Mass Big Day

People like to play games. Play seems to be a universal urge for all living things, but for humans it has been raised to an art form. Every conceivable physical and mental challenge has been turned into a recreational game which people play, from trivial pursuit to golf. Even birders like to play, and finding and enjoying birds has been turned into a kind of sport, with scores and teams and rules.

The trick is to temper the game so it does not become a competitive obsession, and I think birders have done that well. In the birding game the competition is less with others than it is with yourself. The soul of the game is the score, and we like to test ourselves by seeing how many different species we can find in a lifetime, a year, a season, or a day. We restrict ourselves to a particular place where they are found, usually a state or a continent, but it can be as small as a yard.

The ultimate test of your skill and knowledge in finding birds is the "big day," when a team or person can spend up to 24 hours in the field, and try to record as many species as possible within a state. New Jersey Audubon sponsors the "World Series of Birding," a big day event in which teams from all over the world come to the state in May to participate. Our team stays in Massachusetts, so we can test our knowledge of where birds can be found as well as our identifying skills.

My teammates and I are old and wise enough to start our day at 3:30 in the morning rather than midnight, and we end at nightfall somewhere on the coast, where we enjoy a celebratory dinner. This year we tried two big days, because the score for our first one did not meet our standards. Our luck was no better the second time.

The first time, after we heard our third species of owl, we stood before dawn on the edge of a marsh in Granville, listening for the American bittern. We plan our route based on where we had found each target species in the course of our individual excursions over the previous few weeks. The bittern is rare and secretive, but one had been present here less than a week before. This day he remained silent and hidden in the marsh.

On our second try we visited another marsh in Blandford, and this time we played a tape recording of the bittern's call. This is a standard and almost always harmless way to bring a bird into view. One has to be careful and sparing with this method, because, for the bird, the mating call is a matter of life and death, not a game.

The player emitted the call of the bittern, and within seconds a large brown bird rose from the middle of the marsh and came toward us, landing in plain sight two hundred feet away in the shorter grasses. There he rose to his full three feet of height, aiming his frog catching bill to the sky, then crouched low and started to gulp in air to inflate his huge throat sack.

After three preliminary thunks, he brought forth the full sound, "thunk-a-chunk, thunk-a-chunk, thunk-a-chunk." With each "chunk" the throat deflated and the head snapped up with a mighty motion. We stood in awe for many minutes, savoring the sound and sight as he repeated it several times. The route and the schedule were forgotten for a time, but eventually we went on to the next stop.

By the end of the day we were standing on the edge of Nauset Marsh in Orleans on Cape Cod. The rain was pelting down and the sandpipers were barely visible through the wet binoculars. We had persevered to the bitter end, and it was time to dine and dry out. At the table the four of us drank a toast to our team, tested and not found wanting. The memory of an adventurous day in the field is always sweet. Nevertheless we had a name for our team, the "Bittern Enders."