Tehama - The Magazine - Red Bluff Daily News
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/66310
would stand out in the sea of green, but sud- denly the green seems to take on a yellowish hue and the bird seems invisible. The brain reg- isters that the bird is there, because it was seen flying into a branch. When it takes several seconds to find the location of a bird you know is there, it begs the question of what else is in there that you just aren't seeing. Birders Talk, but not Too Much Bald Eagles are commonly seen along the river. Below, a Magpie. ably because you can spend a lot of time pointing into trees and books are cumbersome. Here's what I loved the most about the peo- ple I met on the bird walk: they know how to be silent. Listening is an important aspect of dis- covering birds. You learn to identify birds by their sounds and you learn to hone your lis- tening skills to deter- mine direction from which sounds emanate. So you don't have much Also in the low tech crowd were those of us with binoculars and cameras that were helpful, but not nice enough to be too heavy to carry. My own binoculars were borrowed from my mom and were the free-with-purchase prize that came with the larger set I bought her for Christmas. One of the lenses was prone to fall out, leaving me vacillating between low-tech and no-tech throughout the walk. And wishing I'd gone for higher quality with mom's gift. In the high tech crew were the woman with the Audubon app on her iPhone that demonstrated bird sounds and the couple with the high powered scope on a tri-pod. The latter was cum- bersome, yes, but oh so appreciated when we came across the Great Horned Owls. There was no hierarchy in the crowd. People were happy to share when another could benefit and no one judged the gear, or lack of, of others. Seeing the Forest for the Birds Oddly enough, focusing in on birds allowed me to pay atten- tion to other aspects of my environment in a way that I don't usually experience when simply going for a walk. As someone prone to getting lost in her own thoughts, I often find myself daydreaming on nature walks rather than really paying attention to my surroundings. Looking for birds focused me enough to look high and low and to track a bird in flight. When one would land, someone might say, "It's on that dead branch on the right of the big oak tree." At which point it would register that I was looking at an oak tree. With a dead branch. As the walk went on, I started to really pay attention to the diversity of flora as well as fauna. It was also illuminating to absorb the fact that we can look at a tree that is teeming with bird life and have no idea that the birds are there. A yellow warbler can appear brilliant when perched on a dead brown branch. Then it can disappear into a canopy of brilliant green oak leaves. It makes sense that the bird May, 2012, Tehama - the Magazine 13