Odd Mating Habits of Birds and Birders Revealed

Whiskered Owls & Whispering Birders A Man Named Walraven Reveals... the Odd Language of Love Among Birds and Birders Wezil Walraven hits the brakes on the bird-watching van in the middle of the darkening road into Ramsey Canyon, prime habitat for that most peculiar of human subspecies—birders.

Mountains from all over the country. Behind flit Susan and Larry McKennon, lovebird Army colonels who once invaded Iraq and are now on a campaign to understand the alien culture of birders. McKennon helped build housing for a couple hundred thousand soldiers waiting to invade in the first Gulf War, while Susan ran MASH units. They got married while posted at Fort Huachuca, which once harbored the Buffalo Soldiers of Apache War fame and now protects some of the best blessed bird canyons in North America. Susan and Larry have returned from retirement in Oregon to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary with a romantic interlude at the bird-obsessed Casa de San Pedro. In all innocence, the colonel couple has now fallen in with a band of birders. “Whiskered screech owl,” cries Wezil, his extravagant enthusiasm for all things feathered exaggerated into a personality trait by decades of professional birding. Raucous as a raven and frenetic as a nuthatch, the graythatched, strong-legged, fresh-faced Wezil can shame a mockingbird when it comes to imitating birdcalls, but can't for the life of him mimic nonchalance. Several befuddled birding couples grab their binoculars and tumble toward the doors of the Casa de San Pedro's bird van, the first stop in a treasure hunt that will yield unexpected insights into birds, birders and their odd mating rituals. Only Tucson Audubon Director Sonja Macys understands Wezil's bounce-offthe-walls excitement. A blonde-crested, slim-legged, hard-core birder and conservationist, Sonja knows the rare whiskered screech owl lures birders to the Huachuca Following them come my wife, Elissa, an artist, and me, a writer, 26 years married and given to unpredictable enthusiasms. I am hoping this night and day tour will reveal the interlocked secrets of birds and birders and so explain why 46 million Americans spend $32 billion on their dearly daft hobby every year. Birders migrate to southeast Arizona in flocks to explore famed canyons in the Huachuca, Santa Rita and Chiricahua mountains and lush riparian areas like Sonoita Creek and the San Pedro River. Thanks to sky islands, diverse canyons, migratory flyways and its location on the boundary between the Mexican tropics and temperate habitats, the area boasts more than half of North America's bird species.

WELL-DRESSED CAD

A pair of wood ducks quack sweet nothings, but don't let his fancy outfit fool you. These small colorful ducks nest in cavities in big trees like sycamores, but the male plays no role in either picking the nest or sitting on broods of up to 12 eggs.

By the time we escape the van, Wezil has already centered his birding scope on a dark hole in a huge tree set in a V in the road. I focus my binoculars in the gathering dusk.

Nothing.

Sonja peers into the scope. “There's the mother and the baby,” she whispers.

I elbow her aside and the scope reveals the baby, visible only when he opens his haunting yellow eyes and fixes me with a look wise beyond his fluff-feather years. I cannot see the mother.

Susan looks. “I see them,” she chirps. Impossible. I look again. Suddenly, I see the mother perched right on top of the baby, as cleverly camouflaged as a brain twister illustration in a children's nature book.

Wezil dances a jig in his excitement over our astonishment. Then he piedpipers us down the road in the dark, hooting and ooohing.

Down the hill where pines and sycamores yield to oaks and scrub, he whips out his CD player to reproduce the territorial call of a western screech owl, a hoot that diminishes like a dropped pingpong ball. A moment later, a ghost owl passes noiselessly overhead and perches indignantly in the cottonwood opposite. Wezil flicks on his 9-volt flashlight and notes that this owl lacks the fringe of face bristles adorning its cousin up the road. The whiskered screech owls use the bristles to funnel flying bugs into their mouths. The larger-taloned west-ern screech owls, by contrast, snatch up lizards and mice. Such differences in even closely related species make birds nature's Rosetta stone, revealing the complex connection between habits and habitats.

Wezil and photographer Tom Vezo, who has in his files 100,000 pictures of birds of 500 species, then launch into a complex discussion of the local dialects of owls and Mexican whippoorwills. I eavesdrop, like a plumber listening to a discussion between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr about whether God does, in fact, play dice with the universe.

Abruptly, Wezil cocks his head. “Elf owl,” he says, reacting to a call I hadn't even heard.

Tom spins and spots the 5-inch-long bump of an elf owl on a branch, thanks to an eye trained by 20,000 hours of birding. A sparrow-sized insect hunter, the elf owl also draws birders from the far corners of North America. Suddenly, the feisty elf owl plunges from its branch and smacks into the back of screech owl's head. Everyone yelps, most especially the screech owl.

The owls curse.

