West Virginia’s abundance of birdsong has bird-watchers flocking to the state from all over the country.
This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Wonderful West Virginia magazine. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.
written by Katie Griffith
photographed by Tom Hindman
Far off, a steady staccato flares into a finale of increasing tempo and pitch. It’s followed by two quarter notes that roll into an upbeat triplet, while nearby one lonely, guttural cry sounds for a long second before cutting off into silence as a tiny head tilts to listen for an answer. Stepping into the forests of West Virginia these melodies, to the untrained ear, meld into a simple cacophony of bird song. But for connoisseurs they’re as distinct as an orchestra’s leading trumpets, flutes, and violins, backed by cellos, bassoons, and tubas.
“You’ll normally hear the thrushes first. The robins will strike up the band, and you’ll start to hear a few others—a phoebe flycatcher—and it builds from there. Eventually the warblers kick in,” says Carol McCullough, a longtime birder and president of the Brooks Birding Club, one of the oldest hobbyist birding organizations in the state. The group formed in 1932 in Wheeling, named for A.B. Brooks, a naturalist who for years led a popular nature walk every Sunday. From Wheeling the group spread, picking up chapters in Charleston and Parkersburg and members from neighboring states.
Birders have interests as diverse as the critters they so lovingly watch. Some are satisfied with simply identifying the calls they hear walking through the woods. Others are list-lovers with particular goals. And still others are what McCullough describes as citizen scientists who spend weekends adding to man’s understanding of the fine-boned, colorful creatures that herald earth’s changing seasons. But most birders begin what often becomes a lifelong obsession right in their backyards.
“A lot of people love to watch the hummingbirds,” says Joey Herron, a man who has turned bird-watching into a second career. “The people who lead bird walks, they started off by watching birds in their backyards.” For Herron, growing up in Lewis County, the fascination began at age 12 when a friend noticed a screech owl sitting by the river behind his house. “We started watching that screech owl flying in and out of the woods and watching it hunt,” he says. “We spent every spare moment we had in the woods. We were up at daylight with binoculars hunting for birds. That’s how we learned the birds and the songs—a pair of binoculars and a Peterson’s field guide.” Herron still has that first guide, though he hardly needs it now. He has published nearly a dozen projects in the Brooks club’s scientific quarterly and spends his springs and falls working the migratory bird banding project out of Prickett’s Fort State Park, where he also leads nature walks for folks just starting out. An advocate for birding as a state tourism draw, Herron claims he can now take a walk in the woods around Marion County and identify 99 percent of the birds there by their calls alone.
For McCullough, a Pittsburgh resident who joined the Wheeling Brooks club in 1969, a love of birding began when she started spending family vacations in West Virginia’s woods, enjoying the outdoors with her husband and children. “We had little kids who couldn’t hike, so we started paying attention to the birds and flowers,” she says. “I’m more interested in just enjoying the birds I see. I’m not a hard-core birder, but I do enjoy citizen science.” McCullough goes surveying each year, leading weeklong trips with her club to enjoy nature’s symphony and to track what she hears. “We do most of our identification by sound,” she says. “The major songsters in our country are the thrushes. The wood thrush, the hermit thrush—they sound like flutes. There is a beautiful, ethereal quality to their song. Then you get something like a winter wren—this teeny little bird that has this long, complicated song. I always enjoy when I can hear a winter wren sing.” In September McCullough also works the fall migration at Dolly Sods where she is a federally licensed bird-bander at one of West Virginia’s longest running banding operations. “We band maybe 6,000 birds in a couple of months,” she says.
Birding is what you choose to make of it, says Rob Tallman, a former ornithologist with the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources who now works as a wildlife area manger. Some people get so into it, it becomes a second career, as it did for Herron. Others just enjoy weekends sitting on the porch with a bird feeder. No matter the inclination, West Virginia is a top spot for birders, with its prevalence of public lands and a location along migration paths. “Around 300 species use the state, or occur in the state,” Tallman says. “Some breed here, some winter here, and some just pass through.” In Kanawha County during a spring migration, a patient listener might hear 20 species of warblers. In Pocahontas, you could hear 90 species in a matter of minutes. What’s special about this density is that birds are pretty picky. They don’t fly just anywhere.
Take the golden-winged warbler, for example. One of the most popular species for birders to find in West Virginia, it requires a complex habitat of big trees and open and covered ground. “When you have that you’ll find them, though they are declining pretty precipitously,” Tallman says. Another popular species for bird watchers, the Swainson’s warbler prefers a dense rhododendron understory, most plentiful in the south-central part of West Virginia near the New River Gorge. The cerulean warbler, a bright blue favorite, is plentiful in the southwestern portion of the state—the heart of its range—but the farther away from that area, the more they decline. “West Virginia itself provides the source population for a lot of these migrant song birds,” Tallman says. “A lot of these birds—ceruleans, the wood thrush—are doing really well here and not elsewhere.”
In the New River Gorge, where each spring for the past 13 years dozens of birders from all over the world have gathered at the New River Birding & Nature Festival for a week of bird-watching, one glimpse of one of these rare birds can cause high emotions. David Pollard, founder and organizer of the small but high-caliber event, tells the story of a particular guest who made the trip to the New River festival hoping to glimpse a cerulean warbler and, having finally spotted one, was brought to tears. Pollard estimates that of the 36 warbler species that occur in the Eastern United States, 32 to 34 of them can be spotted at the spring festival and make up the event’s main draw.
“Warblers are spectacularly beautiful,” he says. “Their color patterns are amazing—they’re birds that we share with the tropics and they’re only here for the summer months.” They’re also challenging, piquing the interest of birders who like to collect sightings and check a species off of birding life lists. “Most of them are high-canopy birds moving around in the leaves, and you get the challenge of being able to find them in your binoculars,” Pollard says. “That said, there rare birds here we see every day that we take for granted. A cardinal is a beautiful bird, and we get folks here from California who don’t see cardinals.”
The time, the money for travel, the effort spent for many longtime birders isn’t just to glimpse a tiny golden head here or a black-tipped wing there—though it might start that way. It’s a deep look into the quality of West Virginia’s environmental bounty. “In part it’s the beauty of it, and the other part is understanding the special part that they play in nature—knowing that the ecosystem is still in good enough shape to have a bird like that,” Pollard says. While cerulean warblers are still plentiful in southern West Virginia and parts of Ohio, the bird is on the threatened list. The big tall oak forests they prefer are rapidly shrinking throughout the country and with their disappearance warblers become all the more rare. “It’s special,” Pollard says, “when you get to a place where they are and know a place still exists for that creature.”
