off the pavement / By Peter Starr

A Professional Birdwatcher

(Jan. 17, 2008)  Last summer, I went out with my friend Elias Elias to count marbled murrelets, the small, endangered water bird that nests on old-growth tree limbs. We tented the night before in the Prairie Creek campground and got up at 4 a.m. to count the birds as they left the forest for their salty breakfast at sea. We walked over to Elk Prairie, lay down in the grass and proceeded to stare up into the fog. It wasn’t long before Elias, and then my wife Sara, exclaimed they saw the little duffers. “Okay. There’s one!” exclaimed Elias matter-of-factly. Then my wife piped up, “Oh yeah. Ah ha. Cute.” (Like that was a revelation.)

I continued to stare into the blank white registering nothing until I saw one, then many. My problem had been that I had been looking for something else, and neglected the evidence of what I was really seeing. It’s like mushroom hunting. Sometime you need to see one before the rest of the objects become discernible from the ground. Fully expecting to see “birds” “flying” through the mist, I did not register the tiny little dark cigar-shaped bullets streaking by at more than 50 m.p.h. in the gloom.

Elias Elias. File Photo.

GALLERY >

Usually Elias tracks murrelets in the ocean. He goes out in a 26-foot skiff owned and operated by the Redwood Science Lab, his immediate employer. The lab acts as kind of a conduit for private and public money (collected from various state and federal programs, timber companies and foundations and grants). The team will cover five kilometers of shoreline each day, making multiple passes back and forth, starting at 400 meters off shore and going out to 3,000. “We count murrelets from both sides of the boat out to 100 meters in each direction and we note the distance to each sighting,” Elias says. “That gives us the density and ultimately the population of an area.” Every linear kilometer between the Canadian border and San Francisco has been covered this way.

Land birds (especially the smaller passerines, like sparrows) are counted audibly rather than visually. I once went out with Elias for a walk in Redwood National Park. Where I saw small brown flittering motions off the trail, Elias heard and counted three species of sparrows (Song, White Crowned and Golden Crowned).

“We do point counts,” he explains. “We stand in one spot and listen and look for all the birds you can find in a really short period of time (five to 10 minutes) and give distance to each one. Then we move to the next one.” Elias explains that he can cover between 13 and 18 different points in a day. The window for effective counting is only about one and a half months during the early breeding season. That’s when the males “sing” (as opposed to “call”) to attract mates and defend territories. Once Elias worked full time with four others and covered the entire South Fork of the Trinity River between Highway 299 and Highway 36 by (Hayfork and Hyampom). It took them almost two months.

I ask Elias what his ideal job would be and he simply says “to be a giant ear floating across the landscape just listening for birds.” I then ask him what he would consider his most beautiful experience. He recollects a “backlit murrelet floating on placid water, its wake glittering behind it like fairy dust.” Or a little stream course with tiny 1- to 2-foot waterfalls and little moss-covered boulders: “Life in miniature, like a Japanese garden.” Then I ask him (as I am wont to) about his freakiest incident. This is what he describes.

“I was doing a survey on the Hoopa reservation. I had camped at an access point and was sleeping in back of my pickup truck without shell. It was the middle of the night and I was deep asleep.”

He awoke to his truck being shaken violently from side to side.

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