Rainforest Birders

From natural din of rainforest comes the shrill sound from a group of binocular clad goof-balls staring in all directions at the tops of the trees, “Look it’s a ruby rump bill sucker or is it Rufus sided ball buster? They are so hard to distinguish at five hundred meters in the twilight against a gray sky with it sitting immobile in that tree. If it would just fly I could see its belly and flight profile and have the species nailed for my life book!”

For gods sake! The tree is barely visible at 500 meters. Even with the binoculars that blurry speck could be a bromeliad, a sleeping iguana, or pile of monkey shit. Tell you what; if that is really even a bird I will eat it. Yep, I will shoot the son of a bitch and eat the little annoyance. I will eat it even if isn’t a bird and can only just fly and that is giving it a great deal of latitude since it could be a big moth, a bat or a flying what’s-you-call-it (I guess there are a lot of flying-what’s-you-call-its around here). I just can’t believe that someone would get excited about blob of gray in a tree at five hundred meters. Even if the stupid bird was sitting right on his wrist, right in front of him, it is just a fluff ball of feathers, beak, and feet, looking pretty much like all other little fluff balls of feathers, beak, and feet. “Oh, no! This one has a ruby stripe under its eye and a brown ring around its ass.” B.F.D is my response to this, who cares? After I shoot it and eat it, who else will care?

When I think of bird watchers I think of watching those little tweedy birds that flutter around the forest so anonymously and quickly they should be eliminated because they look more like twirly-wirlies and other visual anomalies from too much of the “good stuff” people took the sixties. No one can really see those little feathered annoyances all in a dither making such a ruckus as they are jumping around in the bushes and twittering and moving so fast, god who can tell what they really look like? (Unless you shot them to slow them down). I am a mycologist and we have a name for the ‘shrooms that we see that are small and plain and we don’t want to identify: LBMs. An LBM is a little brown mushroom and usually it is kicked into oblivion so it can’t be identified because they all look alike and they are too hard to identify because they could be any of fifteen different mushrooms and it might take all day to separate it from the others and no one wants to spend they time doing that. “Fuck it! An LBM! kick it and pretend it didn’t exist.” That is what the tweedy birds are like. They are just jumping around all alike and none are any different from the other, just moving fast and furious. Those little birds have no description because they don’t stop long enough for any real human to really look at them. If you took a shot gun and blasted the bush where they were, you could grab a bunch of those hapless avian and check them out, but otherwise, the birds are just blurs in the bushes. Bird watchers go crazy trying to check off the “life list” and trying to identify the little fucker, some of which really are rats, agouti, and coati babies. What a joke! One of the watchers spotted the rat-sized Central American agouti scooting across the open ground behind some bushes and into a burrow and identified it as Ruddy Ground-dove. Stupid birder! That agouti can only fly if I throw the lousy rodent after catching it and tossing through the forest before it bites me. Ruddy Ground-dove… Right and I’m going to check that one off my “life list”. Maybe the little agouti ate a dead one before going down its hole. Even I can tell the difference between feathers and fur, four legs and two. Those birders just get too excited.

Those bird watcher types in the rainforest bug the heck out of me. They walk around with their eyes pasted on the tops of the trees as they make their way through the forest trees and vines. What the hell are they thinking? Fer-de-lance do not like to be stepped on, nor do they like to be stepped near, nor do they like to be near by any large critter. These snakes with toxic venom and very big fangs to deliver the poison juice have a unique evolutionary development. They have come up with a strategy, “If I bite it they will come.” The venom of the Fer-de-lance is so toxic that it can kill even a cow. Even a newly hatched snake has enough venom to kill a human. The snake has developed the strategy of bite it, follow it until it dies, which isn’t far, and wait until something comes around that is small enough to kill and eat. These wriggly serpants invade pastures, yards, foot paths, and houses, to attack organisms they could never eat, but could possibly bring them a bunch of smaller scavengers that are the size of a good snack of a decent meal. They are surely in great numbers in their habitat, the forest. Because of forest destruction there is also the destruction of the snake and other predators that eats Fer-de-lance and these poisons snakes are proliferating unopposed. The big hungry predators lay in wait or stalk their prey, ready to attack and kill a wayward bird watcher who is not watching where he or she is going so their dead bodies will bring scavengers like a rat, agouti or coati that they can eat (not really a bad thing I guess).

