• What: Ruddy Turnstone, Arenaria interpres
• When: Tuesday, October 15, 2024
• Where: Nummy Island, Cape May County, New Jersey

We’d headed out well before sunrise and had been eBirding and iNatting the whole day. It was well into the afternoon now, and we’d just found our first ruddy turnstone, Arenaria interpres, of our long day afield. It was time for a bit of slowbirding.

Slowbirding, an idea I associate most strongly with naturalist Bridget Butler, isn’t what you might think. We weren’t about to kick back and just laze about the shoreline with the turnstone. Except that that’s exactly what we did. We settled down with the bird and prepared to engage in the most intense birding and nature study of our expedition to the shore.

The bird was just standing there, alert and aware:

We discussed the bird’s intricate feathers and its distinctive bill morphology; we talked about its feeding habits and migratory strategies; we reviewed recent research about its evolutionary history and relationship with other shorebirds. But mostly we just watched. With our eyes of course. But also, sparingly, with our binoculars. And, mostly, with our cameras.

When it comes to birding by camera, I’m a late adopter. But she’s been doing it for as long as she’s been a naturalist. Part of it is generational. I’m thirty-six years her senior.

Birding with a camera was rare, but not unheard of, when I was a kid. You’d get your 24 or 36 exposures on a roll of film, then drop them off at Peoples Drug (Gen X buds, remember?), then pay several bucks per roll to get them developed, then pick up the 35mm slides a few days to a week later, then pop ’em in the slide projector in the den (cues Gen X again…), and then, finally, pray that a few turned out okay. What a headache. And, more often than not, what heartbreak. If you were lucky, one or two exposures indicated an identifiable bird.

Hannah Floyd takes a selfie with the turnstone. The method is routine for naturalists in the 2020s, but proposing to do such a thing would have been met with incredulity just a generation ago.

I said part of it is generational. Check that. It’s entirely generational. Of late, I’ve come to appreciate that the biggest difference between birding in the 2020s vs. the 1980s is cameras. With perfectly good cameras nowhere near the cost of a good binocular, we take a hundred or more photos of a single ruddy turnstone, reviewing the images while we’re in the field, maybe doing a bit of post-processing when we’re back home, then getting them online and shared with all the world while the night is still young. If you’ve got a rarity, you text a B. O. C. (back of camera) image to your state or regional listserv (if you’re old school) or drop the image at a Discord server (if you’re NextGen).

That’s all very different from how it was when I was her age.

But there’s an even bigger difference.

Today’s cameras have made us better birders. Better naturalists. Better scientists. Better citizen-scientists and better community-scientists.

Let’s be honest. How many of us, Gen X or older, back in the 1980s, really spent half an hour with a single slam-dunk ruddy turnstone just standing there? Oh we talked that talk from time to time. But extrapolating from, and perhaps projecting from, my own personal experiences, I think it was rare.

Birding with a camera slows us down. We notice iridescence and feather wear; we pay attention to a bird’s bare parts; we angle, literally, for images from left and right, from above and below, in profile and in portrait. Background and context are become critically important. Science and aesthetics are conjoined. And community engagement: inevitable. Sooner or later, the bird flies or swims or scurries away; either that or we ourselves eventually move on. The seen-only bird is a tick on a checklist, but the photo-documented bird is an upload or uploads to eBird and iNaturalist; a post or share to social media; and, unavoidably, an investment in our own continuing education, as we notice things in our photos that we missed altogether in the field and, just as valuably, reinforce and refine or perhaps revise lessons learned in the field.

When we were in the field with the turnstone, we had a couple of questions: First, how old was the bird, and was it male or female? Second, how far along on its migratory journey was the bird? We knew that close-up photos might well answer the first question, and we were amazed to learn a bit later that the bird’s eventual destination was hinted at by careful evaluation of the photos. You might guess how this all went down: We sent the photos to molt expert Peter Pyle, who conjectured that the timing of feather replacement of this presumptive adult female indicated South America as her ultimate destination.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the turnstone flew to a nearby bit of sea rock, where it alternately preened and pecked at algae:

Then it flew away, perhaps to a beach farther south in Cape May County, perhaps, if Peter Pyle’s conjecture was correct, to a beach in South America. And we turned our attention to this:

Imagine proposing to somebody in the late 20th century that you might carry a phone into the field, point it at a cnidarian, and be informed that the creature’s name is Rhacostoma atlanticum.

It’s a lined water jelly, Rhacostoma atlanticum, and, like the turnstone, it was just standing there—or floating, or bobbing, there, I suppose. The jelly was, in its way, alert and aware, also like the turnstone. And, please don’t hate on me for saying this, but I’m nearly certain I’da kept right on walking, back to the car and then to our next stop, were it not for my camera. And this: I’da likely forgotten about it by now, or maybe as early as that night, or perhaps even before I’d gotten back to the car.

Two or three decades hence or even more, if I’m fortunate enough to still be walking this Earth, I’ll look back on my media of the turnstone and the jelly, and that slow afternoon at the edge of the bay by the saltmarsh will come to life for me. The cool anatomy and physiology, the phylogenies and population ecology, and, most of all, the companionship and shared wonder.

Birds like this ruddy turnstone invite us to practice slowbirding, a particularly engaged way of interacting with the natural world.

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