Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

From the time I was three or four years old, I yearned to be a real, official birdwatcher. My first role model was a TV character named Pamela Livingtone on The Bob Cummings Show, portrayed by Nancy Kulp. She went on to play a similar role, Miss Jane Hathaway, on The Beverly Hillbillies. Paul Henning created and produced both series and wrote many of the episodes, and in both sitcoms, he wrote her character as a stereotypically ridiculous spinster, her being a birdwatcher a cliché. But that went entirely over my head—I adored her. She was kind and gentle, and she really seemed to know how to find and identify birds. I wanted to be just like her.

Nancy Kulp’s characters were often shown wearing binoculars, so I of course yearned to have those, but my mother said TV shows were made up, and that the only people in real life who were allowed to have binoculars were soldiers, spies, and peeping toms. I didn’t know any soldiers, spies, or peeping toms, and sure enough, neither did I know anyone with binoculars.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a field guide, so even if I’d had binoculars, I wouldn’t have had a clue how to find or identify birds. When, at Russ’s suggestion, his parents give me a field guide and binoculars for Christmas in 1974, that wasn’t simply life-changing—it turned my universe upside down. Or, really, it turned my universe right-side up.

That first year I birded mostly in Lansing, Michigan where we lived, with short visits to Chicago to see our families and northern Wisconsin to help Russ’s parents fix up the house where they would retire. Barely a month after I started birding, I got to spend a few days at a naturalists’ convention in Virginia, but we were so busy from morning till night on that trip that I added just a single species, the White-throated Sparrow. I got good looks a few times, but this was spring migration and they were singing so persistently that I could hear that sweet Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody even through the open windows indoors. People pointed out what were my first Turkey Vultures. I didn’t count them on my life list because they were so high up that I wasn’t sure I could have figured them out on my own, but they were lovely to see.

The next spring, I went on a couple of class-related field trips to Point Pelee in Ontario, where I added 8 more lifers. And just before we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, in June 1976, Russ had a meeting in Savannah, Georgia, his mileage and a good part of our lodging paid for, where I got to see some shockingly cool birds. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but the meeting hotel was not very far from the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge. That sounded like a good place so I went to the refuge headquarters, got a checklist, and asked the person at the desk where some good spots might be. Voilà! On that short trip I added 26 new species, bringing my life list to 214. I saw firsthand that travel was the key to seeing lots of new birds in a short time.

Russ and I were dirt poor in those days, but not in any dire sense. Our monthly income barely covered food, rent, and utilities, my tuition (Russ’s was covered by fellowships and research assistantships), required books, and other absolute necessities. Our Pinto averaged about 25 miles per gallon, meaning we could travel the 500 mile round trip to Chicago on about 20 gallons of gas which, at the time, cost about a quarter a gallon or $5.00 for the round trip. That was a lot for us, but we could work three family trips into our annual budget, for Christmas, spring break, and before the school year started. Again, we were hardly impoverished—we never went to bed hungry, always had a roof over our head, and were never in debt. As Mary Poppins said, “Enough is as good as a feast.”

Most travel was out of the question unless some of our expenses were paid by the university, which only happened when Russ was presenting at a meeting. But even though I was as acquisitive and hungry to see new birds as most avid birders, and even though I realized that the more places I traveled to, the more birds I’d see, I was virtually always perfectly contented at home with Russ, taking wonderful classes at Michigan State and seeing plenty of new birds along with the growing number of birds I had become familiar with. Of the 214 species I’d seen by the time we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, 174 species were seen in Michigan, 145 of them lifers. And as fun as it was seeing those lifers, what made me happy was seeing ANY birds. And as it turned out, birds were everywhere I looked. Who knew?

I’d spent 23 years not having a clue about field guides and binoculars, and suddenly, in just 15 months I’d seen 214 different birds. Going from a lifetime of yearning to such bountiful riches was an unexpected and joyful sea change in my life. I felt richer than Miss Jane Hathaway herself—I had all the joys of birding, plus my own personal Jethro Clampett loved me back! Was there ever a happier or, yes, a richer person on the planet?