December 8, 2021
On the Trail with Brian Patrick Gibbons

by Michael McNulty

In a small circle, eight of us waited in perfect silence and near total darkness while Brian played the sound of a Mottled Owl: to my ears, a generic made-for-Hollywood whoo-whoo. Again, one minute later. Again, one minute later. The stakeout became an exercise in meditation: listening intently—at this stage—for nothing. The silence of the dry forest of western Mexico was complete, and became a more clearly perfect silence the longer we waited.

The profound peacefulness of this setting made me hope that the owl would take its sweet time; and so it did. But finally, Brian played an alternate call resembling a cat whose tail was being pulled. Seconds later from directly above us came the response: “WHO?!?“. Brian’s flashlight came on, and the Mottled Owl’s great round eyes gazed down at us, invoking Lewis Carroll. We stared. It stared. Time passed. It flew. We went to breakfast.

Our bird whisperer on the Western Mexico trip was Brian Gibbons. Brian fell into birding young, in his teens, and he never seriously wanted to do anything else. Shortly after Victor Emanuel founded his birding company (ventbird.com), he initiated an annual youth birding camp for teens. Brian did that more than twenty-five years ago and has been a protégé of Mr. Emanuel ever since. He is broadly responsible for ornithological taxonomy within VENT, tracking the incessant lumping and splitting of species, ensuring that the stream of reports coming from the company’s 30+ guides are scientifically up to date.

Like all of the guides working for VENT, Brian has an uncanny talent for knowing precisely what birds are in front of him, more or less instantly. There was a moment when we were standing on a southwest facing canyon late in the day, looking for (and finding, always finding, whatever the bird) the Aztec Thrush, when a ‘mixed flock’ of small birds flew across the canyon from left to right in front of the sun. Songbirds like to migrate in packs; no doubt it’s safer, as they can warn one another of dangers. But it always seems to me, watching them, that danger or no danger, they are just extremely sociable creatures. Brian has many obligations as bird guide, but Job One is always to identify the birds you see in real time. He raised his arm, pointing, and realizing what was happening allowed a note of urgency and excitement to creep into his voice. As they streamed by, he said, “there’s a Blue Grosbeak and a Hepatic Tanager and a Black-throated Gray and a MacGillivray’s Warbler and a Slate-throated Redstart and a Chestnut-sided Shrike-Vireo, and an Audubon’s Oriole and a Rufous-backed Robin and a Brown-backed Solitaire…” Importantly, he did this without being able to see any colors; we were looking straight into the sun and the birds were all in silhouette, and he did this in less time than it took you to read the previous sentence. (The birds I included are only those I can now remember.) Then he said, “That was pretty good.”  

If one hears a pianist play flawlessly in “La Campanella” by Lizst, one can safely assume—regardless of how gifted or talented that pianist may be—that this musician has spent thousands upon thousands of hours sitting in front of a piano. Similarly, it boggles the mind to imagine how much time Brian (and all the VENT guides) have spent peering into the depths of high mountain forests to reach such a level of sufficiency.

But there’s something else. Brian travels with the recordings of five thousand bird calls, and so as far as I can tell, he can recognize all of them without hesitation. That suggests a lot of homework, no? And still, knowing these five thousand languages would not be of much benefit if your hearing is less than adequate. 

And this is where my powers of description are going to fail me. Brian’s aural capacities are hard to comprehend. Walking along a dark forested road he will say, “there’s a Golden-Browed Warbler,” pointing to where he has heard a low bird call. None of us has heard it, nor have any of us seen it. Early on, I thought how easy it would be for him to be having us on; that this could be a fantastic practical joke. Obviously, we couldn’t prove him wrong, as we didn’t know what he was talking about. He could have been inventing birds out of thin air. But then I saw that with patience and an uncanny knowledge of each bird’s habits and habitats, Brian could seduce the bird he heard out of hiding. There!” And thus would appear…the Golden-browed Warbler. Or the Rusty-crowned Ground-Sparrow. Or the Rosy Thrush-Tanager. Or the Orange-billed Nightingale-Thrush. All identified by ear before they came into view. (We saw nearly 250 species that week.)

But wait, there’s more. Knowing the multitudinous habitats in the Sierra Madre Occidental, knowing the birds that live there, and knowing the foraging behavior of all these beauties, Brian would tell you what bird you should expect to see after hearing some scratching in the leaf litter under a wall of shrubbery. “These will be Rosy Thrush-Tanagers,” he will say, pointing to where he has heard some dry leaves being overturned. At this juncture I could no longer understand how this capacity for hearing sounds in the environment could be merely human. The setting is an enormous mountainside, full of life and pine trees sighing in the breeze and insects whirring and a squad of birders shuffling along. I came to think of Brian as someone with superpowers. Believe me when I say that the vast majority of humanity would not have had a hope of picking up the sound of a leaf being overturned, much less a chance of discriminating that sound from the infinity of other sounds being generated at that time in those mountains. Nor could they have told you (I mean, really?!) to expect a Rosy Thrush-Tanager.

Brian Gibbons, one of the best birders in the world.

Photo: Brian Gibbons, on the trail in the Sierra Madre Occidental © M. McNulty, 2018.

November 23, 2020
Looking for Judy in Papua New Guinea

By Tom Taylor

During a VENT trip to Papua New Guinea in 2012, I must confess I developed a distaste for sitting high in bright white tourist vans, roaring down rural roads (once almost sliding off!), then crawling through villages, local folks staring at us while going about their business in a world we kept on the other side of the glass. We were at once too hurried and too nervous to stop.  

Or that’s how I reacted, anyway, as have lots of others I’ve traveled with. But my wife Judy? She was the principal of an Austin elementary school in a challenging community, and dealt with all sorts of folks every day. People do not scare her; quite the contrary. On that same 2012 trip, we were at the airport at Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea—a dirty, crowded, disorganized place, in a city not renowned for friendliness. We managed to check in for our flight, then huddled as a group while hawkers offered skulls of hornbills, assorted other animal parts, and unidentifiable snacks. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t find Judy…

…and then I did, and I will never forget the scene. She was sitting on the floor against a wall, surrounded by a group of four Papuan women and girls, laughing, gesticulating, communicating in some universal language. The rest of us were wary and subdued; she was having a grand time!