On the coldest morning of the season so far, a clutch of birders gathered at the Wingfield Pines Conservation Area on Saturday.
By 8 a.m., Dave Wilton and John Schreiber had already counted 3,000 birds.
To see the most birds in action, you have to get there before you can see them — before dawn, when birds first start scrounging — but there were 1,000 more counted in the next hour.
The conservation area is 80 acres in Upper St. Clair and South Fayette townships that was established in 2001 by the Allegheny Land Trust. The bottomlands would regularly flood, and iron oxides from mine drainage made the area an unfit habitat. But the conservation efforts diverted drainage through pipes that feed the first of a series of ponds to mitigate the pollution that flowed into Chartiers Creek.
Today, as one pond then the next filters out the iron oxides, the last pond delivers almost clean water to Chartiers Creek, which ultimately flows into the Ohio River.
And the bird life there is spectacular.
My binoculars were used by the French in World War I. Mr. Wilton declared them “not binoculars.”
I did make out the detail of a downy woodpecker not very high up in a tree, but I had to trust the birders with high-tech binoculars to point out blue birds, goldfinches and sparrows, most of which I couldn’t distinguish.
Shannon Thompson said an almost mature bald eagle has been spotted in the area “every day around 11 a.m. We come here so often, we know when certain birds will appear. It’s almost like clockwork.”
As we walked among the series of ponds, the veteran birders would stop suddenly and raise their binoculars to their eyes.
“Who’s that?” Mr. Wilton said, then answering, “American goldfinch.”
It’s like a secret code that you learn the more you watch for birds. The secret is not in seeing them but in learning their calls.
The bird count Saturday was a precursor to the annual Christmas bird count, which ornithological groups including the Audubon Society conduct to feed into the national data bank kept at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. The next big bird count is the spring migration event.
As we crunched the rough frosted grass, I thought of all the interests I have pursued temporarily, for various reasons, usually expense. But birding is one passion that grips people and carries them as if it has talons.
Mr. Wilton quit his job as an oceanographer so he could pursue his passion of birdwatching. “It’s an expensive hobby, but the greatest cost is in gasoline.”
A bird lover myself, I have been on several bird counts. One was in the predawn freeze of northeastern Oklahoma, where a group of friends heard owls without seeing them before dawn. Right at dawn, one member of our group pointed to a tree and our bird expert called out an identification that rewarded us. It was the reason we had gotten up at an ungodly hour to trek out into the woods. “That’s a juvenile golden eagle,” he said, and we all swung our binoculars upward and gasped.
On Saturday morning, as my toes froze in my hiking boots, we saw a pond loaded with ducks. They all look the same if you’re not a birder.
Mr. Wilton stopped and asked Al Fleckenstein to check out the collection.
“Can you spot the special one out there, Al?” he asked.
Mr. Fleckenstein held his binoculars to his eyes for some time before saying, “Northern pintail.”
This prompted Mr. Wilton to talk about the cross-species occurrences, of ducks that aren’t really ducks, for instance, which he called “barnyard abominations.”
Bird counting may seem like a leisure activity, but it is highly competitive. Mr. Wilton and Ms. Thompson have been state champions in the numbers and species they have counted. Many birders have life lists from which they check off the birds they have seen.
“Birds are really dinosaurs,” Mr. Wilton said. “Very advanced dinosaurs.”
Ms. Thompson was interested in noting species of sparrow at one pond. One of her two dogs ran into the reeds and flushed out a sparrow she hadn’t counted. She said the site offers the chance of counting seven sparrow species.
The kind we see in the city, the most common kind we think of as sparrows, are really an invasive form of English finch, she said.
We walked a little farther, about when I was thinking a spring count might be more comfortable for my toes, when Ms. Thompson called out, “Red belly!” to which Mr. Wilton said, “Good spot.”
I was happy to get back into the car, but this little group, which included Terry Abbott and Tanya Goldman, inspired me to leave my antique not-really binoculars on the shelf, buy a warmer pair of socks and take up the hobby in earnest.
Diana Nelson Jones: djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
First Published: December 21, 2015, 5:31 a.m.
