Elie Axelroth

I’ve found birders to be exceptionally helpful, generous, and certainly more knowledgeable than I am.

I’m a casual birder. I don’t keep a life list. I don’t drive hours to track down a rare sighting (well, only occasionally). I’m hopeless at identifying birds by their calls. For the life of me, I can’t remember the names of the most common birds. I struggle to spot small, flighty birds in leafy trees. And all those warblers? They utterly confound me.

Despite all that, for Thanksgiving I traveled to Canopy Tower in Panama to bird. Forty-five minutes from Panama City, it’s an old US military radar station reclaimed as a premier birding site.

It’s hard to uphold my image as a casual birder when I’m traveling more than three thousand miles to see tropical birds—along with sloths and monkeys. I was especially hoping to see a harpy eagle, Panama’s national bird. One of the largest eagles in the world, its talons are powerful enough to lift sloths and monkeys. Unfortunately, that wasn’t meant to be.

What I did see was stunning: Trogons and motmots. A tiger heron. Purple gallinule.

Unexpected Generosity of Birders

I would have been lost without the guides (and their green laser pointers), and the kindness and patience of my fellow birders helping me locate the small camouflaged vireo or shrike or antpitta hopping around in the foliage. I was almost always the last person to see the bird.

“Stand here,” Carole said, pulling me in front of her. “There—above that forked branch.”

When I was ready to give up and walk away, my fellow birders were persistent, forcing me to persist, too.

With all the time birders—serious birders—spend patiently waiting for that latest rare bird to appear, you’d excuse them if they’d been just a bit annoyed by my questions. Where is it? Which branch? Shh. Oh—it’s gone. But they weren’t.

Instead, we reveled in each other’s sightings.

Rare Bird. Right There

One recent Saturday, I went looking for a neotropical cormorant reported in a nearby creek. Walking through the mucky creek bed, I spotted birders gathered on a ridge above me with their scopes, cameras, and binos (because that’s what birders call them). I figured we were all searching for the same bird.

As I walked farther downstream, one of them called out, pointing. Rare bird. Right there.

It looked like a great white egret to me, but given their insistence, I slowly backed out of the creek and headed up to the ridge.

They could easily have been irritated by my carelessness, but instead they were only too happy to point out what I’d misidentified: a juvenile little blue heron, fishing in the creek bed. (Not to make it easy, the juveniles are white, the adults blue.) A sweet bird I’d nearly scared off with my unartful meandering.

Citizen Birders

In the midst of excessive greed, violence, and hatred, birders tend to be uncommonly generous. I’ve wondered what makes them so. (Pickleball players are also known for their play-as-you-are welcoming spirit.)

Like a communal meditation, birders are on the lookout for barely noticeable movement in a branch, a twittering call, a flash of color. Sure, some birders can be competitive with their life lists and fixation on minutiae like molting patterns and hybridization, but as a rule, generosity is an ethos, an animating principle, a source of pride. They are only too happy to share what they know. Perhaps because they care so deeply for the environment, for bird habitat. Birders are slow walkers, introverts bonding over a shared passion.

With the proliferation of birding apps like Merlin and eBird, a burgeoning community of citizen birders are recording flight patterns, rare bird sightings, hot spots. There are birders spending sleepless nights documenting the dangers of light pollution during migration season. (Two of the most serious dangers to birds are cats and window strikes.) Last year, over 83,000 birders participated in the Christmas bird count.

Wake up America!

What would it take for generosity like that to grow? To become a movement? A cultural ethos? My experience traveling tells me that other countries do a better job of caring for others, so my hope for us is nowhere near impossible.

I have to believe there will come a day when America wakes from its slumber—when what was acceptable yesterday will no longer be acceptable tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’ll be meandering along the coast and local trails, depending on the generosity and kindness of birders.

Explore More

If this piece resonates, you might enjoy:

• Holding On to Hope: Finding Strength in Uncertain Times
• Where Are You G-d? A Letter to My Non-Jewish Friends about Israel, Gaza, and Holding Two Truths

You can also find my novels Thin Places and Cross Body Lead at Volumes of Pleasure in Los Osos and wherever paperbacks and ebooks are sold.

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