Personal Account
From 1969 to 1983, I came to the Fresh Pond Reservation 10 minutes from my house in Cambridge, Massachusetts only as a lister, only in Fall, and only to see the Canvasback, Redhead and other Aythya species for which our city reservoir is well known. Since then, I've recorded 220 species of birds here, including 38 species of waterfowl in the Fall.
In l984 I started counting waterfowl systematically from October through December, thinking to submit regular Monday and Friday telephone reports to The Voice of Audubon for Eastern Massachusetts and regular monthly written reports to Bird Observer of Eastern Massachusetts, then in its fourth year.
I still count ducks and still submit those reports in Fall, now over the Internet. But after more than a thousand field trips around this economically, socially and biologically complex place, I now come here during the Fall waterfowl migration to enjoy a two-month display of wildlife art. I come here during the Spring breeding season to study song and dance at a two-month festival of performing art. Importantly, I also come here year-round both expecting and expected to participate in the sometimes contentious life of a small town--contributing to its benefit, not simply passing through.
If you come here, come prepared to practice your citizenship, not simply to look and listen, for Fresh Pond is both a biological community of which the birds form a very important part and a human community to which birders belong only as members of a minority special interest group. How you behave here publicly is ultimately far more important than what you see and hear privately, however rare or aesthetically wondrous. Expect to be asked questions. Expect to respond graciously.
If you want a role model, find the lady disguised as Smokey the Bear. She is Jean Rogers, an experienced interpreter and Chief Ranger for the Fresh Pond Reservation. She'll soon have you talking about birds to the golfers, joggers, runners, bicyclists, dog owners, and a great many people who come here just to walk. She will probably also try to recruit you to help out on International Migratory Bird Day, celebrated on Saturday, May 10 this year, and our own International Migratory Waterfowl Day, to be celebrated on Sunday, November 2 this year. She may also introduce you to some of your Fresh Pond neighbors.
You shouldn't have too much trouble helping people identify a bird they've just seen or heard, as long as their description is not too vague, for it is probably one of our 35 breeding species.
You can still come here as I did originally, just to look for birds rather than to talk to people. Perhaps your thinking will change. Mine changed because of a chance encounter in Spring 1986.
I began a systematic Spring census of Fresh Pond in l986 having had previous success finding rare birds there, the first a juvenile female Tufted Duck on December 4, 1984 and the second a LeConte's Sparrow on October 21, 1985. Late in May I encountered a teacher showing birds to schoolchildren at Black's Nook, a small, separate body of water along Concord Avenue at the northwest corner of the reservoir. I asked her whether she might like help from a volunteer, noting that I'd led many field trips for adults. A science teacher, Kathy told me that Cambridge had long been taking public schoolchildren to Fresh Pond in Spring. She also told me that Chris, a classroom teacher at the nearby Tobin School, on the other side of Fresh Pond Parkway, was especially interested in wildlife and wanted to make intensive educational use of the Reservation.
At our first meeting in June, Chris and I decided to begin with a program on migratory ducks in the Fall and continue with a program on neo-tropical migrant breeding birds in Spring. That decision led directly to the October 21, 1986 discovery of a third and far more impressive rarity, a vagrant thrush and to intense continuing involvment with Green Heron, Tree Swallow, Pine Warbler, Yellow Warbler, Baltimore Oriole, Eastern Kingbird and Warbling Vireo in Spring.
The programs Chris and I developed became the basis for migratory bird workshops I continue to offer for fifth-grade children in the Cambridge Public Schools and for ninth-grade students at St. Clement High School in nearby Somerville, both now centered on an international educational exchange with Econciencia, a Mexican environmental education organization headquartered three hours south of Cancun on the Yucatan Peninsula, home to many of the species that breed at Fresh Pond in Spring.
In turn, those workshops have become the basis for adult education programs I offer year-round through the Massachusetts Audubon Society's semi-monthly magazine, Sanctuary. In addition, doing those workshops for children at Fresh Pond has shown me how very good a place it is for learning birds. You can see them easily. You can come to know them not only as species but also as individuals because you can visit them daily where they've taken up residence, and because you can learn to identify them through subtle differences in appearance and in song.
|
JHB for JR, MP, RW, SZ, RP, LL, MS, JC, SP, EM, MP et mult. alt. A writer and consultant, Jim Barton is also co-author of Thinking on Paper and Thinking Together, both published by William Morrow. He leads instructional bird trips for the Boston Program Office of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and for the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Conservation Commission. He can be reached at redwing1986@mediaone.net and at 617/354-7435. |
|
|