouting finally turned up a Piping Plover and almost a nest.  The reason for the “almost” is that I was watching NJ Wildlife staff scouring the beach for a nest where they presumably will erect an exclosure.  This was at Stone Harbor Point, where I also got a tip that there has been an occasional Gull-billed Tern.

The final (and perhaps best) find of the day was something we are hoping will be good for our “mojo.”  The Wetlands Institute gift shop sells stuffed animal birds that sing their song when you squeeze them.  So now riding proudly on the dash of the van is a stuffed Common Yellowthroat that sings “witchity, witchity, witchity” when squeezed! 

by Ian Lynch

As usual, we have had a good number of valuable encounters with other scouting teams.  The exchange of information and helpful hints has been steady.  We even had the pleasure of enjoying the hospitality of WSB staff Sheila Lego and Marleen Murgitroyde on Tuesday night at a dinner they hosted for WSB participants.  The unscheduled entertainment for the evening was a pair of teammates from one of the top teams who put me in mind of Penn and Teller: one regaled us with fantastic stories while the other performed magic (in this case near perfect imitations of bird songs, including Winter Wren).  Thankfully there was still food left when Ken and I arrived, since we were late.  It would be nice if the cause were a matter of not being able to leave the field because of all the birds we were finding, but the truth is that we couldn’t leave the field because our technology drained the van battery and we couldn’t get it to start.  Thankfully, Ken got enough signal on his cell phone to call AAA, but they couldn’t get there for almost two hours.  A dozen or so people stopped to help, but none had cables.  Eventually, one Good Samaritan went home and came back with cables and gave us a jump.  We re-learned a lesson we had thought we already knew and now have cables in the van.

One of the members of last year’s winning team, Bert of the Lagerhead Shrikes, has become something of a hero to Ken and me for his creative use of technology.   One thing he has done is to take pictures of birds and their locations in the field so he can mark them up and show him to his teammates, thus helping the team to shave off valuable seconds during the competition.  We so liked the idea that we’ve added his name as a verb to our birding lexicon.  After locating the Yellow-crowned Night Herons at their usual roost in Avalon, I decided to snap a picture so that I could “bert” them.  You can see the result posted here.  We did the same with the Red-headed Woodpeckers.

by Ian Lynch

The frustration of not being on territory looking at birds last week has now been replaced by total immersion scouting.  I left Massachusetts late on Sunday and drove through the night getting to Witchity HQ South around 3:30 AM; sleep deprivation being a key element of World Series conditioning.  I unloaded my stuff into cabin 18 at Avalon Campground, conveniently left open by Marleen and the friendly staff here.  Then before getting some sleep I set up our feeding station: a hummingbird feeder, a dish of mixed seed and a block of suet.  The reason for choosing this campground was the prior appearance of Red-headed Woodpeckers, so this set-up was an ambitious attempt to bait this bird for Saturday.  I went to bed with bird sounds playing on a loop on my laptop ready for the great adventure to begin.

When I got up in the morning (OK, so it was only a few hours later) the first bird sound I heard was a repeated buzzy call that immediately put me in mind of the eagerly anticipated woodpecker.  Just as I was beginning to think that the week had started with a bang, I realized that I was listening to a Great Crested Flycatcher. As it turns out, while we are happily domesticated in our cozy cabin, we picked the wrong campgrounds this year as a very cooperative pair of Red-headed Woodpeckers is setting up house a few miles up the road at another campground.

Scouting has been going rather well.  Our driver, my brother Ken, joined me in the south on Monday afternoon.  Carl spent the weekend camping up north, went to work for two days and is now again camped out in the northern woods.  Dave has been making wild overnight forays (often starting at 2 AM) north from his home near Princeton.  And Chris (aka Crew Member #6) has taken special missions to Brigantine, National Park, and Salem County.  The good news is that we have more scouting power this year than ever before.  The bad news is that we will have no excuses!

by Ian Lynch

by Ian Lynch

by Ian Lynch

by Ian Lynch

Front (L to R): Linda Pivacek, Tom Young, Geoff Wood, Ian Lynch Rear: Cliff Bernzweig (honest, that's his chin), Carl Bernzweig, Tom Clay

So what does a Witchity do in the winter to stay wicked sharp for the World Series?  Compete in the Super Bowl, of course!  The Super Bowl of Birding is another competitive birding “big day,” only this one takes place the weekend before that other Super Bowl. The playing field is Essex County, Massachusetts and Rockingham County, New Hampshire.  Not only is this more like a half-marathon (it runs from 5 AM to 5 PM) but there is the added twist of every species having a specific point value.  Adding to the need for cunning strategizing is the fact that each top value species (5 points) has to be phoned in to the Joppa Flats Mass. Audubon Sanctuary with the first team to do so earning a 3-point bonus.  It is a different game, one that was irresistible from the start for us Witchities, not to mention that there is a home field advantage for erstwhile Witchity (and original captain) Tom Young and myself, who both lived in Essex County for many years.  So for each of the three years of the Super Bowl, Carl and Cliff Bernzweig have made the reverse trip that I make each May, coming to Massachusetts from New Jersey.  And since we have three local non-Witchities on this team, we decided that the winter plumaged team required a different nom de guerre, so for the Super Bowl we are the Wicked Pishahs.

