Table of Contents and Index by Steve Gerow

            A free day- no work, no appointments or scheduled activities, nothing that has to get done today.  Given that you are reading a bird club newsletter, chances are your reaction is the same as mine to such a situation- go birding, of course.  But where?  You recall that someone recently reported some rarities at Natural Bridges, and someone else found a couple of interesting things at the UCSC Arboretum, so you decide to visit both spots.  Around dawn you head off to Natural Bridges first; the birds you would most like to see were reported there.  You proceed to the spot where the rarities were found, wait there for over an hour in the cool and foggy morning, and see almost nothing.  A chickadee calls briefly from deep in the willows, and then becomes silent.  Something is scratching under the bushes but doesn’t come out.  A starling flies by.  Time to give up on this place and go to the arboretum.  The fog disappears shortly after leaving Natural Bridges, and when you get to the arboretum it is sunny, and a bit windy.  You go to the spot where the rarities were reported.  There appears to be almost nothing there with feathers; you hear only an Anna’s Hummingbird faintly ticking.  A starling flies by.  That’s about it.  You go home, and check your email for MBB notices.  Someone was at the Arboretum when you were at Natural Bridges, and had three eastern warblers and a Harris’ Sparrow.  Other birders went to Natural Bridges in the late morning when you were at the Arboretum; they found a first county record.  You put away the binoculars and notebook, and consider taking up tennis or stamp collecting.

            Some birding days are like this, but it is often possible to increase your chances of finding what you are looking for.  If you are trying to find something in a reference book, it is usually fairly futile to just start opening the book to random pages and hoping to find your subject.  A table of contents directs one to the chapters or other main divisions of the book, and an index locates the pages for more specific subjects.  Using these tools greatly enhances your ability to find the information you seek. 

            In a sense, it is possible to “read” the natural world.  Unlike the printed words in a book, birds move around (and sometimes they don’t move, which can also create problems.)  While it isn’t always possible to predict what a specific bird is going to do at a given time, it is possible to make an educated guess. 

            First there are the habitats—each species of bird eats certain things, requires a certain structure for foraging and living in general, and thus ends up in certain habitats most of the time.  If one views the different habitats as chapters in a book, then reading the “table of contents” involves recognizing the habitats and knowing the preferences of the various bird species. 

Specific details can be important here.  For some reason Rufous-crowned Sparrow comes to mind as an example (a bird that is extremely localized in Santa Cruz County, but fairly easy to find in parts of Monterey and San Benito Counties.)  If I am in an area that has this species and I want to find some, I first look for a spot that has a certain sort of habitat.  The best would be a relatively steep slope with some exposed rocks, some grass, and some not-too-dense brush (often California Sagebrush or something structurally similar.)  Then I just listen for the distinctive “dear, dear, dear” call and hope for the best.

For something more characteristic of this county, gulls are often thought of an almost complete generalists over the range of habitats they inhabit, but actually each species has at least a subset of preferred places to be.  If I am birding in winter along the rocky shore of West Cliff Drive, for example, I don’t expect to find Ring-billed Gulls there, unless I continue on to Natural Bridges, where the fairly sheltered sandy beach with a creek mouth attracts some.  I do expect Glaucous-winged Gulls, however, which in this area seem to have a preference for rocky shore, as well as the more exposed-to-the-elements coastline of the county’s north coast.  When Mew Gulls venture inland, they favor certain freshwater ponds and also feed on certain types of open fields, but they don’t usually end up at dumps, where several other gull species thrive.

Okay, all this is fine, but it doesn’t explain the scenario in the first paragraph.  Weather, of course, is a significant factor in birding.  Some weather conditions are generally better for birding—a combination of high wind and torrential rain is clearly bad, for example.  Time of day also plays a role- morning is generally best, in most cases.  Some spots, though, can be better a bit later in the morning.  Areas near the coast or with morning fog often get more active late (the moment the fog clears often produces the best activity.)  This can be especially true in fall and winter, with cooler morning and lacking the sunrise song chorus of spring.  Shaded canyons and other spots that don’t get sun until later are also places that might be better birded a little later.  On the other hand, an open area just a bit inland can be extremely active very early in the morning, and seem empty and silent just a few hours later.  I sometimes think of various birding sites as early morning and later morning spots.  The Arboretum is a place that is usually best early, for example, and Natural Bridges often gets better a little later.

It does matter, also, what kind of bird you are seeking.  Seed eating birds of open areas, for example, are almost invariably more easily found rather early, while insectivores will often get more active when it gets warmer, stirring up more insect activity.  Mid-day is usually not too great for anything, but sometimes a few flycatchers might be active, or raptors could be soaring.  Swallows, when they are around, often are on the wing through the warmer part of the day. Some shorebirds and waterbirds can be visible almost any time of the day, though even they sometimes manage to find some sort of cover to disappear into for the mid-day inactive time.

If you are only able to bird a given site at the “wrong” time, this sort of knowledge can still be helpful.  If you are there too early on a cool morning, for example, it is often possible to find a place that some sunlight is hitting, spurring bird activity.  Or if you are “too late”, and conditions have changed for the worse, sometimes in a sheltered spot one can find birds working slowly and quietly.

In essence, a variety of factors come into play if one is trying to find a certain kind of bird at a certain location (or just out birding and hoping to see anything halfway interesting).  To go back to the reference book analogy, if one thinks of a bird’s habitat preference as a “table of contents”, a combination of this with what is going on with the day’s weather, normal patterns of bird activity at a given location, and details about the bird’s feeding preferences and habits can be combined into a more specific “index” of where, when, and how you are most likely to find it.  Like all things, it doesn’t always work, but it helps.  By getting to know all these specifics, you are in a sense teaching yourself to think like a bird.  The more one can think like them, the more one can find them and know them.