San Diego Reader

A steer skeleton lay in the dry creek bed. Tom extracted a tooth from its skull and handed it to me like a picked flower. Its roots were long and brown, so desiccated they looked almost wooden. Only its crown was any bit of white. I slipped the gift into my backpack — a souvenir of square V17.

Tom's wife, Ann, said that things had changed completely since the last time she and Tom were here in V17. "In the spring, this was neck-high grasses! We got lost, separated from each other a couple of times. We were tripped by the logs that were hidden and fell on our faces. It was difficult to find a true path; eventually you'd find that it was a false path. We practically had to hack our way through here with our bare hands. A machete would have come in handy." She lifted her binoculars. "There's a California towhee," she said, pointing the lenses at a place on the ground about 100 yards away. "They're around our house in La Mesa. They come right into the garage. The cats wish they could have them."

As Ann wrote in a small spiral-bound notebook, I found the towhee with my own binoculars. What I saw was a chubby, gray-brown, robin-sized bird with a rust-streaked breast, a conical beak, and a way of foraging that made me think it was annoyed. Using both its beak and feet, it hunted for seed in the short, dead grasses. Despite its vexed manner, I envied the bird its lack of distractions and its purposefulness. It would never think of spying on me.

But the Keenans have a purpose here too; they’re not just birding for idle pleasure. They’re collecting data for the San Diego County Bird Atlas. “Citizen science” is one name I’ve seen to describe projects that use volunteers who engage in fieldwork under the supervision of the professionals who recruit them. Tom’s background isn’t biology: he retired early, 15 years ago, from his job as an electrical engineer (or “double e,” as he says); at the same time, Ann left hers as a computer scientist. Together they started exploring things. In 1988, they took their first birding course from a local chapter of the Audubon Society. “As far as we’re concerned,” Tom told me, “birds entered the planet that year.”

V17, as it’s known on the bird-atlas grid of the county, is a three-by-three-mile square close to the border near Tecate. On our way to it we took a dirt road that became a washboard road. Our voices vibrated as we rode along in the Keenans’ 1999 black Mercedes SUV. The part of the square that we were on now was grazing land. We could see the herd in a distant pasture; later we would almost stumble into a stray herd member who was sitting as still as a big, black boulder under a live oak tree. Tom pointed out that all the oaks in the area were trimmed up to steer-mouth height and that no smaller ones grew underneath them: the steers had eaten the seedlings too. Meanwhile, Ann spotted lark sparrows feeding under one of those oaks and wrote in her notebook again.

The smell in the air was the sea at low tide. The Tecate and Cottonwood Creeks come together in V17, then flow into the Tijuana River. The land is owned by the San Diego County Water Authority — a rancher rents it — and the Keenans and I needed permission to be on it, along with a key to unlock the gate. They hadn’t bothered to put their official sign on the windshield: “Bird Atlas. Volunteers Conducting Bird Survey. A Project of the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias of the San Diego Natural History Museum.” The Border Patrol had probably already seen us with our birding gear anyway. Their cars occasionally appeared on the cliffs above us, and their helicopters sometimes passed overhead.

The Keenans signed up for the bird-atlas project as soon as it began, on February 22, 1997. When the results of the five years of fieldwork are published by the museum, as a series of color-coded maps with detailed commentary, we will know exactly what birds were where — and when — and what they were doing during the five-year period that ended on February 28, 2002. A comparison of this fresh data with available historical data will reveal how distributions have changed over the past century. We’ll also know which birds are adapting to urbanization and “habitat fragmentation” — and which ones aren’t.

The project isn’t unique. Bird-atlas work has been conducted in Europe since the mid-1960s. In the United States, the first results of bird-atlas surveys were published by Vermont and Maryland in the 1970s. The California counties of Marin, Monterey, and Sonoma have published bird atlases recently. Fieldwork for the bird atlases of several other counties in the state is underway. And San Diego itself has had a forerunner to this current project; the results were published by the museum in 1984 as The Birds of San Diego County.

Philip Unitt, collection manager of the museum’s birds and mammals department, was the author of that earlier study and did most of the fieldwork for it himself. That wasn’t what he had intended to happen. “A group of us talked about doing an atlas in 1978,” he told me in his office one day. “But as time went on, the other people fell by the wayside until I was the only one left. We all realized an atlas was needed; the latest thing available was from the 1950s.”

Unitt’s reference is to the 1959 annotated list of birds in San Diego County compiled by James R. Sams and Ken Stott. Forty years earlier, Frank Stephens (1849–1937), a self-taught ornithologist, compiled the first list for the region. In 1924, Stephens became the San Diego Natural History Museum’s director; his collection of study skins formed the nucleus of the museum’s collection.

Unitt, whose job is to oversee that collection today, will be the author of the forthcoming volume. But having recruited a core of 200 consistent long-term data collectors like the Keenans, he has been able to be much more ambitious than anyone at any previous time, including his younger self. In fact, the new project is acknowledged by some experts to be one of the most ambitious bird-atlas projects in the world. That’s because it will include birds that winter here as well as birds that breed here. There’s a good reason to include them: more species spend winters in San Diego than breed here. The latest British studies have included winter birds, and a few other places around the world are starting to do the same. But the winter portion of the San Diego project is among the first for North America. It is definitely the first for California — and is likely to be precedent setting.

Not every good birder in San Diego has been involved. “A certain number of people with adequate birding skills flunked the paperwork,” Unitt said. Reams of it have been required. A couple who, like the Keenans, have been among the most loyal participants showed me the biggest, thickest three-ring binders I had ever seen when I interviewed them at their home. The binders were filled over the five-year period with copies of their bird-atlas forms.

I looked at some of those forms that volunteers were required to submit to the project. They made it clear that bird-atlas work was no mere walk in the woods. The Winter Record Form (which isn’t even as complicated as the form required during breeding season) lists six columns of bird species, about 300 in all. “Specify a single date” for your sighting, the instructions say. “Enter count or estimate of number observed in square in one day. Enter a specific number, even if just an estimate, rather than a range or order of abundance level. Estimate the abundance level only when you have achieved the threshold criteria for covering the square. Abundance level: E1, 1–10; E2, 10–100; E3, 100–1000; E4, 1000–10,000. If a more accurate estimate or count is possible, enter it without the ‘E’ prefix.” Some of the species have asterisks after their names. For those one must plot the precise location of the sighting on another form, the Daily Field Map.

To be committed participants, birders needed something else besides tolerance for tedium. They needed to be free from their own long-term birding goals and interests — rare-bird sightings, for example.

(Even if some of the county’s great birders didn’t adopt a square and weren’t working specifically for the bird atlas, they were constantly feeding data into it. In addition, the last five years of Christmas bird counts, sponsored by the National Audubon Society, have been folded into the bird-atlas data. Same goes for the Breeding Bird Survey, sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey and conducted by volunteers.)

Those who signed on for the full term of the project also had to believe in its usefulness as a conservation “tool.” That tool would logically take the form of maps, because any bird that gets listed as an endangered species is put into geographical context: the area considered essential to its survival must be listed along with it, as a critical habitat.

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