Those are just the Fer-de-lance that are aggressive snakes ready to bite the skyward looking birders, but are not the only potential rub in rainforest. The bushmaster that get up to 11 feet long and has fangs about two and a half inches long and poison that will knock the socks off every living thing, lies in wait next to the trails or along the edge of the fallen logs. Stepping over a log and not checking or walking unaware down a trail can bring a foot very close to one of these scaly incubuses who does not like to be stepped on. And there the birders go with binocs to their eyes, walking down the trail stumbling into each other and trees and bushes remarking on the birds not snakes. Not watching their step.

In the early morning, before the sun, the birder are all up. The birds can’t see in the dark I guess, they need the light. Just before the light comes up the stupid birds think it is time for everyone to get up so the Mealy Parrots start squawking and alerting the entire world to the fact that the sun will come up in about a half an hour. Imbecile birds! Some animals sleep in and some of us like to hit the snooze button so shut the fuck up! But no, they keep it up until the Howler Monkeys start to scream. The Howlers are very loud and are very annoyed at having to get up yet again before the sun is actually high in the sky and they scream their annoyance at that fact. Their noise is like a large very angry lion in the tree voicing its opinion about the problems of the world. All over the forest the male howlers are screaming while the parrots squawk their encouragement to get up and greet the sun. Other animals begin to join in. The cacophony becomes a din no one can sleep through. This is all started by the Mealy Parrots who need to be shot.

A couple of morning birds greet birders and everyone else who choose to listen to the parrots. The Great Curassows, purported to be the size of a small turkey, but sounds like it might be dinner for 30 people or more. These birds are described by the bird watchers as “providing the tropical American forest with the background sound, especially in the morning.” “Groups of males rhythmically give their very loud calls described variously as ‘cha-cha-KAW-ka’ or ‘’cha-cha-lac’.” Let me say that the birds squawk like eagles being castrated with a pair of pliers and they do it as close to your sleeping quarters as they can get. The birders have no sense of timing or background morning sounds. These birds do not fly as far as I know, but run like a cheetah through the forest when shit is thrown at them from the window or flap of a tent. Those stupid flopping crests on their heads just keep the guns from sighting in for a kill shot. Damn birds keep screaming as they run so they make maximum noise. There are lots of these miserable feathered beasts despite what is said. It is not a pleasant morning forest call after a long night. Birders be damned!

The Great Tinamou is another moronic bird that is an annoyance in the morning and loved by the birders. This bird is described in the bird book as having a pure tone melodious whistle which is characteristic of the forest. The bird is loud and obnoxious in the early morning when it knows people are not quite awake. The Tinamou adds to those Curassows or takes up after the Curassows have been chased off because the bird doesn’t like to run. Oh, my god, such a stupid bird making such a sound on the ground and still being alive today. This bird, the Tinamou, has the body the size of a rugby ball and the head the size of a golf ball. It stands about as tall as a T.V. tray. This dumb bird has adopted the evolutionary strategy of thinking it is invisible when a predator comes around. When a threat is near this bird stands still and thinks, “I am invisible and I can’t be seen, isn’t this cool?” The bird just stands there frozen. If you walked up on them they just stand there thinking they are invisible until you are so close you can actually kick them, which I have done occasionally to teach them they are not invisible. People grab them, kill them, and eat them. Anyway the birds don’t seem to fly even though they are reported to do so, but they are so noisy in the morning they need to be silenced one way or the other. They are noisy in the evening too, but that is ok because most people are up then. Birders just love the “melodic whistle”, like a drunk with a referee’s whistle.

Once all those bird watchers are up in the morning, they are out in the forest watching up not down. They get so excited about the birds in the area they don’t notice the Capuchins monkeys moving in silently above them. These little guys will begin to set up and start lobbing shit, literally shit, on the bird watcher. The Capuchins will also throw pieces of fruit, seeds, sticks, bromeliads and other debris that can be harmful or even deadly. If one is not aware of the Capuchins, a birder could get beaned by a piece of fruit that causes them to be unconscious (pentaclethra fruit weighs about 300g and is hard as a rock). The unconscious birder then could be eaten by ants. The monkeys are not kind to people who pause in their territories. Howler monkeys pee on people near them.

That “life list” is the curse that drives the birders. The “life list” for the uninitiated is the list of species that a birder sees in their life. They need to sort of verify that they really see the species before they check them off. Once the bird is checked off it is gone from the mind of the birder and it is on to the next species as far as I have seen. Verify and move on. Now the blur in the tree at five hundred meters may be a lump of monkey shit next to an orchid moving in the breeze that looks slightly like a blurry eyed tit-mouth, so if two or more birders agree then check that baby off and move on. That stupid list causes people to get up early and go place they should not go. It causes them to walk without watching where they are going and not pay attention to what is around them. That “life list” of birders can be the life of them and the people around them.