A contemplative hobby

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 27th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: birding.

Most people don’t really notice birds. They’re just around. Pigeons. Robins. Sparrows. But one organization says there’s value in studying them and doing it up close and personal.

WORLD Special Correspondent Anna Johansen Brown has our story.

DECOURCEY: You got, is that the banded? This is the banded Downy. Okay, we're gonna do this one first.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: Leslie DeCourcey is looking for a pen. She’s rummaging in a plastic container with one hand, and gesturing with the other as she talks. But in that other hand, she’s also holding a bird.

DECOURCEY: Here's a little male Downy Woodpecker. Easy little buddy, easy. The way I'm holding him I know a lot of people think I'm choking him. I have my fingers around his neck and I'm supporting him against his back against my palm. I am not choking the bird.

The woodpecker is black with white speckles, and a crimson dot on the back of his head. He lies very still in DeCourcey’s hand. She finds the pen she’s been looking for and starts recording notes on a chart.

This is the first bird of the morning here at the Sagawau Field Science Center in Lemont, Illinois. The center does bird identification, tracking, and habitat reclamation, as well as educational programs—shedding light on this sliver of our world that so often goes unnoticed.

The day is blue-skied and breezy. Birds are darting past, settling on feeders that are strategically placed throughout the trees. And if you look closely, at different points around the feeders, you’ll see fine nets hung between metal rods. They’re called mist nets. They billow slightly in the breeze and they’re almost invisible. Especially to a bird focused on food.

STAFF WOMAN: The trick with these mist nets is so they do get tangled in the net. Of course, it does mean that we have to untangle them from said net.

One of the staffers is trying to untangle a Rose Breasted Grosbeak. The bird isn’t making it easy. He keeps jabbing at her hands with his broad, solid beak.

Lee Witkowski is standing by. He volunteers at Sagawau and teaches at Lewis University.

WITKOWSKI: You can see the bill on that is made for seed cracking. And he's trying to crack her thumb thinking it's a seed. So it can be painful.

The staff member is finally able to get the bird’s claws untangled from the fine threads of the net, though she’s not without a few battle scars.

STAFF WOMAN: And then so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna put him in the bag. And so that calms him down.

She carefully places the Grosbeak into a white cloth bag and takes it over to Leslie DeCourcey for banding.

DeCourcey is a licensed bird bander. Each bird that comes into her hands gets a tiny aluminum band around its leg, with an ID number. She shares the bird’s information with the US Geological Survey. That way, if the bird comes back later or winds up at a different processing center somewhere else in the country, they’ll be able to track where the bird has been, and what it’s been up to.

DeCourcey has been taking data on the Downy Woodpecker.

DECOURCEY: Now we're gonna start looking at those feathers. [Blowing sound]

She turns the bird over and blows on its white belly feathers.

DECOURCEY: Okay, we see that little bare belly with these little wrinkles on it. So this little male has a brood patch.

That means he’s a dad with either eggs or hatchlings back at the nest.

DeCourcey takes more measurements and records all the data on a chart. Then she moves on to the next bird—an Oriole.

AUDIO: [Bird singing]

DECOURCEY: Orioles are one of those species that actually will sing in the hand…they're amazing.

As DeCourcey works, people start to gather around to watch.

One of the Sagawau volunteers leads birding walks through the surrounding forest, to see how many species they can observe in the wild. Everyone’s equipped with binoculars, but listening is also a key skill for birding.

SAGAWAU VOLUNTEER: Let's see if we can hear them. That's singing right now is a Tennessee warbler. The way that we like to identify their sound is it's like a sewing machine.

AUDIO: [Bird singing]

Peter Searby is the founder of the Riverside Club for Adventure and Imagination. He brought the Riverside students to Sagawau partly because he wants them to expand their awareness of nature.

SEARBY: Birding does tend to make you a much more observant person who’s I would call present. And it kind of gives you a sense of peace in the sense of like, I'm present in this moment, I’m not trying to go somewhere else. I’m just here. It's a contemplative hobby, for sure.

But more than that, he sees birding as a way of studying God’s fingerprints in the world around us.

SEARBY: Anytime we teach these kids to appreciate, name, and be very observant when it comes to birds, I'd say you're sort of delighting in God's creation.

Leslie DeCourcey says birds also serve an important practical function: Insect control.

DECOURCEY: The common grackle: you couldn't you couldn't go a block without seeing several of them in people's lawns…What were those birds doing? They were picking up insects, bringing it to their nestlings.

After the Downy Woodpecker is all weighed and measured and recorded, DeCourcey sets it free again.

DECOURCEY: Okay, would you like to let him go?

NOELLE: Wait, are you saying me? Yeah!

Or more specifically, she lets a spectator set it free. Monique Noelle came to Sagawau today to find out what bird banding was all about.

NOELLE: I really never imagined that she would say to me…like, do you want to release it and going like, you mean like actually hold the bird?

DECOURCEY: Put your hand underneath that. Okay, hold on. And then when you're ready, let him go. Just let him sit on your hands.

In a blink, the bird darts off into the trees and is gone.

Noelle says holding and releasing a tiny, fragile, wild bird like that was a bucket list item she never knew she had.

NOELLE: I carried a woodpecker! [laughs]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown in Lemont, Illinois.

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