Like most of you, we keep a Christmas card list. Logically it would seem the older one gets, the longer the list of friends and colleagues would become, but of course the years exact their toll, the list inevitably wanes, and “doing” Christmas cards becomes a bittersweet meander down memory lane. For this year’s Christmas Column, because birding brings out the best in most of us, I’m celebrating all our birding friends, past and present, while singling out a special one whose memory lingers though she is gone.
I have presented at a few birding festivals, but I have been an actual attendee at only one, the Rio Grande Valley Texas affair in 1996. I arrived at the airport in McAllen, walked up to the rental car desk, and discovered to my shock that my driver’s license had expired. My mother had died the previous month, and in dealing with all the details a life event of that magnitude entails, I had overlooked this one important one.
Luckily there was an airport shuttle to my motel, and luckier still was that the one trip leader I knew offered to drive me to the first morning’s field headquarters. Once there I discovered, not for the first time, but all over again, the wonderful graciousness and camaraderie that is legendary in the birding community. I began chatting with Chris and Pat Pratt, total strangers who had driven to the Valley from Vermont, and as I laughingly recounted my stupidity regarding the expired license, they offered to chauffeur me around for the duration of the festival.
She, Chris, drove. He, Pat, navigated. I sat in back grinning ear to ear because it felt like I had just won the lottery. They were about our age, enjoyed birding for the same reasons and in the same way we did, and Pat was one of the best birders I’ve ever known, persistent in the search, meticulous in identifications, and witty in a dry, New England way.
Over the ensuing quarter century we connected with Chris and Pat at least every other year or so, often in south Texas at Christmas, but one year we stayed with them in Vermont where they put us on Bicknell’s Thrush, and one year they stayed with us in Arizona where we led them to Gray Vireo and Black-chinned Sparrow. Propitious conversations leading to lifelong friendships are so common in the birding community that every birder has a favorite “six degrees of Kevin Bacon story,” and never tires of its telling.
When Chris died quite unexpectedly two years ago in the spring, Deva and I were devastated, and it was difficult that year to send a Christmas card to half a couple. Last year we joined Pat and their son in southern Arizona for some Christmastime birding. This year we congratulate Pat on becoming the first person to record 150 species in each of Vermont’s fourteen counties. Though I am no longer a lister, yesterday as I addressed a Christmas card to Pat I reflected how birding has helped him recover from his loss and how birding binds people from disparate backgrounds into a celebrated kinship, one which just may play some small part in saving our planet.
Good birding. Season’s greetings.