Surprisingly, World Series wisdom has taken a while to get a grip on the Pishahs.  During Super Bowl I, we actually stopped at a fast food restaurant for lunch!  OK, well only two members went in for food, while a majority of the team remained in the parking lot (making any species countable by this game’s rules) to record the only Cedar Waxwings we saw that day.  The Pishahs finished fourth in our first outing despite our lackadaisical approach.  That all changed in Super Bowl II when sharp skills and a cunning plan netted a second place finish (and the Director’s Award) for the team.  With the grand prize that close in our sites we pushed ourselves to accept nothing less this year.  So with 86 species and 195 points (a Super Bowl record) the Wicked Pishahs were crowned champions of Super Bowl III and hoisted the Joppa Cup (well, we didn’t exactly “hoist” the award since it is topped by a Swarovski crystal sculpture of a Great Blue Heron that is perilously attached to the base).

National Public Radio’s sports show, Only a Game, made the right choice of teams to shadow for the Super Bowl, “embedding” journalist Michelle Seaton with us.  You can hear her report here  The story begins at 38 minutes, 50 seconds.  You can also read a stories about the event here  and   here.

Don’t tell the competition, but we have big plans for Super Bowl IV.  We believe that treating the Super Bowl with the same ruthless efficiency required in the World Series that we can top our totals from this year.  In the mean time we’ll just have to see if we can follow one winning effort with another come May in New Jersey.

Let me introduce myself–Carl Bernzweig–and add my two cents regarding honesty in the World Series of Birding.

Non-birders, even those intrigued by the idea of competitive birdwatching, have a lot of trouble getting past the idea of the contest results relying on teams' own reports.  The analogy they're most likely to bring up is golf–which I imagine must be rife with cheating.  The best we can do is tell these non-birders that we know we don't lie about our own sightings, that most of the competitors know one another, and if we thought others were just making things up, we all wouldn't spend so many hundreds of dollars and hours on the effort every spring.  It just means too much to us. 

On the other hand, birders understand that while a golfer knows whether he just spent four strokes or six, a competitor scoping a distant, backlit peep may not be so mathematically certain as to which one he's seeing.  And any birder who's ever built a list, whether at leisure over the course of the year or racing the clock on a Big Day, also understands the compulsion to make the bird in view the one you most need.  Wishful birding seems more of a threat to a fair WSB outcome than outright cheating does, and a couple mistakes probably get made by a team or two every year.  The teams all understand this, and I believe most work hard to avoid crediting themselves with unearned species.  It's heartbreaking to think of how many bird sounds we Witchities leave unidentified in the night.

Last year, 11th hour scouts reported a singing Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow, a difficult bird for WSB.  Its location was relatively near the finish line, so most teams would have visited the spot late in the competition when, like us, they'd be over-tired, worrying over holes in their checklists, and very eager to believe any faint sound or little flash of brown was the bird in question.  We spent ten precious minutes there but left empty-handed, convinced the thing would start singing its heart out as soon as we turned the key in the van.  

I'm not sure how many teams actually went gunning for that same bird, but there were probably dozens.   When the checklist of species seen by all teams combined was handed out at the awards brunch, the box beside the Nelson's was unchecked.

This is fellow Witchity, Ian Lynch.  Brian's post about honesty reminded me of this piece I wrote last year:

In May of 2004 some well meaning birders directed me to what quite possibly
might be the stinkiest place on the planet. In Port Norris, New Jersey
there is a pile of clam shells that must be at least 30 feet high.
Someone suggested that a way to endure the smell was to think of it as
leftovers from last night’s seafood dinner. That would be OK except
that it smells more like last month’s seafood dinner! On top of
that, to find the birds, one must walk on grassy impoundments that are
a tick nursery. After my short visit there I picked a dozen ticks off
various parts of my body. Joining the assault are swarms of winged
blood-suckers of varying shapes and sizes.

It may seem at this
point that the birders weren’t so well meaning after all. Considering
that they, like we, were scouting for sites for birds in advance of the
World Series of Birding perhaps they were tossing us a red herring (it
certainly smelled like a dead fish!) Standing downwind of the
malodorous mountain of shells, being eaten alive by tiny flying insects
in the sweltering heat, knowing that ticks were at that very moment
anticipating the taste of my blood, and all the while not
seeing or hearing the King Rail that I was there to find, I was still
willing to trust the information. Our team had been told about this
bird and this location by the team that won the previous year (and
repeated this past year). Actually, I had no good reason to trust them
beyond the fact that the whole event hinges on trust. When the teams
arrive at the finish line with their bird lists they have been running
around New Jersey for the previous 24 hours completely unmonitored. The
only system preventing rampant lying and cheating is the honor system.
All in all, that is a pretty good system. Not only does that encourage
trustworthiness, it also makes this perhaps the friendliest competition
in the world.

Out on that miserable dike I met a very pleasant
fellow scout who confirmed that he had previously heard a King Rail at
this location and shared a wealth of other information with me. He told
me of a place to find a Prothonotary Warbler. Later that week when I
saw him again I was able to thank him for that with the news that
additionally I had found a Kentucky Warbler at the same location. Teams
were also free with tips and tricks on finding birds and getting them
to reveal themselves.

This got me to thinking about Jesus’
command that we should love our enemies. It is too easy to approach
much of what Jesus taught with the attitude that it is a lofty ideal
beyond our reach. But my experience with the generosity of my
competitors at the World Series of Birding made me realize that the
best way to defeat your enemies is to treat them as your friends. I
don’t ever expect our team to win the World Series, but since I could
never muster any animosity toward other teams I could never feel like a
loser. This “love your enemy” stuff is actually more practical than
lofty. If more of us could truly believe that it works then maybe some
day they will have a war and nobody will show up!