The birders hoot.

Wezil beams.

We chat happily on our way back to Casa de San Pedro, getting to know each other.

Sonja is earnest and expert, although she gave up keeping her “life list” of birds she has seen after the Mexican federales inexplicably confiscated her only copy during one memorable fiasco in Mexico.

Susan is easygoing and brimming with delight, although baffled by the birder hubbub. Larry is careful as a colo-nel in a roomful of generals, although his eyes gleam with amusement. He watches Susan with the wordless devotion that prompts soldiers to throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies. She is the happy splash of a stream to his deep ocean current, but they fit perfectly. They found each other in the midst of muddled wars and now seem as content as life-mated eagles.

We declare the owling a great success, but privately consider Wezil odd and Sonja obsessed, especially after Wezil insists we have breakfast by 6 A.M. to get those early birds.

We assemble just past dawn in the Casa de San Pedro dining room for a reassuringly substantial breakfast, then head for Garden Canyon on Fort Huachuca, where Wezil has promised us elegant trogons, outlandish, foot-long, parrotlike tropical birds that remain the avian superstars of southeast Arizona. They sport long tails and nine colors, including emerald-green backs, vivid red breasts, bright yellow bills and spooky orange eye rings. A tropical species, they breed in a few lush canyons along the Arizona-Mexico border where they nest in sycamore trees, whose soft, easily broken branches make them a cavity nester's paradise.

The Aztecs believed trogons harbored the spirits of dead warriors, perhaps for their gaudy plumage and eerie calls. Trogons have expanded into Arizona in just the past century, perhaps due to a 3degree average temperature rise linked to cattle grazing and deforestation. They eat berries, bugs and lizards, nest in abandoned woodpecker holes, reproduce slowly and defend their young fiercely. They often mate in the tropics, but the females can store the sperm inside for weeks before fertilizing an egg. The males migrate first so they can hunt up several nest cavities in hopes one will impress his true love, since they appear to mate for life. When the missus arrives, he leads her from hole to hole, fluttering, croaking and preening hopefully.

Wezil delivers us to a peaceful picnic area in Garden Canyon, where gaggles of birders wait hopefully for a trogon's call. We wander about, appreciating North America's greatest diversity of butterflies and pointing out painted redstarts, hepatic tanagers, yellow-eyed juncos, whitebreasted nuthatches and even a rare sulphur-bellied flycatcher, to add to a species list that will top 40 by day's end.

Suddenly, we're electrified by the bizarre, swallowed-caw of the trogon, sounding like a turkey reared by mockingingbirds on hallucinogens. Delighted, we creep through the woods behind Wezil, druids seeking our fairy circle. The heartstopping, bright-red breast of the male trogon flashes in the branches. We crane our necks, cry out, shamble through the forest, stumble over tree roots, cross the stream, bumble down the road and return to the picnic area-following the trogon from perch to perch. Two trogons fly back and forth overhead, a delirium of red and green.

Wezil can lie down and nap on his laurels so far as I'm concerned.

Instead, he leads us to the humming-bird heaven of Beatty's Miller Canyon Guest Ranch & Orchard. There we encounter a New York birding guide, an obsessive life-lister with a frightening gleam in her eye who has tallied 736 spe-cies in North America, but hasn't glimpsed a new bird in two years. She has brought three wealthy clients to see several rare tropical hummingbirds. Now she haunts the row of buzzing hummingbird feed-ers, unnerving as Marley's ghost dragging the chain of a life list. In the next hour we see two-thirds of the North American hummingbird species, including black-chinned, broad-billed, blue-throated and violet-crowned-not to mention rufous, Annas, costas and magnificent.

Still, Wezil has not finished with us, seeing as how Susan is still calling trogons “Trojans.” So Wezil resolves to reveal to us the secret hiding place of the threatened Mexican spotted owls, elusive predators of old-growth forests hanging on in a few unlogged canyons, including Scheelite Canyon in the Huachucas.

So we drive to the canyon and troop nearly a mile up a steep, leafy, bird-thronged trail.

At length, Wezil perches on a rock and tells us to think like a Mexican spotted owl. After much blundering about, I spot a gigantic, drowsy, mottled brown owl high in a nearby Douglas fir.

Moments later, Susan stops in astonishment beneath a branch just 8 feet off the ground that holds a foot-high, fledgling Mexican spotted owl, adorable in his baby feathers. The mother eyes us dubiously from a nearby tree.

Susan shrieks in delight.

“Oh, it's so cute,” she cries. “That's it. I'm a birder!” Wezil chortles like a trogon.

The owl holds my stare skeptically, but I can only shrug. I cannot explain us, especially when it comes to mating habits.

Even so, I'm proud of our most distinctive field marking: A wonderfully fluffed up sense of wonder. AH