Students Find Science and Solace Through Binoculars
Neither Kevin Dernier nor Caley Doell thought much about birding, but it turned out to be their calling. Both are students in SUNY Plattsburgh’s natural resources and ecology masters program.
Dernier was always fond of living creatures, but figured he’d specialize in reptiles. Born in Plantation, Florida, Dernier considered himself a “Steve Irwin kid.”
“I thought I’d be wrestling alligators,” he said.
That changed when his family moved to Weston, Vermont — he was 5 years old. The Northeast has a noticeable lack of reptiles, but a vast diversity of migratory bird species, Dernier noted.
Doell’s family frequently traveled to the Adirondacks from their Westchester County home and had bird feeders in their backyard. At some point, her interest in birds fell dormant, until a research project in her sophomore year of undergrad required that she research a bluebird nest.
“It was almost like I remembered how much I like birds, and it kind of snowballed from there,” Doell said.
SPARK BIRD
Many birders have a so-called “spark bird” — a bird that pulls them into the hobby, Dernier said. For him, it was the gray jay.
When Dernier was an undergraduate student at Paul Smith’s College’s forestry program, he took an introductory class in biology and wildlife. At one session, he saw a gray jay eating from his professor’s hand. Dernier made a sound at the bird, not realizing it provoked aggression.
“That was the first time I recognized that birds have really complex behaviors and interesting social dynamics — especially corvids and jays, who are really stinkin’ smart for birds,” Dernier said.
Later in the class, he learned bird banding, a technique that allows researchers to track birds by fastening a band around one of their legs. He recalled holding a chickadee, “They’re really bitey, really fighty.”
He put his ear to the bird’s chest — its heart beating “a mile a minute.”
Through those two key experiences, Dernier fell in love with birds, their personalities and their ways of life. He wrote his undergraduate capstone research project on Rüppell griffon vultures, an endangered species native to Africa, having never taken a class in ornithology, the science of birds.
SUNY Plattsburgh’s natural resources and ecology program allows students to choose between completing an internship and producing a research thesis. Within the internship route, almost everything Dernier does relates to birds.
“One of my supervisors made fun of me for babytalking the birds,” Dernier said. “Personally, I think they’re precious. They’re adorable, and it’s a privilege to handle them and to be involved in the management of the species.”
Doell doesn’t have a spark bird: The bluebird nest she studied simply reignited a love that had always been there. Doell also noted birds’ strong charisma and presence.
“There’s not many places that you can go and not see a bird somewhere,” Doell said. “If you let it infiltrate your whole life, it will. I can’t turn that part of my brain off. I can’t go anywhere without noticing what’s going on around me and seeing it and hearing it.”
Doell’s research thesis path, which has her surveying birds on the Altona Flat Rock, can be especially exhausting. Every time she feels the stress catching up to her, she goes outside, and things fall into place again.
“Research is hard, sometimes, and it can be easy to forget why you’re in it,” Doell said. “But then I go outside and I am reminded that I’m in the right place doing the right thing, because I love it so much.”
WHAT YOU NEED
The essence of birding boils down to seeing a bird and identifying it. Neither is easy unless you’re prepared, Dernier and Doell know.
Sound can be a solid indicator of a bird’s presence, but Dernier and Doell don’t consider a bird sighted unless they see it with their eyes. Once they spot movement, they reach for their binoculars.
Neither considers themselves an expert birder yet, so they peek into their copies of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America by Plattsburgh native David Sibley or open the Merlin Bird ID app by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
Aside from models of birds from all angles, seasonal colorings and sex differences, Merlin Bird ID also has recordings of bird calls. Dernier uses the sounds only for learning and identification purposes, however, so he doesn’t confuse or exhaust the real birds.
He does sometimes mimic the calls himself, though. With his head turned up toward the tree canopies at Ausable Marsh, he whistles as a black-capped chickadee does, starting high and strong and winding down. The call’s cadence matches the rhythm of the word “cheeseburger.”
Lastly, Dernier and Doell log their sightings on a citizen science app called eBird. Logging what birds you see — and how many — can help other birders know what to look out for, too.
LIFE LIST
Birding isn’t a hobby that demands huge investments of time and money. Birders usually keep a “life list” of all the bird species they have seen. Dernier has about 230 in his, but some top birders have thousands.
“It’s a hobby like Pokémon, where it’s like, you gotta collect them all,” Dernier said.
Dernier started out with the goal of spotting as many bird species as possible, but eventually, the excitement from new sightings wore off, and he began cherishing the hobby’s ability to center him in the present moment.
“You just get to do something for yourself and enjoy what you’re looking at without it being almost superficial,” Dernier said. “It’s a real thing that anybody can enjoy that I get to enjoy at this moment, and that’s what I like about birding.”
Doell encountered the greater yellowlegs — a species she’d never seen before — on a walk at Lake Alice Wildlife Management Area on Sept. 10.
Clinton County is a region with abundant bird species inhabiting its varied elevations, beaches and bodies of water year-round. It is also a hot spot for migratory birds when they make stops in the spring and fall.
“We live in such a beautiful, diverse place to bird — there are so many different places that I could go to see different things, and it really never ends,” Doell said. “It’s never a bad time to go birding.”
Story and Photos by Aleksandra Sidorova
