Wings over the West: believe it or not, bird-watching is the hottest hobby in America. Here's Sunset's complete guide to its pleasures

Sunset, Nov, 2002 by Lora J. Finnegan, Jim McCausland

The statistics on migration are the stuff of the Guinness Book of Records: the Arctic tern may fly more than 11,000 miles from its breeding grounds in the Arctic to wintering areas in the Antarctic. Swallows and swifts travel nonstop, feeding in flight during their entire journey. And some songbirds lose half of their body weight during this avian endurance contest.

But some details of bird migration remain wrapped in mystery--scientists still do not fully understand how birds know when to depart on their journeys (day length appears to be one key trigger). Nor do they know exactly how birds navigate, returning to the same breeding and wintering areas year after year, despite changes caused by climate and construction.

The fall migration of waterfowl approaches its peak this month and next at many wildlife refuges in the West. (We list the best of them in "Fantastic Five: Top Western Birding Destinations.") Viewing the winter congregation of tundra swans at a refuge in the Klamath Basin of California and Oregon or on Oregon's Sauvie Island is enough to make you fall in love with birds.

A FINE MADNESS

Taking birding to extremes

For Dr. Steve Mlodinow, the annual time tally looks like this: 100 days birding, 10 days writing a birding column, more days working on a new birding book (he's already written two)--oh, and a full-time family medical practice in Everett, Washington. Somewhere along the line, the notion of birding as a hobby flew the coop.

It started when Mlodinow was a toddler--his junior high--age brothers joined a birding club, and he wanted to do what they did--and continued on and off until repeated injuries turned his interests from ultimate Frisbee back to serious birding.

Very serious birding, in fact: the kind that's taken him over most of the United States, including Alaska, to find one more rare bird, something not yet on his encyclopedic U.S. life list. (A "life list" is a record of all the birds you've ever seen in your state, country, or continent. It's theoretically possible to see about 900 species of birds in the continental United States and Canada, and Mlodinow has checked off 744 of them.)

"I'm less interested in lists these days," he told us, "because the length of your list is so much a function of money spent, your time alive, and luck. These days, I'm more focused on finding vagrant birds." It's an engaging specialty. Most birds have pretty predictable ranges: a species might breed in central Canada, for example, migrate down the East Coast, cross the Gulf, and winter in Venezuela. When you see such a bird on the Washington coast, you know that the bird's navigational system has probably gone amiss.

Mlodinow collects records of vagrants sighted by birders throughout Washington and Oregon and publishes them in a quarterly technical journal, North American Birds. But he doesn't just wait for the rare-bird reports to roll in. "Finding rare birds is way more exciting than going out to see what somebody else has spotted."

How does he do it? "It's being in the right place at the right time. I go to the dry parts of eastern Washington in May/June, then again in August/September. If you're a migrating songbird in need of rest, you look for clumps of trees, and there aren't many in the Columbia Basin. So go to a town like Vantage and glass the trees, where I've found everything from blackpoll warbler to Harris's sparrow."