Barred owls. (photo by Lauren Thomas)
A good bird field guide is also a great thing to have. Because of the mind-boggling pace of technology, to help a birder recognize the bird they can hear but might not be able to see one can download a bird app that can play the particular song of more than 900 birds in the Northeast.
When walking with a seasoned birder, what at first appears to be a quiet, peaceful setting, such as the lakeside trail in late afternoon at the Shaupeneak Ridge, suddenly turns into a cacophony of sound. As DeDea walks, his ears are carefully attuned to the wildly active birding community. “Ah, there’s a red-winged blackbird,” he will say. “There’s a great-crested fly-catcher…I hear an ovenbird.”
“The thing is,” he says, his binoculars strapped around his neck like a well-worn crucifix, “people think that you have to see the bird, but more often than not, once you tune your ears in, you hear them first and then you know where to look.”
Within 20 minutes along the lake, DeDea has casually pointed out more than a dozen species of birds, mostly by sound and some by sight. He named them all from their specific song or flight pattern. He was able to include many details about each one. “The ovenbird nests in the ground and creates an oven-shaped nest, hence the name.”
DeDea identifies a tree swallow in flight dipping in and out of the water to catch insects and then flying back to its nest among dead trees, where woodpeckers have already made a nice little cavity for nesting. Pointing out a pair of grey herons flying over the water, he suggests that they might be mating here. “They’re like giant flying dinosaurs,” he says. “They’re elegant, yet so archaic-looking. I never get tired of watching them.”
To call out some of the birds he has identified by their particular bird-call or song, DeDea announces he is going to “piss” into the woods. But he doesn’t really mean “piss,” he means making the sound “pisssh.”
He apologizes. “If you’re going to be a birder you have to have a really bad sense of bird humor, which we all do,” he says with a laugh. He then stops and starts to “pisssh.”
A male wood thrush darts out of his nesting site, almost hitting DeDea in the leg, and then banks left down the footpath, pretending to have a hurt wing. The wood thrush, says DeDea, “faked having a hurt wing so that any potential predator would chase him to divert that predator from going near the nest, where the female is caring for their young.”
“Pishing mimics the sound of a tufted titmouse,” he explains. “They’re like the policemen of the woods. They make that sound to warn the entire bird community that there is a predator. It could be a black snake or a bobcat or a hawk.”
After one spends a half-hour with DeDea, the woods no longer seem less like a quiet place and more like an urban center, with birds calling to one another, looking for mates, warning each other, marking out their territory, or reveling in the end of the day.
“It’s amazing because many of these birds are migratory like the vireos or the warblers,” DeDea says. “We think of them as belonging here, but really they could spend a third of their life in Central America, a third of their life migrating up north and then back south, and the other third of their life here, mating and breeding.”
Schoenberger and DeDea lead many walks for new birders or seasoned birders throughout the Hudson Valley for various organizations, nature centers, state parks and preserves. “That’s the thing,” DeDea says. “Birders love to bring more people into the fold. They like to talk about birds, be asked about birds. They’re not intimidating people. They love to share the joy they get from learning, listening and watching birds.”
The John Burroughs and Watermen Bird Club websites provide detailed information on dozens of locations for bird-watching during every season. Other websites and organizations which offer local birding information include the Forsyth Nature Center and the Mohonk Preserve.
For those that want to give the activity a try, DeDea suggests signing up for a guided bird walk. He advises testing out different binoculars so that if you’re interested you know which ones to purchase. At the walks that he leads extra pairs are usually on hand “for those that are just getting into it.”
