BIRD WATCHING IS my life.
Some of my best bird-watching has been done with a chainsaw. Considered unethical by the same people who say it’s wrong to bird-watch with a shotgun.
Do they have a cinnamon teal on their life list? I do, with stuffing and gravy.
A life list is a permanent record of the bird species you’ve observed. It’s a measure of your achievements as a bird watcher. You don’t have to say how you saw the bird, you just have to see them.
Whoever dies with the biggest life list wins. And if you have to knock down a few trees or bust a few caps to boost your life-list numbers, toughen up.
Bird-watching is not for your sensitive types. It’s a hardball world where you can find yourself stranded in a swamp at daylight with the pages of your bird book glued together and axle grease on your binoculars.
Sometimes, you can’t see the birds for the trees.
Cutting timber can get the birds moving and offer some excellent bird watching.
That’s how I added a northern shrike, a Clark’s nutcracker and a flying squirrel to my life list in one day!
I know what you’re thinking. Squirrels aren’t birds. They might as well be.
Flying squirrels are nocturnal which makes them difficult to observe until you cut their tree down.
Flying squirrels are relatively easy to distinguish from other squirrels.
They fly. The other squirrels do not.
Where there are squirrels, there are hawks hunting them. Of which, the great white northern goshawk is the largest. You probably won’t see one unless you work in the woods, where they swoop through the trees picking squirrels off the limbs at sub-sonic speed.
They are part of a spring migration of raptors heading up the Pacific Coast now. Where you probably won’t see a gyrfalcon, the largest North American falcon that rules the sky by chasing ravens off their roost.
The bald eagles are flying sticks and tree branches back to their nest to repair the damage from the storms of winter.
As the days lengthened, our nation’s symbol engages in some amusing mating rituals. Female eagles are easy to identify. They are larger than males. Eagles are said to mate for life, but they probably fool around. Because there’s usually an extra male hanging out nearby. Probably a migrant. It’s like a soap opera with the same plot every year.
I used to enjoy watching eagles on the river. It was a symbiotic relationship. They would perch on limbs over the water, peering down between their talons at the fish. Then it was just a simple matter of anchoring up and fishing until you caught one. I would clean the fish and feed the guts to the eagles to fulfill the social contract.
Eagles can live for 20 years or more, so there was the very real possibility that I’d been feeding some of these birds all of their lives. The eagles never lied about seeing fish. Until, they did. Sitting on a limb above a dead river.
Now, instead of me watching eagles, they watch me. Expecting me to catch a fish and get them some guts, but now we can’t eat steelhead. It’s all torture and release fishing.
They’re trying to declare the steelhead endangered, which is an historic accomplishment in fisheries mismanagement for a salmonid that doesn’t die when it spawns.
Steelhead can spawn as long as we let them, which won’t be long the way things are going.
Maybe we are all endangered species. Which could really limit your life list.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
