Of a feather: Birding community chronicles populations for entertainment, conservation

The sun has barely risen above the horizon line at Miller Reserve in Scott City, but biologist Mike Taylor has been up for hours.

The reserve is peaceful, yet alive with noise. Grass crunches under Taylor's muck boots. Cicadas sound their low hum. A plane flies overhead. With a trained ear, he filters through the cacophony of sounds to listen for his object -- birds.

Taylor is a birder. He seeks out different species of birds and logs the ones he finds.

Birding is the perfect pandemic activity, he said, but he and other local birders have had their eyes and ears peeled for birds long before anyone ever heard a chirp about COVID-19.

Birds piqued the interest of Bill Eddleman from the time he was 12 years old. Eddleman is a historian and a retired Southeast Missouri State University biology professor and provost.

Mike Taylor looks for an Indigo Bunting bird at Miller Reserve.Monica Obradovic ~ monica@semissourian.com

"There's always something different with birding," Eddleman said. "It gets you outside. It's really increased in popularity since COVID. It's something you can do by yourself and doesn't require a lot of equipment."

At Cape Girardeau County Park, Eddleman looks out onto a lake on the park's southern side with binoculars in one hand and his cell phone in another. Eddleman's working on completing a "Big Year," a challenge he and other birders set for themselves to log as many species in one year as possible.

The largest big year on record with American Birding Association is 840 species. So far, Eddleman has logged 179 species in Cape County alone. He aims to find as many as 220 species by the end of 2021.

Eddleman logs what he finds on eBird, an app created by Cornell Lab of Ornithology used by dedicated birders to track and log the birds they find.

Taylor uses eBird to share birdsongs through visual audio recordings called spectrograms.

Bill Eddleman watches Killdeer birds through binoculars at Cape Girardeau County Park.Monica Obradovic ~ monica@semissourian.com

He stalks through tall grass with his eyes aimed at the trees at Miller Reserve, a 27-acre plot of wild land donated to SEMO by John and Addison Lawrence.

Why does he record bird calls? He answers until he hears a chirp from 50 feet or so behind him. He halts mid-sentence.

"Indigo Bunting!" Taylor said while pointing at a small blue-ish bird resting on a power line. He aims a microphone in its direction to record its sound.

A piece of plastic in the shape of a satellite dish surrounds the microphone. It funnels soundwaves into the microphone, creating a clean,concentrated sound.

He will upload the recordings onto eBird and make spectrograms out of them. With those, scientists can observe the bird's calls and study their behavior.

"To me, they're works of art," Taylor said.

Close-knit group

Local birders have sounding calls of their own. A close-knit group of birders keeps in touch through group text messages. They text each other when someone sees something interesting.

The other week, someone spotted a Sandhill Crane in the parking lot at Menards. Sandhill Cranes are almost unheard of in Southeast Missouri, according to Eddleman.

"That's the nice thing about birding," Eddleman said. "There are always surprises."

Two years ago, Tim Kavan of the Missouri Department of Conservation found a flamingo in New Madrid County after a hurricane in the South. He texted a few birders about it. Within a day, his phone exploded with texts from hundreds of other birders asking for statuses and where he saw it.

Kavan said birds have fascinated him since childhood. It's gotten to the point, now, where family vacations are centered on birding locations.

But things have changed in the few years since he began his birding hobby. Southeast Missouri has slowly become more industrialized. More buildings have been built, roads constructed. Farms using pesticides kill off birds' food supply.

Birds face the threat of human expansion now more than ever, according to Kavan.

"We are growing at a rapid rate, and habitats are lost as a result," he said. "With the changing of our ecosystems, we are struggling."

Kavan works out of the Missouri Department of Conservation's New Madrid office. Throughout the Missouri Delta, he said he's watched bird populations rise and fall over and over again throughout the decades.

Eddleman said he just completed bird surveys in the Bootheel and noticed an obvious decline in certain species in the area.

"It's pretty depressing," he lamented.

He lives in a house built by his parents in Cape Girardeau where a Whipporwill would sometimes sit on the house's back step and call.

"I haven't heard a Whippoorwill out there for 20 years now, and it's all because of crap like this," Eddleman said, gesturing to a patch of mowed bluegrass at Cape County Park. Areas like those are what Eddleman and other biologists call a "biological desert," where few things can grow or live.

As things change, Taylor predicted Southeast Missouri and other regions across the world will lose certain species of birds, but nature will still run its course. New species will come in their place.

To observe different species, Taylor drove from Miller Reserve to Sand Prairie Conservation Area -- an almost entirely different habitat just a five-minute drive away from the reserve.

At Sand Prairie, charred vegetation cracks under his footsteps. The Department of Conservation recently burned the area so invasive species would die and new species could grow from the ashes.

Taylor spots a Mourning Dove and logs the sighting in eBird.

Now, the sun is bright and the birds have quieted their morning chorus. The hunt is over. For now.