Ashley Procum
October 2, 2013
Johanna Pedersen;
final draft
LEAD ONE: Johanna
Pedersen, age 21, has the same hobby as your grandparents.
LEAD TWO:
“Bird” is now a noun and a verb. “Haven’t you heard that the bird is the word?”
LEAD THREE:
Johanna Pedersen crouches in silence by a large Oak tree in College Woods at
the University of New Hampshire. An instrument not entirely dissimilar to that
of a pirate spyglass is held up to her right eye. Her left is closed. She has
transfixed her gaze up into the treetops with the instrument, looking through
it with vigilance. “I see him,” she says, pointing.
Johanna
is a 21-year old practicing the same hobby as many 60-year-olds.
The act of birding is simply the observation and
education of birds. Like Darwin’s finches, Pedersen found her niche here at the
University of New Hampshire when she started the UNH Birding Club just last
year. The club was designed to bring together students interested in learning
about birds.
Though the club
currently has only 18 active members, there are over 50 people in the UNH
Birding Club Facebook group. “It shows there’s an interest in the community,”
Pedersen says, regarding the relationship between the Facebook page and the
members of the club. She believes the differentiating numbers are due to a lack
of information. “People think you need a lot of experience to go out and bird,
and you don’t,” she says. “I don’t know everything, I can flat out say that.
Most of the people I know don’t know everything, either. It’s good to have that
one token person that knows what they’re doing, but it’s basically for fun.”
Still, the sport
frequently levies up some stereotypes of the “typical” birders, such as aged
men and women with binoculars and peppered hair follicles. So why does this
sport peak such an interest in a community of 20-something-year-olds?
Ian Hancock, a
friend of Pedersen, describes her as the exact opposite of what one would
describe as a stereotypical birder. “She’s really tall,” he says. “Five-eleven,
I think. And rail thin. She’s definitely not an old woman.” Hancock mentions
that he and Pedersen often skate around campus on their longboards together, a
sport not many are capable of.
Pedersen mentions
that birding is a lot more active than the typical “stare at feeder, check off
‘Cardinal’ box, stay very still” method that many presume are the only
movements made while the sport is in practice. “If you want to be a field
biologist you’re bush-whacking to bumblefuck nowhere to set up this net to
catch this rare bird,” Pedersen says. “Actually, no birder I know is fat. All
of them are relatively young and very fit people because they’re running around
in the field.” She enjoys the active hunt for these birds.
The Birding Club
generally goes out into College Woods and tracks down birds that way. Next to
the Bluejays and Chickadees (the regulars), the group will play recorded bird
calls out in the field via cell phones with downloadable apps. “You get the
Chickadees called in and stuff like that and they’re always like, ‘What’re you doin’
here? Whatcha doing?,’” says Pedersen.
And surprises
always lurk in the sport of birding. A lot of times, the recorded bird sounds
turn out to be warning calls to bird species. “A bunch of them will come in and
be like ‘whatcha doing in our terf?’ and we’re just like, ‘we’re gonna get
killed by 50 Chickadees right now,’” says Pedersen with excitement.
Binoculars and
spotting scopes, (“telescopes for short-range”) are the primary visual
instruments of choice for most birders, and can range anywhere from under $50
to well over $1,000 depending on brand and quality. But, after the initial
purchase of all the gear, birding is a free activity. “Binoculars are bank,” she says. “Your optics are your
big thing; you pay good money for good optics, but afterward the sport is
completely free.” A one-time investment can lead to a life-long hobby.
But birding is
still a practical sport for those without any equipment, too. “In the spring
time it’s Warbler season, and that’s when we want to teach members how to listen for birds,” Pedersen explains.
Warblers are very quick birds that hide in bushes and are difficult to find,
which makes them perfect practice for training new ears. “One of the sayings
for a birding community is ‘Warbler’s Neck’ because they’re so sneaky. You’ll
never see them, you’ll only hear them. So you’ll be like, ‘ah, it’s over… over…
over… th-there! No, there! Nope, that’s not it,” Pedersen says flinging her
head and arms around, imitating those who try to spot the Warblers. “You’re
just derping around and you can’t figure out where it is exactly.” This
“derping around” contracts the “Warbler’s neck.”
“And we get
excited about stupid things, too. We’re very nerdy people,” she says. “But I’m
not gonna go up to you and be like, ‘Oh, you don’t understand what a woodpecker
is? NERD,’” she says. We’re not mean; we’re totally open to helping people and
teaching them.” Pedersen is a Marine Biology major at the University of New
Hampshire. After college, she would like to study Biology and bird on the side,
or teach about pelagic biology. “Just think of Nemo. ‘Let’s name the zones, the
zones, the zones, lets name the zones of the deep blue sea! There’s epipelagic,
mesopelagic, bathyal, abyssopelagic,” she sings with enthusiasm, arms stretched
out wide like Mr. Ray, the animated manta ray who sings this sea zones song in
Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo. And the
zones are correct, too. “That’s why marine biologists are okay with Nemo for
the most part,” she says happily.
Pedersen likes the
way the sport functions as a social catalyst. “I like going out because you’re
getting a bunch of people together,” she says. “The most enjoyable thing is
having everybody on the same page.”
To this day,
Pedersen is allergic to most animals with fur. As a kid, she always wanted cat but could never get one due to her
allergies. “I love them so much but I just can’t handle it,” she says. “That’s
why I like birds and reptiles. I can do feathers and scales.”
In addition to her
allergies, Pedersen got into birding because of influential birders in her
life. When she was very young, her grandfather would take her on walks around
Long Island to look for birds. “We’d just walk around, talk, listen and look
for birds. No fancy equipment or anything,” she says with fondness in her eyes
and nostalgia in her voice. She pauses before discussing the second influential
birder in her life, who she met during her internship as an ornithologist at
the Shoals Marine Lab just off the coast of Maine. Here, she met a man who acts
the same way she does to birds. “He’s always so aware of the birds and his
surroundings,” Pedersen says. “He’s just so into everything so when you talk to
him he’s like ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, Glossy Ibis!’ It’s great.” Pedersen believes
that most true-birders are like this, always vigilant. “I’ll be talking to my
friend and my friend will be like, ‘Hanna, what’re you doing?’ and I’m just
like, ‘Northern Cardinal!’ it’s kind of an issue,” she says before laughing.
She explains that being an active birder and being surrounded by others who are
also active birders is “just like an energy that rubs off on you.”
Pedersen’s
favorite pelagic bird is a gull. “People think they’re big rats with wings but
I think they’re very intelligent birds,” she says. Gulls, the proper term for
the birds society recognizes as seagulls, are scavengers. “They have to be very
creative with their food sources,” Pedersen says. “Gulls can adapt anywhere.
They will go to the depths of ripping through a dumpster as well as going out
in the ocean. They have the range to do that, to do whatever they want unlike
birds like Toucans or Hoatzins where they have specific things they have to
eat.”
Like a gull,
Pedersen is creative with her birding. “Once I was crouched in the crevasse of
a tree like pretzel, cramping up, all just to see this one bird […] it was
pretty bad up until the point I saw him, then it was all worth it.” she says. She
explains that birding is a hobby that can be done anywhere. “. Like, literally
anywhere on the planet because everywhere has birds,” she says. “If you have a
field biologist whose interested in soils they could study burrowing owls
because they burrow under the ground. Or oh, I like glaciers. Well then you can study Adelie Penguins. Oh I like
the rainforest, well you can study toucans.” One can bird essentially anywhere
on the planet.
“Haven’t you heard
that the bird is the word?”
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