Vancouver Audubon Society members have a field day

WOODLAND — The star of the show was coy. Perched inside a lonely tree in the middle of a farm field northwest of downtown Woodland, the hawk kept its costume wrapped up tight and didn’t move.

Suzanne Setterberg advised patience. “When you look away, that’s always when they fly,” she said, chuckling. “That’s when the excitement begins.”

“What I want him to do is open his wings,” Cindy McCormack said while peering through a powerful spotting scope. “I want to see the variations on his tail.”

Karen Wood was eager for more clues, too, with pen perched over notepad to jot down this celebrity’s name, once there was positive ID. “I never look back at the list,” she confessed. She just likes to build it, learning names as she goes.

“I’m not a hard-core birder. Sometimes I just like to know what I’m looking at and know what it’s doing.”

Wood’s observations have mostly been made in her own backyard, but on Feb. 11, she joined a gaggle of fellow Vancouver Audubon Society members — experts, fledglings and in between — as they searched for bird life in the flat, agricultural lowlands known as the Woodland Bottoms.

“This is my first time out in the field like this,” said Wood.

It was a regular monthly outing for the Audubons, who gathered at 8 a.m. in a nearby parking lot to review the itinerary and sort themselves into carpools. The Audubons are always happy to welcome new members, they said, but there’s no need to wait for their next field trip.

Citizen science

Today, you can take yourself on an official, sanctioned, truly scientific birding adventure simply by stepping out your back door with a pen and checklist. You can bird in comfort for as little as 15 minutes or as long as you like; you can stay home or go anywhere you think the birding might be beautiful.

This is Day 3 of the Great Backyard Bird Count, a four-day exercise in citizen science that helps Audubon and ornithologists at Cornell University track bird populations and underlying environmental trends. Last year, according to Audubon, more than 181,000 people participated, accounting for over 6,000 different species and tallying up nearly 30 million individual birds.

To get started, register at http://gbbc.birdcount.org. The project uses a data network called “eBird,” which also offers a downloadable app with all sorts of handy features for identifying the birds you observe; it lets you record your observations on your phone and upload them directly to the Great Backyard Bird Count.

Keep birding for as long as you like, today and tomorrow. Start a new checklist with each birding session, or every time you change locations. The provided checklists are “smart,” that is, tailored to your local area and the species commonly found there.

But that’s exactly what is changing, several Audubon birders pointed out. A 2015 report by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology said that many northern species are wintering far south of their usual range because of food (seed) shortages in Canadian forests. A more global 2014 Audubon report, based on citizen science, predicted that “a vast number of species will run into problems” within the next few decades because of vanishing habitat and climate change, said Eric Bjorkman, president of the Vancouver Audubons. “The report is really dire,” he said.

“Things are definitely changing,” agreed Randy Hill, who worked for several different federal agencies across a long career, and was deputy manager at the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge when he retired. Whether it’s warming northern forests or runaway development right here, he said, the threat to bird life is increasing all the time. That’s why protected areas are so important, he said.

“The human population is not going to get any smaller, anytime soon,” Hill said. “Development doesn’t go backwards.”

Lens of birding

Not surprisingly, many motivated Audubon birders are also current or retired scientists and science enthusiasts.

“A college friend first invited me, many years ago, and it just kind of fascinated me,” said trip leader Setterberg, a retired chemist for the Food and Drug Administration. “There is always something to learn. It gets me to places I’ve never been before.” Whenever she takes a trip, Setterberg said, she tries to connect with local Audubons and go on an outing. “I enjoy the world through the lens of birding,” she said.

Other birders are anything but scientists. Bjorkman is a custody officer at the Clark County Jail. Michelle Maani, a retired high school English and French teacher, and Marie Marshall, a retired fifth-grade teacher, are both fledgling shutterbugs.

“I was looking for new things to do,” Marshall said, and realized she was mighty pleased with hummingbird photos she took in her yard. “I’m a novice at photography and at birds,” she said. “I just love nature. And I like hanging around experts.”

Saturday’s experts exercised plenty of patience while staring through binoculars and scopes — at birds they’d spotted, and at places where birds might suddenly reveal themselves. “It’s always good to look for lumps in the trees,” Setterberg said.

While Woodland Bottoms’ bird society turned out a little thin that morning, the group did spy upwards of 50 different species, including plain brown mallards and stunning, multicolored wood ducks; double-breasted cormorants and sandhill cranes; scrub jays and Steller’s jays; belted kingfishers and great blue herons; American kestrels (the smallest, most common falcons in North America) and bald eagles; red-winged and Brewer’s blackbirds; red-tailed and rough-legged hawks; northern harriers and common goldeneyes; white-crowned, golden-crowned, savannah and song sparrows — and one otter.

Here’s some expert birding behavior, demonstrated by Bjorkman: Trying to get a rise out of certain small, dark, hard-to-identify birds by going “Psssh, psssh, psssh.” That’s a distress call that attracts gangs of allies to go harass an aggressive raptor, he said. When you mimic that sound to try to trick birds into flying toward you, Bjorkman said, what you’re doing is “pishing in the wind.”

Yes, he added, cracking well-worn birding jokes for newbies is also expert behavior. And by the way, those tough-to-identify little birds are generically called LBJs, or little brown jobs.

Grants and gatherings

Just as Setterberg approaches life through a birding lens, the National Audubon Society is an environmental conservation organization that approaches its whole mission through the health and well being of bird populations. There are hundreds of local chapters. “The common thread is love of nature and concern about nature,” Setterberg said.

But unlike most “podunk” Audubon chapters, Bjorkman said, the Vancouver one has some muscle. It was left property a few years ago, sold it and wound up with a tidy chunk of change that got parked at the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington. In the past few years, the Vancouver Audubons have granted a total of $54,000 to like-minded community groups, like the Chinook Trail Association and the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge.

The Vancouver Audubon Society holds a general membership meeting at 7 p.m. on the first Tuesday of every month (except July and August) at the Genealogical Society, 717 Grand Blvd., Vancouver.