Superbowl of Birding

It’s late January at the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary when I hear Abby Raimondi, a high school student, say, “This is a life bird for me.”

The salt blown from the ocean seems suspended in the cold air as the friable ground cracks audibly underfoot. Throughout our day on the North Shore, I’ve watched Abby shed her reticent demeanor as her enthusiasm has gotten hold of her.

She is now peering through a telescope at a snowy owl some 400 yards off in the distance, sitting on the frozen ground as if having landed for a photo-op. “A life bird mean I hadn’t seen it before,” Abby helpfully informs me.

This is the Superbowl of Birding – with Superbowl rendered as one word, lest you confuse it with that other Super Bowl – an annual event of 14 years standing that takes place in Newburyport around this time each year, with a passel of teams also making inroads into Cape Ann and southern New Hampshire.

The “competition” – let’s call it a light competition – is organized by Mass Audubon’s Joppa Flats Education Center, “which is nestled conveniently in a crook along the Ipswich River. The river serves as a fluvial backyard where a number of the birds we are trying to spot will put in an appearance throughout the day.

Here’s how it works. You assemble a team; you get some binoculars, maybe a good telescope if you’re a passionate birder; you gather up the coffee and hot chocolate; and you take to the sticks, the marshes, the edges of the highway, and you spot all of the birds that you can, with each person in the group getting a chance to take a gander at the latest avian delight. Rarer birds are worth up to five points – why, hello, Eurasian wigeon – while that common house sparrow will net you a single point.

The groups, as you might imagine, revel in their names. Birders are a passionate lot, which you’re well aware of if you’re a birder or know one. And it’s not uncommon for the devoted birder to hop in his or her car and drive for several hundred miles to spot a rare bird that has been sighted in a region in which it is rarely seen.

There is a range of zealotry at the Superbowl. Some people get pretty hardcore, some are decades-long experts, and others are on the younger side, making their first bird-spotting forays with life birds galore. The very term itself is pleasing; the idea that a marvelous creature of the sky can imbue a life force in a person firmly rooted on the ground is one that quickens my own step across these marshes as I try to keep up with the group.

Among the groups are: Return of the Great Auks, Team Tanager, Twitchers in the Rye, and The Unflappables. Birders like puns. This group of “the kids” is called the Ipswich River Robins, which is somewhat ironic, as the common robin – good old Mr. Redbreast, whom you will likely have seen on any given day if you’ve spent 15 minutes outside – has eluded us thus far… but not the snowy owl.

Brendan Cramphorn, the lone male amongst the high school students, is the closets we have to a veteran of this scene. He is appropriately hawk-eyed, with a knack for saying, “Look!” and pointing at a speck then manifests itself, thanks to a telescope, as a wooden duck. “We still need a tree sparrow,” he says, with the air of someone determined to both get things done and have a blast doing it. “You’d think we would have seen one by now.” He scratches the side of his face, slowly, presumably with tree sparrow images manifesting in his head.

Meanwhile, we all take a second look at the snowy owl. I saw one here the year before, but even the second time my thoughts dance a little collective jig, when I looked through the scope to see this dot of white, with its sharpened, triangle of a beak, sitting on that salt-topped frozen earth 400 yards off in the distance. It is a model of utter New England placidity, and yet, like these sea and wind-lashed parts themselves, is capable of immediate and galvanic power.

“I can’t believe we can see him that far off when he’s on the ground,” Abby marvels aloud, echoing my own incredulity, which has since made way for amazement. “Well, he’s probably been sitting there for a while, given all of the other teams that have seen him,” Brendan wisely reasons. That’s how it works – you’re in competition, but teams tip each other off: “There’s a snowy at the River Wildlife Sanctuary; set your scope near the big bay of cedars.”

So often in our world today we feel a need to excuse our passions, especially if they’re not common ones, and this is something that the Superbowl mitigates against. In the woods, with a group or by yourself, reality has a way of walking up to you and making itself comfortable and known, and I’d wager that if you’re a birder, you’re probably more secure in who and what you are than someone who perpetually stares at a phone. Being with birds is a way of being with yourself.

I’m thinking about that as I watch one of the girls, Isabel Rasmussen, look through binoculars later in the day, past the Newburyport downtown center, at what seems to be a disused factory back off in the distance. We are hoping to see eagles.

Isabel has refused to wear a jacket. The rest of us are crowding in tight circles, huddling for protection from the buffeting wind. I wonder if this is high school defiance (hey, we’ve all been there) but she seems to be more of a kid with a capacity for wonder and with one less layer—literally—between herself and nature, with some inner vim serving as the requisite warming fire.

“Aren’t you very cold?” I ask. She stares at me as if I’ve just inquired if the world is flat. “No, I’m not cold. Are you?”

I am not as hardy as this young woman. There is a pizza party awaiting us, as a post-event wrap-up, and a few of my thoughts have turned to what it would feel like to again be inside, with promissory “notes to self” written in my mind to spot more birds come spring.

There is no way not to smile each time the good Mr. Cramphorn offers a jacket to Isabel, who always politely refuses.

“We’re probably not going to win,” Isabel concedes. Everyone laughs in a way that reminds me of fluttered bird calls. We are not here to win. Not like that, clearly. But it occurs to me that the tally of new experiences, new memories, and what might be new paths to travel down and explore in life, requires a tabulation system far beyond a point system consisting of  the numbers of one and six.

“No eagles,” Brendan concludes, as our day comes to a dusk-driven close. We all look into an opalescent sky riven by the flight paths of harriers, as a blue jay, that roué of the lower canopy, squawks his latest opinions of the day.

But we’ve already counted those earlier in the day, and we’ve counted a number of other things besides.

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