The minute i heard my first love story
The first birding-by-phone service rolled out in the 1950s, and the concept’s popularity grew through the next five decades-before crashing headlong into listservs, social media, and ultimately the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird app and website, which allow instant lookup of logged bird sightings anywhere in the world. That would determine our pursuit, whether chasing a Northern Saw-whet Owl in the Bronx’s Pelham Bay Park or a Sabine’s Gull on eastern Long Island. We’d crowd by the receiver to hear a list of the week’s unusual sightings. While other kids passed their Saturdays attending matinées or playing Little League, our afternoons followed a different routine: After arriving at my dad’s house, we’d call the New York Rare Bird Alert. My parents were divorced, and my brother and I spent weekends with my bird-obsessed father. The Rare Bird Alert loomed large in my childhood. Cutting-edge in their day, these services capitalized on emerging telecommunications technology to deliver news to birders in what then would have been considered real time.
One of birding’s most historic and influential institutions isn’t quite there yet, but the phone services that announce unusual bird sightings-known as Rare Bird Alerts, hotlines, or dial-a-bird numbers-are clearly an endangered species. There has to be a last of everything: Passenger Pigeons, unicorns, Jedis, suppers.