A Birding Interview with Cin-Ty Lee

An amazing polymath, Cin-Ty Lee is a bird ID expert, bird artist/illustrator and photographer, sound recordist, field trip leader, world-famous geologist/petrologist/geochemist, and prolific author. His three-part book series with friend Andrew Birch, the Field Guide to North American Flycatchers—of which two parts have been published—takes a methodical, holistic approach to help all birders, from beginners to experts, crack the empid enigma and other tyrannid trials. A Rice University geology professor since 2002, Lee has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and many other awards. He runs two blogs, consults about birds and the environment; leads bird tours and classes; and looks for birds, arthropods, and plants around Houston and beyond.

In this invigorating interview, Lee tells how he spent the COVID-19 pandemic, promises to finish his ambitious flycatcher ID project, and explains how birding saved his life.

—Noah Strycker, Associate Editor

Birding: After immigrating from Taiwan to the U.S. as a youth, where and when did you get into birds?

Cin-Ty Lee: I grew up in southern California from a very young age. We lived in an orange grove on the outskirts of Riverside, quite isolated, so my brother and I did not have other kids to play with. I wandered around on my own in the coastal sage scrub hills behind our house, looking for snakes, lizards, and insects. I did not really pay attention to the distant birds, but I remember hearing the calls of California Quail and watching Red-tailed Hawks land on the granite boulders behind our house.

One April day, when I was about 10 years old, an old friend of my father visited from Alaska. He was a birder, and he brought me a National Geographic Society field guide. My father was not a birder, but he asked one of his birder colleagues, Doug Morton—famous for finding California’s only Mexican Violetear in the 1970s—to show us around. Next thing I know, we were out at Morongo Valley, along a willow- and cottonwood-lined stream at the edge of the Mojave Desert. As I stepped out of the car and looked toward a large cottonwood tree, out popped a bright adult male Vermilion Flycatcher. I was stunned. And then an equally bright Summer Tanager popped up. Hiding in that same cottonwood was a Long-eared Owl. As we walked into a marshy part of the stream, a Virginia Rail strode across the path. I was hooked. With my dad’s old Bushnell binoculars and the National Geographic guide, I returned home and started trying to find and identify all the birds around me.

I didn’t know then that birding would one day save my life in a way. Being one of the only Asian kids at school, I was often made fun of. In junior high, I got beat up a lot. I was not particularly good at schoolwork, so I did not have great self-esteem. Birding really ramped up for me in junior high as I became more skilled. The ability to identify birds gave me something to feel good about. My parents could see that birding was helping me cope, so they encouraged it. My mother took me to the monthly San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society meetings. I met the curator of ornithology at the San Bernardino County Museum, and he let me sit in on his taxidermy classes. I was lucky to have many mentors. The fact that adults were willing to take me birding, and entrust me with helping them find birds, allowed me to gradually heal and repair myself.

 

Birding: How did geology hijack your college plans to become an ornithologist? Do rocks and birds go together?

C-TL: I wanted to be an ornithologist when I was a kid. All my peers were talking about being doctors, lawyers, engineers, artists, carpenters, police officers, anything but ornithology, so I thought I would not be able to make a living in ornithology. At the University of California at Berkeley, I tried to find some topic I might be good at. I took an awesome ornithology class taught by the late Ned Johnson—responsible for the original split of the Western Flycatcher—but I got a disappointing grade. I wanted to be in the field chasing birds and was not so interested in taxonomy and genetics. I realized that birds for me were for enjoyment, not a job. At about this time, I took some classes in geology, which came very naturally to me. The birds did help me at Berkeley, though. I was not doing well in calculus, but the graduate teaching assistant was a birder, so we ended up birding around San Francisco Bay and I learned a little math along the way.

For much of my professional life, geology and birds have been separate, but they go together when I am out in the field. Birds are everywhere. Geology is everywhere, too, and many geologists become birders. I can’t take students outside and only look at rocks. We look at everything—how the geology, climate, and landscape influence vegetation and vice versa. I recently took a group of students up to Sandia Crest in New Mexico to see the Rio Grande Rift and the Great Unconformity. As I pointed out some features in the landscape, an American Goshawk flew by. I turn a few geology students into birders each year. When I see their eyes light up, it reminds me of the birds that sparked me when I was young.

 

Birding: Which skill is most important for birders and geologists?

C-TL: Most important is the art of observation. It is the ability to notice the little things, the big picture, and how the subject relates to its surroundings. It’s about seeing beauty in even the mundane, to notice the anomaly, the rare bird, a never-before-seen behavior, or a new type of rock. Observation is necessary for success in any field. Musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes—the best ones are always observing. I like to bring my son, Heru, and other kids out to explore nature because they always notice something about a bird, plant, or bug that I missed. I learn from kids and students all the time. Sadly, we tend to lose some of that childlike curiosity and ability to observe as we progress through the education system. I started teaching nature journaling classes to help students relearn observation.

