Disability need not stop the pursuit of an obsession: Legally blind birding

I was a 26-year-old physics graduate student when I became suddenly, inexplicably, obsessed with birds. I was innocently studying at a park one spring afternoon when the sight of a Northern Flicker somehow kick-started a need to go identify as many species as possible. Before that day, birds were just another part of a natural landscape that I moderately appreciated. But with this happy surprise, it was as if a filter had been removed and these creatures took on bright, new significance.

Within a year, however, I would be presented with another surprise that was far less pleasant: the rapid deterioration of my eyesight. This was due to Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), the most common genetic cause of blindness. RP usually results in the loss of (at least) night vision and peripheral vision. In my case, my central vision was, and has so far remained, intact, but my visual field is constricted into “tunnel-vision.” One is legally blind if their visual field is less than twenty degrees - mine was measured to be fifteen - plus, I cannot see anything in low light. I consider myself lucky so far, though, because many with RP are totally blind.

On the left, a tree full of Hoatzins, my favorite species, along the Amazon River. With RP, you get just a fraction of the scene, as shown on the right. Sometimes, tunnel-vision is represented as blackness punctuated by a small image, but that really isn’t accurate. To see the black, the “walls of the tunnel,” would be to actually see something. Rather, there is literally nothing to see. The brain (my brain at least) seems to fill it in with a kind of soupy light, so that there is no contrast or demarcation between the image in the center and the nothingness off to the sides. It is hard to describe.

Just how much RP would affect my growing preoccupation with members of the class the class Aves was not initially apparent. I often birded alone, and lacked the experience to realize just how many birds I was not seeing. Many of the places I’d frequent, while I was learning the ropes, were not especially problematic for someone with limited eyesight: a lake full of waterfowl, a mudflat full of waders, or a prairie with a bird on every other fence post.

Meanwhile, I’d meet a lovely biology graduate student named Claire, an experienced birder and thus the object of my wooing. Soon we found ourselves with a family, so most of our first decades of birding together consisted of those kind of mixed outings that every birder/parent knows well; scanning the trees between stints of keeping the kids out of the poison ivy, or worse. Claire would develop the patience to help me with the occasional difficult bird, be it a skulking thrush in a dark, hardwood forest, or a warbler working high overhead. That some birds escaped my searches didn’t bother me too much back then, because we were usually near home, and I knew we’d be back in the same spot in a day or two. I would get the bird then, or next month, or next year.

Claire and Michael birding in Germany, 2016.

The full impact of my vision loss became clear later, after the kids became more self-sufficient and we could take serious trips. Since sites with high species counts are often in dense tropical forests, we’d frequently find ourselves in places where the low light and endless depths of foliage made finding birds far more daunting. No less arduous for me would be the mere negotiation of some narrow forest track: when your field of vision is attenuated, you cannot simultaneously keep pace with the person ahead, scan for treacherous footing, and avoid the occasional branch that is perfectly positioned to deliver a stunning good whack to the forehead. Birding would sometimes become a (literally) bruising affair.

And now the stakes were higher because we’d pay handsomely to spend a scant few days or a week in some distant locale, realizing that we likely had just this one shot at various tantalizing species. And although everyone invariably misses some birds, it would become maddening to be on a guided outing and to keep failing to see species that everyone else was admiring. The group would have moved on to the next birds while I was still trying to find the previous one. Once in Ecuador, after fruitlessly spending the better part of an hour trying to glimpse a White-backed Fire-eye that others had seen, I was ready to toss my binoculars and go seek out a less discouraging obsession, one better suited to my limitations.

Yet that same fire-eye also provided me with a solution, because while he was masterfully avoiding my gaze, he kept singing. Later that day, while brooding about my situation, I realized I’d could still capture a record of such birds going forward, despite my eyesight – I could capture them sonically. I had always resisted the idea of ticking, as a life bird, something that was "heard only." I was not confident in my ability to correctly identify anything and everything by ear. And I am not willing to simply take a guide's word for it, because even experts can misidentify vocalizations in the field. But by making recordings, I could get around this. I'd have objective evidence of the bird, being able to verify the identification via comparison with other recordings. What’s more, my audio could add to the growing digital repositories such as xeno-canto and eBird’s Macauley Library.

Spectrogram of a White-backed Fire-eye singing, recorded by Peter de Rouw in Ecuador, from xeno-canto.

Of course, I still make every effort to see birds, and with luck and a patient guide, I often do. Sometimes I even manage to photograph them. But I’ve learned to be content with a recording if that is what I’m given. After all, we undertake these quests on the birds’ terms, not ours. If they want to show themselves, or vocalize, they will. One takes what is offered and appreciates it for what it is. Some birders have told me they cannot imagine ticking a species that they heard but didn’t see. I ask them why they don’t feel the same way about counting a bird that they saw but did not hear. Why is sight considered more valuable than hearing?

Why is sight considered more valuable than hearing?

After the experience with the Fire-eye, I also decided that I would not stop chasing birds until I had identified, visually or otherwise, at least half of the world’s bird species. Depending on the taxonomy, this might mean around 5,200 to 5,400 birds; as of February 2021 I’m just shy of 4,500. That’s striking distance from a vivid demonstration that disability need not stop the pursuit of an obsession.