Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

It’s strictly for the birds

As the last days of May wilt and triple-digit temperatures loom, we're reminded that Southern Nevada is a desert.

Many of us try to air condition it, defy it with large lawns, jounce over it in large tortoise-crunching 4-wheel-drive trucks or dump on it with the occasional inconvenient corpse.

But for others it's a place for birds - verdin, bushtits, quail, rock wrens - and the quiet, thoughtful and patient hobby of spotting, identifying and counting them.

Even in the middle of the Las Vegas Valley, man's booming stucco defiance of all that nature intended, there are birds. Birds you wouldn't expect in the desert - ducks, egrets, herons, swans - seasonal tourists too, here for the fake lakes and ponds.

There is, in fact, excellent bird watching to be had at Henderson's sewer ponds. (Of course, we call it the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve at the Water Treatment Facility.)

Bird watching - "birding," to the cognoscenti - that rare recreation here: outdoorsy, family friendly, quiet and, most shocking of all, almost free.

And the birds don't care what kind of shape you're in.

"After my wife had a heart attack, we could still go out birding together even though she really couldn't walk very much," said Jim Boone, a retired-at-48 ecologist and keeper of a bird-watching Web site (www.birdandhike.com).

"You don't have to be in fine physical condition to go birding. You can go birding in your own back yard."

At a meeting of the Red Rock Audubon Society last Wednesday, most of the birders ranged in age from the middle-aged to significantly past middle-aged.

But the best birder of the evening may have been 12-year-old Josh Barrett, spotting birds for the group of 30 with young eyes peering out from under a mop of red hair as he gamboled over Wheeler Camp Springs' puddles and brush on coltish legs.

Josh said he's been birding for 14 months and that his "life list," species he's spotted in the wild, has 271 birds on it.

"It might be 273," Josh allowed.

If there's a competitive side to birding, it's the lists.

Boone keeps a database on his home computer of 10,000 birds and where he saw them. But where it's tempting to see taxonomical mania, Boone says there's merely curiosity.

"You're always trying to identify things - it's a bit of a game," Boone said. "It broadens your whole outdoor experience.

"If you just go hiking and you walk down a trail and don't notice anything you might as well be on a treadmill in a gym."

It's a hobby Bill Hoppes, a retired special education teacher and Las Vegan since 1963, has enjoyed since he was about Josh Barrett's age.

"When I was in the Boy Scouts, someone injected me with a little bird virus. And it festered," Hoppes said.

He said bird watching has made him, as it has many birders, more concerned about the environment.

"You realize without conservation and with a loss of habitat, you're losing your birds," Hoppes said.

"It makes you a conservationist. They go hand in hand."

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