 

Birding: What compels you to capture birds in field sketches, drawings, paintings, photography, and audio?

C-TL: Drawing and painting birds were my first loves. Birds are so beautiful, it is fun to capture their images on paper. My interests in photography and audio recording came a bit later. It took a while before I could afford a decent camera and recording equipment. Before that, most of my photos were of such poor quality that it was painful to look at them. I used photographs only to document rarities. Now that the price of good cameras has come down, and photos are so beautiful, one can get quickly drawn into photography. It is dangerous, though; it’s easy to take thousands of photos and spend countless hours processing them.

 

Birding: How does being a wildlife illustrator influence your approach to birding?

C-TL: I love to illustrate, but I do not think I’m good enough to call myself an illustrator. I am mostly self-taught. I look at other illustrators’ works and try to emulate their styles or tricks, but I have a long way to go. My single biggest influence has been Andrew Birch. We met at Berkeley as undergraduate students—he was an economics major, and I was a geology major—when we bumped into each other while looking for a Philadelphia Vireo on campus. We birded like crazy together. For all we knew, we were the only birders on that 20,000-student campus. Andy was an illustrator, and his paintings were eye-opening. He got both the details and gestalt right. He was a completely different level of illustrator from me, and at that time his work seemed very different from some of the illustrations in the National Geographic or Peterson guides. I could see that Andy’s sharp skills as a birder and illustrator were connected, feeding off each other. Illustrating makes you look at the bird very carefully, and consequently you become a better birder. Through Andy, I also was exposed to a different level of birding.

 

Birding: During the COVID-19 pandemic, why did you and Andrew Birch decide to tackle the near-impossible flycatcher ID challenge?

C-TL: Andy and I, back in our Berkeley days, were hardcore birders. Our love for sketching and chasing birds made us both interested in difficult identifications. Andy suggested we do an article on Pacific and Arctic loons, which we published in Birding magazine in Apr. 1997. Andy did the illustrations, and I did most of the writing. After that, Andy moved to Southern California and I moved to Texas. We kept writing and illustrating identification articles for Birding and North American Birds on difficult birds: female orioles, dowitchers, pipits, wood-pewees, and the like. Again, Andy illustrated and I wrote. We really wanted to do a field guide to the birds of North America, but never got there because we spent so much time on each challenging species complex that it would have taken 200 years to do a full field guide. Andy started Surfbirds.com, and we worked to populate the website with identification articles. During its run from 1998 to 2023, Surfbirds was a popular and cutting-edge place for birders to share trip reports and photos.

A common theme in our articles is the idea of holistic ID, that is, using a combination of field marks, behavior, gestalt, habitat, and other characteristics to aid in identification. For some birds, no single field mark is diagnostic, but the combination of multiple field marks is. Flycatchers are particularly challenging because, in many instances, there is overlap in most field marks. When I look back, our articles on loons, pipits, orioles, and other species were steps in our finding the right way to tackle holistic identification. It’s one thing to identify a flycatcher yourself, but it is not that easy to communicate to others, including beginners, how you did it.

What we needed was a standardized way of describing field marks so that everyone talks the same language. Our first two field guides are quite different from traditional field guides. In each, the first third of the book shows how to see the bird and what to pay attention to. Our goal is to take what seems like wizardry to beginning birders and make it accessible. This first section helps even experts communicate how they go about making identifications.

By deliberate choice, there are no photographs in our two guides. Photographic guides are beautiful, but there is something unique about the Chapman, Peterson, and Sibley guides. Unlike photographs, illustrations can convey important features in a consistent way. They can line up birds side by side in the same lighting for comparison. They can emphasize particular features. Nonetheless, illustrating flycatchers is not for the faint of heart. Many of the structural and plumage features are subtle. Andy’s illustrations are spot on.

Another deliberate feature of our guides is that the bird images, maps, and text are all large. Bigger is better. For flycatchers, in which wing-bar details and primary feather patterns are relevant, big images are essential. The same goes for maps. Traditional guides show breeding, nonbreeding, and migratory ranges, but we wanted to show migration timing as well as migration routes, so large-format maps were necessary. Sometimes, the timing of migration can help identify or rule out certain species. For example, the Yellow-bellied Flycatcher doesn’t appear in the U.S. until May. Timing is a critical part of holistic identification.

