When You Meet Your Heroes
Sometimes They Exceed Your Expectations
It’s great fun to meet your heroes - you know the ones with superpowers you’ve admired for years. Yes we have celebrities in the birding community and I’ve gratefully met several of them.
One of these people was a heroine named Lucy Seeds. A stalwart member of the birding community in Ohio when there were few women birders and she happened to be a lifelong friend of my mother. Lucy used to call me up and say “let’s go find us some warblers” and off we’d go to spend a morning tracking down the migrants that travel through Ohio every spring. With her help, I racked up “my summer of 34 warbler species in Ohio” that summer and she taught me a great deal about movement and habitat.
In my birding community in the Denver-Boulder area I was still a newbie but enthusiastic birder. On fieldtrips I kept hearing people refer to Thompson Marsh - which I presumed was a location along the front range. Then on one trip I actually met Thompson Marsh - the person not the locale. An expert birder in Colorado who had trouble keeping up with the field trip because of his advancing age. So I stayed beside him, helped him in and out of the car, making sure he saw the Louisiana Waterthrush someone scared up along the creek and he regaled me with more bird information than I could absorb. We birded together several times and I learned he knew every Latin name for every species of N.Amer. bird.
Some were drive-bys. I stood along the Atlantic shore somewhere studying gulls ( I hate gulls: 3-5 years to maturity and their plumage can vary each season - arrrggghh!) near a group of birders but not so close as to intrude.
While I was there, a man came up to me and asked me “what are you looking at?” and I pointed to one of the dozens of gulls and said “I think that’s a ______ gull. I’m just checking the field marks because I’m not very good IDing gulls.” I named the field marks I was using as evidence and he finally said “you know I think you’re right. Good job!”
I was happy with my ID and someone from the birding group near me approached and asked “Do you know who that is?” No. “That’s Peter Dunne!” (a truly world class birder). I responded, “I’m glad I was right.”
Later I served on a national raptor non-profit board of directors with Bill Clark - the imminent world-renown raptor expert. Wow what a mind!
The birding world has it’s Mick Jaggers and I’ve been fortunate to meet several of them. But I’m just as impressed meeting the newbies attending my community college class of Beginning Birding or the parents with their kids sitting beside me at the observation deck at Estero Llano State Park. They are the future of birding, the future of conserving habitat and protecting ecosystems - they are super heroes too.
