My Infamous Barred Owl Observation

Well it’s official, two months into my new life as a birdwatcher I’ve been reprimanded by a bird scientist from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It was bound to happen, I just never imagined it would happen so soon.

The subject of the email read, “Your Barred Owl observation on eBird”.  The tone felt ominous and I braced myself for the worst.

* * *

At this point in the story you are riveted, as I’ve started in media res, which is Latin (I assume) for “immediate resolution”. Much like hit dramatic TV series Breaking Bad opens Season 1: Ep. 1 with Walter White naked in a desert, police sirens screaming toward him, a gun to his mouth and a finger on the trigger, I too have begun just before the end — in my case, with an owl email.

3 Months Earlier: Feb 12, 2021.
As everyone knows, Feb 12 was day one of the “Great Backyard Bird Count,” sanctioned by the Audubon society to recruit volunteers around the globe to count birds. If you read through the final results of the Great backyard bird count, they had a record breaking year with over 300,000 participants, and you will also find sentences like, “Particularly noteworthy was the Northern Wheateater, found overwintering in Ohio!” 

Before this year I’d never counted birds, and if I’m being completely honest I couldn’t have even told you the difference between a Northern Flicker and a Yellow-Bellied Sap Sucker.

Ignited by the motivation of helping bird scientists, and even more so by my lack of anything better to do, I walked into the woods and stared at birds, and that evening I made my first eBird checklist. Ebird as it turns out, is like a crack dealer who gives out free samples, luring you into the warm embrace of bird checklists – an addictive one that holds on tight and doesn’t let go, as it combines three incredibly satisfying activities:

1) Counting things
2) Listing things
3) Looking at things through binoculars

Once you’ve entered your birds into eBird you can then — at any time of day or night— open your eBird profile and gaze back fondly over your bird checklists, reminding yourself exactly where and when for example, you saw your first Limpkin.  

My bird count has now ballooned to an incredible seventy-four, and if that doesn't sound impressive, I dare you to spot (and verify) seventy-four different bird species. Because the harsh reality of birding in the Northeast is that after you get through the common birds like pigeons, crows, robins, doves, crows, grackles, boat-tailed grackles, sparrows, starlings, red-tailed hawks, red-winged black-birds, mallards, seagulls, Canadian geese, cardinals, blue jays, chickadees, and maybe a red-bellied woodpecker, your bird-count-growth-rate will fall swiftly off a cliff. So good luck climbing the ladder to 74.

I reached this great number mostly through bird tours in Central Park, which is as it turns out, one of the top birding spots in the country, as it provides a central hub for birds to layover from all over the world on their migrations, much like the Atlanta Airport for humans.

My owl observation occurred on a Birding Bob tour — is a black-market bird watching op that doesn’t take reservations and only accepts cash on arrival. Bob leads a flock of spectators through The Ramble each Sunday, our binoculars raised skyward, blocking walking paths as people attempt to squeeze by muttering things like, “Wow, sure are a lot of birdwatchers today.” As if we don’t hear them and as if we’re unaware of their judgement. As if we’re unaware that it’s technically “uncool” to bird watch. As if the way they walk through the woods with no clear objective is so much cooler, please.  

At 9:45 a.m. on May 3rd, Birding Bob aimed his laser pointer 30 feet up to where a majestically plump Barred Owl was fast asleep, zonked out on a branch directly above the walking path. Excitedly, I watched the sleeping owl as it slept, his fierce oval body expanding and contracting delightfully with each tiny owl breath — a more adorably ferocious oval I submit does not exist.

That evening I was excited to enter the Barred Owl into eBird, as it was both my first owl and my first “rare bird.” Which brings us back to the Breaking Bad naked in the desert moment, when I woke to find an owl email in my inbox.

Daniel, from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was was not pleased with my owl observation, and he informed me that I’d listed the owl in the “Strawberry Fields”, but that in my “details” I said the owl was, “sleeping in a tree near The Boathouse.” Given the boathouse is not located in Strawberry Fields, he asked me to please change the owl location to “The Ramble”, or to list the entirety of my birdwatching day as all of Central Park. It hit me like a cold bucket of ice being dumped over my head for charity.

Now, when I opened my eBird account, I didn’t know that big bird would be watching over my every move, and I certainly didn’t know bird auditors would contact me directly, demanding bird coordinates with 100% perfection. Furthermore, Strawberry Fields is a quarter mile from The Ramble; it’s not like I listed the state wrong. I was off by 400 yards.

So, I let sleeping dogs lay / lie, and went about my day (and a fun filled day it was). I decided I certainly wasn’t going to let myself be hazed into the eBird fraternity via passive aggressive owl requests.  

48 hours Daniel e-mailed a second time: “Writing to check you got my message about your Barred Owl observation.”  Wow. Do I work in a birdwatching cubicle now? Is Daniel my boss? I wanted to write, “Excuse me Daniel, but some of us have lives and places to be, and maybe we can’t all just be updating bird locations all the time as you see fit on your timeline,” but I knew this would be a lie. I am not busy and in fact I have countless hours open in my day to update owls. And now there was a growing part of me that didn’t want to fall into some eBird penalty box, in which my bird observations are no longer taken seriously. Or worse, be banned from eBird altogether, at which point I’d no longer be able to gaze back over my bird checklists.

So, I went into eBird (I’m currently ranked 2,012th best bird watcher in New York) and corrected my Barred Owl sighting to “Central Park.” It’s not like these freaking bird hotspots are user friendly and easy to find Daniel, I wanted to say. Instead I wrote, “Sorry about that. Updated,” to which he replied, “Thank you!” 

And thank the Egyptian bird god Horus, I still have my eBird.

* * *
This week Orioles are passing through New York, and I got to see not one, not two, but three Freaking. Baltimore. Freaking. Orioles. LIVE. They’re so cartoonishly bright orange and slightly bigger than I imagined, they look like living caricatures of themselves. Seeing a bird for the first time is kind of like spotting a celebrity, you’re like, “Wow, there’s Bill Murray!” and you try and get a photo before he flies off.

Seeing the orioles made me think of my friend Andrew, who’s a huge Baltimore Oriole baseball fan, so I texted him, “Just locked in three Orioles!”, to which he responded, “Nice! I picked up some new players this week in my league as well.”  

I guess my reputation as a prolific birder hasn’t preceded itself yet. Which of course, keeps me humble.