When we meet up again after a day off downroute I often get asked by the crew I’m working with if I “saw anything I hadn’t seen before” - by which they invariably mean a new species. It’s nice that people are polite enough to ask rather than just dismiss me as an eccentric of some sort - but I do get a little frustrated that the idea that all us birders are after is seeing a new species has become so rooted. I guess that the fact that ‘birding’ and ‘twitching’ is used synonymously by the media (who usually prefer using superficially-understood jargon rather than attempting to understand a subject properly) doesn’t help. Maybe the breathless way we birders (and I include myself of course) sometimes write reports, highlighting additions to our list but downplaying some of the equally exciting ‘birding moments’ that make up a day in the field, is to blame as well. Whatever the reason, I want to redress the balance a little and write briefly about an individual of a species I’ve seen many times before, but which gave me and two companions (Jack Cole and Ed Frost) a ‘birding moment’ I don’t think I’ll ever forget: the male Townsend’s Warbler in the photos below.

Townsend’s Warblers, as many birders will know, are stunningly-plumaged wood-warblers which breed in mature coniferous and mixed forests throughout central Alaska to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, and to the mountains of western Montana, the Idaho panhandle, and northeast Oregon. After breeding many Townsend’s head for the forests of Central America, while some spend the winter further north - especially under the sunny skies of California where this particular bird was found. On the breeding grounds, as they rush around the canopies of tall pines, these little gems can be quite hard to see well, but in the winter they’re found at lower elevations and in much less sky-grazing vegetation: in eucalypts, bushes, and shrubs, and even hopping along the soil in garden borders. However, only occasionally do they show so superbly and perfectly as this individual.

For about ten minutes this tiny, almost weightless warbler - a dazzling mix of inky black and liquid amber, of dark streaks and bright-white bars, its back a green the colour of a mossy forest and its belly washed with the yellow of a primrose - carefully picked off tiny ants from a few sprays and twigs of a youthful tree at eye-level just a few short feet away. It was mesmerising to be so close, and whether it didn’t see us, or just didn’t see us a threat, it seemed totally unconcerned by the presence of three birders pointing cameras at it and uttering low murmurs of “How gorgeous is THAT then?” every few seconds.

While I was watching, almost holding my breath so I didn’t scare it off, I felt absurdly lucky that we had just happened to be in the right spot at the right time, that this beautiful bird had chosen to come to a bush right next to us just as we were walking past. However, in the back of my mind I was being niggled by a small concern: why did it allow such intimate views? Surely it was too dangerous for a small bird to be this close to us. And why did being so close seem somehow more unsettling to me than to the bird?

I’m almost pathologically inclined to avoid anthropomorphism wherever possible, and I don’t believe for one second that this particular Townsend’s ‘trusted’ us or was especially ‘relaxed’ or ‘unconcerned’. Thinking about it later, though, seeing this bird so well caused me to reflect much more on impact and on the historical relationships between humans and the wildlife that surrounds us than on what defines ‘trust’. I mean, why SHOULDN’T a Townsend’s Warbler come so close to three humans? For tens of thousands of years there would have been interactions like this going on all the time. The forests would have been full of birds, and almost empty of people - the balance of survival would have been in favour of the individual warbler. It was only relatively recently that we armed ourselves and began slaughtering, shooting, and clearing the forests of birds in monumentally selfish and destructive ways. We shouldn’t have been interpreted as a threat because we were doing nothing threatening.

This next paragraph will probably seem overly melodramatic, but I think the rather sad fact is that I’ve started to believe that birds and humans can’t really live together without the birds having to be continually on their guard. That we impact too heavily on the environment and, where we interact, we cause too much disturbance to them for a sense of “naturalness” to exist anymore. Even when I come across a bird that is behaving normally, that is apparently unaffected by my being there, I react by worrying that by being approachable it is putting itself in danger, that when I’ve left if someone wanted to they could so easily reach out and take its life. I hope that says more about my own cynical state of mind than any universal reality. What it perhaps boils down to is that I’ve lost my trust and faith in people more than some birds seem to have done…

Did I see anything new this time round, then? “No, but I saw one of the most beautiful birds in North America behaving normally, and it really affected me”, would have been the honest reply. But an answer like that would have required far more explanation than I guessed my colleagues actually wanted, so I just smiled instead, and said I’d had a great time and seen some great birds, but, no, no new ones.

Perhaps the real reason why non-birders think us birders are only interested in new birds is that we don’t always take the time to explain our passion properly, or that we think some things are just too difficult to articulate to an audience that experience tells us isn’t really interested anyway? That you “just had to be there” to really understand, to have years of birding under your belt to recognise a moment that will stay with you forever, that to coalesce years of thinking into one quick sentence when you’re busy in a tube at 39000′ isn’t possible…Perhaps, too, I missed an opportunity to explain my feelings about the world we live in, but as I struggle to put such complex thoughts into words AND I still had eight hours of flying time to get through, smiling and nodding may have been the wisest cause of action anyway: I really wouldn’t want my fellow crew to get the impression that I’m just a miserable bloke with a horribly jaundiced world-view (which is something else for me to think about I guess…)