We split the project into three parts partly because it was such a daunting undertaking. Doing it all in one volume would have taken five or more years. We were amid the pandemic and concerned that one of us might not even make it out. Also, to do justice to each guide, some bird groups deserved their own treatment. The generally drab “empids” (in the genus Empidonax) and pewees are a good pairing, but the more colorful species in the genera Tyrannus (kingbirds) and Myiarchus require a different approach. We got feedback on the first volume, which allowed us to make the second volume better.

We are working on the third volume. It will have photographs along with Andy’s illustrations. We see this final installment as a reference work, complete with detailed spectrograms, photographs of birds and their habitats, and maps, as well as Andy’s illustrations. It will include an exhaustive presentation of primary tip spacing measurements to help banders identify flycatchers. Primary tip spacings might seem like an impossible detail to see, but the quality of photographs today makes it possible. With the third volume, one will be able to identify Willow and Alder flycatchers with reasonable confidence. [See Matt Smith’s Dec. 2025 Birding feature story referencing Lee and Birch’s 2025 paper. —Ed.]

Birding: Also in the pandemic, what got you into nightly recording the sounds of migrating birds?

C-TL: The inability to travel during the pandemic hit birders hard. Many birders started playing around with microphones to listen to nocturnal migrants. It was the perfect time for newbies like me to come in. I set up an off-the-shelf voice recording microphone (Olympus LS-10 and now a Zoom F1-SP shotgun microphone) and was shocked at how many birds I could detect flying over Houston. The learning curve was steep because flight calls are short and sound similar, but there was a welcoming community of NFCers on Facebook. Many of us communicated and shared recordings late into the night. The NFC community sort of learned together.

It becomes an addiction because there is something new every night. When 2,000 Swainson’s Thrushes and several hundred Gray-cheeked Thrushes pass through the middle of urban Houston in one spring night, one is hopelessly hooked. It is magical. Everyone knows about spring migration in Texas, but less is known about fall migration. One difference is that the number of detections each night is very low in fall, and we detect almost no thrushes, grosbeaks, and warblers compared to the sheer volume in spring. This is largely the opposite of the experience for so many NFC enthusiasts in the Appalachians and Eastern Seaboard. Most fall detections in coastal Texas are of sparrows, which are rarely detected in spring. We detect hundreds of Grasshopper and LeConte’s sparrows each season in the middle of Houston, but it’s hard to find these secretive birds during the day.

We now have a five-year acoustic record of fall migration. There is a remarkable correlation between the number of Grasshopper Sparrows we detect each fall with drought conditions on the northern prairies based on satellite-based remote-sensing data. Acoustic surveying of migrating birds might help us gauge the ecological health of grasslands thousands of miles away. It will be interesting to see the results of larger-scale acoustic networks, such as the Chicago Bird Migration project at the University of Illinois. The future is bright.

 

Birding: How do you compare the birding world today to 30 years ago, when you were starting out as probably the only non-white birder around?

C-TL: The birding community 30 years ago was not particularly diverse. Most birders were white, and birders younger than 20 were rare. Birding itself was a fringe hobby. I still remember walking home from a bird walk and coming across a group of my high school friends. I hid my binoculars because I didn’t want to look uncool. How times have changed! Birding has recently become cool [See Joe Trezza’s article on p. 38 of the print edition of this issue. —Ed.], and I think that has to do with the internet and social media connecting everyone together. Now, young birders can connect across the country. If you’re a birder of color, you know there are others out there. As you start to see others who look like you, you are encouraged, and in time your presence encourages others. Birding has picked up all over the world. Now there are many birders in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—and in some countries, such as Taiwan, birding is even more popular than in the U.S.

Barriers to getting into birding also have dropped. Citizen-science projects like eBird and iNaturalist, as well as the great ID apps from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, have made it easier to discover nature. Once one gets pulled in, there is a remarkable community to interact with. Thirty years ago, there was an elite circle of hardcore birders manning the gates, but the gates have fallen. I try to turn everyone I see into a naturalist or a birder. We all come from different places and have different views, but birds and nature can be shared by all, drawing us together.

 

Birding: What strategy and itinerary do you recommend for birding Texas?

C-TL: Birding Texas can seem daunting because it is so large and has such a diversity of habitats. The only way to do it is to keep coming back. If I had only two weeks, I would come in April. Maybe start in the Lower Rio Grande Valley to rack up the Mexican birds, then head up to the Corpus Christi area to pick up any lingering Whooping Cranes, and then move on to the upper Texas coast, hitting coastal hotspots like Houston Audubon’s High Island and Bolivar Flats sanctuaries, the Texas Ornithological Society’s Sabine Woods Sanctuary, and the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory’s Quintana Neotropical Bird Sanctuary—ending with a foray into the piney woods of East Texas to pick up Red-cockaded Woodpecker and Bachman’s Sparrow. That could be a 300-species trip!