Birding etiquette breaches

The guy was poaching.

Two of us are standing in a little patch of swampy woods on Duluth's Park Point, binoculars focused on a couple of the few warblers we've seen this late-May day, when he arrives.

Khaki pants and white golf shirt, he walks right into our field of view. He scans the tree we're working, just enough movement to scatter our birds. Then, without word or look in our direction, he wanders off.

You wouldn't anchor your fishing boat next to mine and cast into the patch of lily pads I was fishing, would you? No one with a sense of the etiquette attached to most leisure pastimes would hit a golf ball into the foursome ahead of them.

What you do is ask. May I join you? May we play through? May we walk on ahead along this birding trail? It's just being polite.

Bozo reminded me of two past birding experiences that define extremes of good and lousy birding behavior. Sometimes we do the strangest or most unexpected things.

Several years ago in Alaska, four friends and I were scattered over several hundred acres of tundra. Our guide, Paul, noticed a knot of men some distance away, focused tightly in the same direction. There had to be a reason.

I reached the knot of men first, dripping wet and winded. Glasses fogged, I spoke through a torrent of sweat: Where are the bullfinches? The men, four clients and a guide, began walking away. One of them made a vague gesture behind his shoulder, and said, "Over there."

Over there! Over there? I suppressed road-less rage to find the birds. Eventually, all of us saw them.

The problem? We hadn't paid that guide, plus, the men were competitive birders. We don't see the bullfinches, score one for them. As if it mattered.

A few years later, in Florida, four of us were hiking a state park trail, hoping to find a Mangrove cuckoo. We met another guide and his customers.

"Are you looking for anything special?" he asked.

'Here," he said, "let me play my tape." Taped calls of birds often stimulate them to appear.

Ten seconds later, the bird peered down at us from a small mangrove tree.

The guide then helped us find a black-whiskered vireo, another bird on our wish list. He didn't have to do any of this, but he did. I think he took as much pleasure in sharing as we did in seeing.

And that's the way it's supposed to work. Birding is supposed to be fun. You can always be a bozo at home.

The man who was birding with me when we were poached in the Park Point woods needed only his final paper to complete work on a doctorate in anthropology. I suggested that the topic "social interactions among (mostly) male amateur birdwatchers in an outdoor setting" was low fruit on the thesis tree.