A New Look At Birding - Cape May Authors Turning Sport On Its Ear
By Steven V. Cronin
Staff Writer
Pete Dunne is walking through the small bird sanctuary behind his office, casually identifying birds on the wing.
It's an impressive display, both of Dunne's prowess and of the sheer magnitude of species that make the nearby woods and wetlands their homes.
But Dunne's rapid-fire IDs are also impressive in their audacity. Because here, Dunne - author of nine birding books and one of the premier birders of his generation - is also casually tossing away more than a century of tradition as he helps change the way birders everywhere approach their sport.
It's a revolution centered in this quiet corner of southern New Jersey, which has long attracted an inordinate number of both migrating birds and those who love to study them. And while it had been quietly fermenting in the background for some time, the revolution has broken out into the open this summer with the publication of two books proselytizing on the "Cape May School of Birding."
Both "Pete Dunne's Essential Field Guide Companion" and "The Shorebird Guide" by Richard Crossley, Kevin Karlson and Michael O'Brien advise would-be bird identifiers to focus on a holistic method of putting a name to a bird rather than following the traditional method of making identification by picking out recognized plumage points.
Put simply, the idea is that you don't need to spend long minutes closely studying a bird to begin making an identification. If it's shaped like a robin, moves and acts like a robin and is in a place where you would expect to see a robin - such as your backyard - then you are likely looking at a robin. After making that general identification, then you can look for specific clues, including plumage, to confirm your belief.
"It's been around for a while, but it's always been demeaned," Dunne said of the practice, which he and his other Cape May School proponents refer to as GISS for general impression of size and shape. "People say it's not defensible, it's not precise, but that doesn't mean it's any less accurate."
In fact, GISS helps those in the know about birds make some pretty amazing identifications. Dunne talks about how he shocked himself by identifying a ferruginous hawk at three-quarters of a mile after a quick glimpse of the flying bird.
"I don't know how I did it, earlier in the day I'd spent 20 minutes staring at something in the binoculars and I still wasn't sure what I was seeing. But here - maybe it was the habitat, the location, some movement - but something clicked. It never occurred to me that it was anything else," Dunne said.
Dunne says he and the other Cape May birders haven't hit upon anything new.
Other birding books have talked about the method, but no others have focused so completely on it. The U.S. Navy used a similar philosophy during World War II to train fighter pilots to quickly identify enemy planes.
Most of us make dozens of identifications and decisions in our daily lives based on GISS principles, Dunne says. We recognize friends and family members from far away, even though we can't see their faces because we've unconsciously put together subtle clues about how they move, look and act.
"It's what everybody does. Yet we've been almost railroaded to look at IDs from scratch. To look at details in order to put a name to a bird," Dunne said. "You don't identify Dolly Parton by her eye color. Your recognition begins before you ever lay eyes on (her eyes). "
GOOD IN THE FIELD
The GISS system also makes sense because it takes into account real-life conditions that birders encounter in the field.
Anyone who has ever watched birds knows how difficult it is to get clear views that are similar to the beautiful glossy photos found in field guides. In most cases the birds are backlit, moving or sitting at an awkward angle, making a point-by-point identification difficult, if not impossible, Dunne said.
That's why many birders, great and not-so-great, have long employed the techniques of GISS - many coming to it on their own and not realizing what the strategy was called.
To understand why GISS has only now reached a sort of critical mass as a recognized birding strategy is to take a look at birding history. Birding was initially pursued by ornithologist, who prepared field guides by studying and painting birds they had shot and then brought home.
"We were all trained to do (things this way), and it hadn't changed when we stopped shooting birds and pulling them out of drawers," Dunne said. One reason was that the easiest way to fill a field guide was to produce perfect portraits of birds. A GISS-based guide not only requires extensive knowledge about all birds covered, but also the ability to boil that knowledge down into easily digested entries. Another reason the old system has been used for so long, Dunne happily admits, is that - while not perfect - in most cases it did work. Casual birders could pick up a guide, and flip through the pages until they came to a photo that looked like the bird perched on their feeder. They weren't interested in making precise identifications. Hard-core birders, meanwhile, took a kind of perverse pride in making their plumage-based IDs under the toughest field conditions.
Birders in Cape May began developing other methods of identification based on some problems peculiar to birding in this area. With lots of birds moving over an area surrounded by water, birders found they often couldn't get close enough to make precise plumage identification. They learned to rely on their guts and on their extensive knowledge of how birds moved and acted to help them quickly make difficult identifications of faraway birds on the wing.
Another problem is that many of the area's shorebirds don't look the same from season to season, said Kevin Karlson, whose pictures of birds in flight, in motion and at rest fill "The Shorebird Guide." To be able to ID a shorebird using the old system, you'd have to not only know what a bird looked like in each of its seasonal plumages, but also what it might look like as it molted and made the transition from one to the other.
WATCHING BIRDS
Karlson, a noted wildlife photographer who has more than two decades invested in his craft, said that he, like other birders who have spent a large amount of time learning to bird in the traditional method, was initially skeptical about trying something new.
"You get someone who has spent 25 years and they don't want to hear that they could be doing it wrong. That's not what we're saying, but that's how they hear it," Karlson said.
"It took me about six months to grasp this new approach, to change something I'd been doing for 23 years. An established birder is the hardest student," he said. But Karlson eventually became a convert. After a year of using the GISS method Karlson not only found himself "a 30 percent better birder," but also began noticing new things to appreciate about a pastime that he was already an acknowledged expert in.
"I suddenly found myself staring at robins in flight, over and over and over. I had seen them for years, but I had never really looked at them," he said.
And that's one of the beauties of the GISS system - it steers those interested in birds into many more areas to explore and appreciate than just simple identification. If the old system was about bird identification, the heart of the GISS system is really bird watching, seeing what the bird does and understanding why it does it.
Dunne's book, which took him four years of traveling the country to complete, is as thick as a phonebook and contains not a single picture. Instead it is crammed with details about how birds fly, act and live, and how birders can use this information to make an identification. "The Shorebird Guide" is packed with photographs of the birds living their lives - running, eating and flying.
"For years I've referred to myself as a birder. I'm actually a bird watcher," Dunne said. "I find IDing the bird the least interesting part of watching birds. It's just a hurdle I have to get over to get down to the business of watching birds."
To e-mail Steven V. Cronin at The Press: SCronin@pressofac.com
