Warblers
It was not your stereotypical Dartmouth outing at least, not by stereotypical media standards. There we were, nevertheless, the Dartmouth Birding Club students of all ages, sizes, and shapes; a nice lady from Hanover; two old parties from Norwich trudging up Balch Hill to the cleared top where, in the warm May sunshine, we could look down at a valley still fogbound.
We had met at 6:00 a.m. at Gilman Hall, in a pea-souper that would have done Limehouse proud. A freshman named Mario, apparently our leader for the day, announced the destination for the regular Tuesday walk. The wooded slopes of Balch Hill, dense with both conifers and deciduous trees, and the clearing, it was agreed, were splendid cover for migrating warblers. While we waited for George, who had overslept, the students exchanged notes on weekend triumphs orni- thological variety. Mario reported that he had seen his first Wilson's phalarope on a Saturday trip to Plum Island, a long spit of land off the Massachusetts coast. Eric, a senior we recognized from last spring, said he'd heard about new breeding grounds for the phalarope. The talk turned to life lists, local sightings, summer projects. George came puffing along, heavier-eyed than most of us, then ducked into Gilman to round up some extra binoculars.
The Dartmouth birders are interested and interesting, helpful to novices without being condescending, nimble in mind and body. Some in the group are learners or "gifted amateurs"; some are advanced graduate students embarked on careers of teaching and research. They maintain com- puter programs of sightings, first sightings of the season, rareties, events, to which one and all are invited to contribute.
With everyone outfitted, we were off to Reservoir Road, to be dazzled first off by a spectacularly brilliant scarlet tanager hard by the intersection with East Wheelock Street. Then a black-and-white warbler posed obligingly and un- characteristically on a telephone wire. On into the woods, we saw veeries and vireos, grosbeaks and flycatchers; lots of warblers blackburnians, Canadas, yellow-throated, and chestnut-sided. There was a flurry of excitement when a yellow- bellied sapsucker a woodpecker with a red, white, and black head and a belly more cream-colored than yellow was briefly mistaken for a red-bellied woodpecker which has a red crown and neck but no red on its belly.
The real pros identified calls from a dis- tance, even when sightings were made im- possible by late May foliage. "That's either a black-throated green or a black-throated blue back in there," said Eric modestly. "They sound so much alike, I can't tell." George confessed that it was part of a whole range of calls he couldn't dis- tinguish. Mario went loping off to try to catch sight of a chestnut-sided warbler he had heard. It was of course long since on his life list, he explained, but when he came to Dartmouth, he had started fresh with a tabula rasa for New Hampshire. A little later, after the group had split between those who had to get back for an eight o'clock class and others who could stay for a while, the chestnut-sided displayed itself in full sun, but Mario wasn't there.
It's impossible to recall precisely how many varieties were observed that morn- ing, because most Dartmouth birders are there more for the sheer joy than the ac- counting of it. Was it a Nashville warbler that someone reported, or a Tennessee? Does one count the garden-variety robins, blue jays, chickadees? If so, why not the pigeons that ornament Gilman Hall? Of earthbound creatures, there were lots of in- quisitive squirrels and curious dogs, but no single specimen of the Dartmouth Anim was sighted.
