BEYOND
PIGEONS
Bird watching catches
on in the urban jungle
by Susan M. Brackney
photography by Brian Smith
O
kay, so he was dead. But he was also the most stunning wild bird I’d ever seen—probably ever would
see. I’d been walking the city alleys of Bloomington,
Indiana, when I nearly stepped on a lovely-but-lifeless
Indigo Bunting. I recall lightly pinching his paper-thin
body between my thumb and index finger. With the smallest movement
of my wrist I could make his electric blue head flop from one side to the
other. His snapped neck made sense. After all, the neotropical migrant
navigates with the stars. Flying at night, he probably never noticed that
eight-story brick building smack in the middle of the city’s buzzing
downtown—until he smacked into it himself, of course.
True, mine was not exactly the sort of encounter most birders relish,
but it served as my first glimpse of a relatively new pastime—urban
birding. Sound like an oxymoron? Plenty of modern-day birders are
happy to report it’s not. While traditional birders go the distance to see
their quarry in preferred habitats, their urban counterparts are happy
to stay home, instead scanning their own concrete-covered environs
for avian treasure. Greg Links, an avid birder and trustee at large for
the Toledo Naturalists’ Association, does a little of both. Sometimes
he steals out on his lunch hour to look for migrants passing through
downtown in the spring and fall. “It’s a quirky little game,” he says.
What kind of goody can we turn up in the middle of all of this?”
During one fall field trip Links and a group of urban birders found
58 species in an afternoon. “Those birds were all in downtown To-
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