Chasing a nemesis bird with birding author Julia Zarankin

If you are reading this post, you’re either already a birder or taking your first steps on the path to becoming one. Even if neither of those situations applies, I recommend that you read a wondeful book on discovering the joys of birding: Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder: A Memoir, by Julia Zarankin.

Julia is a Toronto-based writer and lecturer and an avid birder. I happened onto her book in the most serendipitous of ways.

Several weeks ago, I received an out-of-the-blue email from Julia, who had seen one of my Mercer Meadows reports on e-Bird. The blue grosbeak is a nemesis bird for her, one that maddeningly has eluded her view, even with her high-quality Zeiss binoculars.

I saw plenty of blue grosbeaks at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm last year, and as spring wore on this year I was hearing them and wondering when I’d see one. I finally spotted one high up in a tree on the Reed Bryan Farm side of the park one morning, and Julia spotted that report.

She was coming to the Princeton area to visit friends and asked me for pointers on where to spot one of the grosbeaks. I wrote back with my best instructions and offered to meet her at the park when she got to town.

On a Saturday morning, we met in the parking lot and headed down the trail. While we saw plenty of birds on our walk (her affable husband, Leon, joined us), we didn’t see or hear a single blue grosbreak.

Darn.

But if you read Julia’s book, you’ll know that missing your target bird is part of the birding game. Appreciate what presents itself to you in the moment.

As we walked back to our cars, we traded notes on people we knew in common at Princeton University, where I work and she had gotten her Ph.D. That’s how I found out Julia is a writer (widely published in Canada) and asked if she’d written any books.

That’s when she mentioned “Field Notes,” which I ordered on Amazon later that day.

Julia is as delightful a writer as she is a person. The book isn’t just about birding. She writes about her upbringing in Ukraine during the late years of the Soviet Union, her years as an immigrant in Canada, the breakup of her first marriage, finding new love with Leon and their ambitious travels.

Julia is a wonderful storyteller. I found a lot of commonality between her early experiences at birding and my own, including feelings of inadequacy from misidentifying or not recognizing birds in front of other birders (like the time I thought what might be something exotic turned out to be a male house finch).

The book recounts with good humor some of her misadventures netting and banding birds and camping out in wilderness areas for birding research. Julia also notes the joy of discovering the abundance of birds near home. I’m itching to drive to Toronto to visit some of her favorite spots.

To me, Julia represents the best of birders: a kind and caring advocate for birds, curious and eager to see more of them and appreciate their magnificence, and willing to share her knowledge (without resorting to “birdsplaining”).

Take my advice: get the book. You’ll meet a new friend in Julia, and maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to meet her some day in the wild as I was.