First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
Illustration by Juliana Neufeld
I have Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson to thank for my love of birding.
The three of them acted together in The Big Year, a 2011 comedy drama that flew surprisingly under the radar considering the star power attached. Martin, Black and Wilson are cast as three obsessive birders, all competing to see the highest number of species in a calendar year in North America.
I saw the film in high school and was immediately intrigued by how they identified birds from just a glance or a few notes of birdsong. I was always a kid who liked being outside, having spent a lot of time hiking and camping while growing up. I had a basic interest in birds and could tell a cardinal from a chickadee, a red-tailed hawk from a turkey vulture. But this was something entirely different – almost a gamification of birding.
My mom and two aunts also watched the movie, and we began our own “big year,” communicating our sightings through a private Facebook group, and keeping a shared Excel sheet to track our individual bird counts.
Over the next year, I learned more about birds than I ever knew there was to learn. Ontario has hundreds of species, many of which were viewable on a short walk from my house. Others required travelling farther to see. I grew up in Mississauga and started frequenting the parks along the lakeshore, where I found grebes, loons and diving ducks.
First Person: In search of the scarlet tanager: birding has brought me closer to Dad
My family and I often birded together, spending days or entire weekends in nature with our binoculars (or “bins,” as birders call them) in hand. We travelled to Point Pelee National Park and Rondeau Provincial Park to see the spring influx of warblers – a group of brightly coloured birds in yellows, blues and reds that weigh half an ounce and fly back from Central America each year. One of my aunts, who lives near Algonquin Provincial Park, took us there in search of chestnut-backed chickadees, the elusive spruce grouse, and Canada jays, who associate people with food and will swoop down if you call for them.
By the end of the year, we had so much fun that we decided to do it again. Our lists grew with our knowledge, and this time around we were able to identify many birds by sight, and even some by sound. We joined Discord groups and discovered birding communities across the province, mostly made up of retirees and passionate science students. We knew where to go – or who to ask – to find certain birds. It’s like realizing a scavenger hunt has been sitting there waiting for you, and there’s hundreds of dazzling clues to be found in the forest.
Birding opens the door to the diversity that exists in the natural world. Most of these birds are fundamentally the same, made up of hollow bones, wings and talons. And yet, they’ve found seemingly endless ways to survive through specialized wings, migration routes and feeding patterns.
There are birds that eat tiny crustaceans and others that feast on tree sap. Burrowing owls live underground in holes dug by other animals, while vireos weave bark fibres and grass to build orb-shaped nests. The loggerhead shrike, a songbird, will hunt small birds and mammals and skewer its prey on barbed wire (or anything pointy, really). The red knot, a bird only a little bigger than a robin, flies up to 30,000 kilometres each year during its two trips from South America where it winters, to the Canadian Arctic where they nest and hatch their chicks.
First Person: Am I still a birdwatcher if I don’t care about what they are called?
At the end of The Big Year, Martin and Black’s characters lose to Wilson, whose ruthless strategies ultimately lead him to victory. He’s willing to do anything to be the best birder – including abandoning his wife during fertility treatments to look for a snowy owl – and this eventually costs him his marriage. Martin and Black, meanwhile, are pulled away from their birding journeys by the occasional sacrifices required for the people you care about. Martin’s character takes a few days off to meet a new grandbaby, and Black does the same to care for his aging father.
As for me, nearly a decade after I first saw the movie, I’m no longer in what I consider my “big year” era. I don’t keep rigorous lists or fixate on my yearly total the way I did in my first few years of birding.
Much like Jack Black at the end of the film, I still go birding through forests, wetlands and urban parks on the weekends. More often than not, I keep a pair of binoculars in my car just in case I spot something spectacular. But I don’t worry so much about counting them any more.
Instead, I focus on the aspects of birding that I truly love: the way it pushes me to get outdoors more, travel to gorgeous parts of Ontario I wouldn’t normally see, and remember that patience reaps rewards. Most of all, I love the optimism inherent in birding. Beauty is all around us, and you never know what you might find unless you pick up a pair of binoculars and look.
Caelan Beard lives in Brantford, Ont.
