Technology and social media have changed birding, for better and worse. When I was a child, birders exchanged information orally if they happened to run into one another on the trail. Unexpected vagrant birds were observed by only a few friends before they continued on their way.
In my teens, the rare bird hotline was invented, whereby observations were reported via telephone to a central source, which made a recorded message available to the whole city each week. By the time I got through the busy signals on Wednesday morning, most of the rare birds had departed.
The advent of eBird alerts and birding Facebook pages has democratized birding so thousands of birders learn about each new sighting within hours. The elites can still maintain some advantage with informal texting networks, but within hours everyone who is interested can get the exact location and view cell phone photos of any lost migrant. This can be a problem when birds show up on private property where visitors are not welcome, but the same social media is used to broadcast the acceptable rules for access and to shame transgressors.
I used these new tools to my advantage earlier this month with some students as we embarked on a wild goose chase. First stop: the cornfield behind a Princeton, N.J. nursing home, where a Barnacle Goose from Greenland had been reported regularly on eBird. No luck, and within minutes a bald eagle had scared off the thousands of Canada geese there. Undaunted, we followed our cell phones to Lyons, N.J., where an even rarer pink-footed goose, also from Greenland, had been reported on the lawn of the VA Hospital. There it was in all its pink-legged, bicolored-beak splendor, a really beautiful bird still looking dazed after a misguided journey across the Atlantic. As we watched, three other teams of birders arrived, having followed the same digital trail to this needle in a haystack.
Our main quarry lay ahead. For only the second time ever, a graylag goose had been reported in the continental US, this time in Providence, R.I. A native of Iceland, this goose is the progenitor of domestic farm geese, but the wild form lacks the obese belly and has a smaller beak. Interstate 95 was very forgiving that evening as we sped through Connecticut, regularly checking eBird and several listserves for updates on the graylag and our missing barnacle goose.
We spotted the graylag at dawn, exactly where it had been all week, in a tidal pool near a golf course with large flock of migratory Canada geese. It refused to pull its head out from under its wing for what felt like an eternity, preventing a satisfactory look. Perhaps excited by what felt like a blast of a wind directly from Iceland, it finally woke up and flew around calling and looking for its mates. After some high fives we migrated south.
We tried another location in New Jersey where a barnacle goose had been eBirded the afternoon before, at a corporate headquarters pond. Failing to find any geese there, we used Google maps to locate the nearest lake, and as dusk fell on the second day of our epic chase we spied a pair of these extraordinarily beautiful European geese. Within minutes everyone on eBird knew about the new pair of barnacle geese and that mill pond has been getting regular visits from birders ever since.
Cristol teaches in the Biology Department at the College of William and Mary. Email him at dacris@wm.edu. To discover local birding opportunities visit williamsburgbirdclub.org.
