Bird call.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

A generation ago, they were "birdwatchers," a lovely term redolent of tweed jackets, easy strolls in the countryside and a glass of fine port after dinner. Now they're "birders," a more aggressive breed, tuned in to high technology and international travel.

About 650 birders converged on Eugene from around the country and around the world earlier this month as the American Birding Association held its 2003 national convention, the first ever in Oregon.

Among the enthusiasts gathered at the Eugene Hilton were bird world celebrities such as Pete Dunne, author of "Pete Dunne on Birdwatching: The How-to, Where-to and When-to of Birding"; and Kenn Kaufmann, author of the birding classic "Kingbird Highway."

Bird artists, bird photographers and bird guides from around the country joined upscale birders dressed from head to toe in designer khaki - the fashion look among men was distinctly Ansel Adams, often down to the short-cropped gray beard - for workshops, speeches and charter-bus birding tours that left the hotel with ice chests full of box lunches as early as 3:30 a.m.

"When you're hell bent to get a life bird, you'll do about anything," said Diane Pettey, a Florence birder who was among about two dozen local expert birders pressed into service to guide bus tours for the hundreds of out-of-towners.

After leaving the Hilton at 4:30 a.m., Pettey's bus, with 38 people aboard, headed to Florence to give visiting easterners their first looks at such Western birds as wrentit and Western snowy plover. (`They were thrilled with that one!" Pettey said.)

The bus stopped at Sea Lion Caves, not for sea lions but for rhinoceros auklet (`People were just jumping up and down!'), among 79 species the bus riders counted that day.

In the opposite direction, birders loaded themselves into two different buses for the daylong trip over Willamette Pass to see black swifts, a rarity, at Salt Creek Falls, and a variety of woodpeckers nesting in charred snags in a recent burn next to Elk Lake.

The buses reached Salt Creek Falls at 6 a.m. and birders piled out carrying binoculars, cameras and tripod-mounted telescopes.

Rich Hoyer, a professional bird guide from WINGS, a bird tour organization based in Arizona, pointed out the black swifts, which were darting and weaving, mere specks on a distant horizon in the dim morning light.

"Swifts over the round peak," he announced, pointing for the group of birders around him, who followed his every movement with binoculars. "They're heading right, dipping below the horizon, OK, they're out on the right side of the peak now, entering the sky ...'

Later, the group hiked through sandy, burned soil at the Elk Lake burn to find three-toed and black-backed woodpeckers nesting in holes pecked into charred snags.

Birding, by all accounts, is on the rise. Fueled by the disposable income of retirement age, nature-loving baby boomers, birding and birdwatching are pursued to some degree by a third of Americans age 16 and older, according to a rather inclusive figure put out by the ABA.

Among the conventioneers was Gary Johnson, a gray-haired pathologist from Kansas City, Mo. He had started birding in high school, Johnson said, and then rekindled his interest seven years ago as he started looking ahead to retirement. Like most of the conventioneers, Johnson is a lister, meaning he keeps track of the numbers of bird species he's seen.

Johnson's life list of birds he's seen in the continental United States is "well into the 500s," he said. Throw in Hawaii and the rest of the the world and he's into the 600s.

About 800 bird species can be seen in the continental United States.

Perhaps the greatest lister of all time was the late Phoebe Snetsinger, whose life story has just been published by the ABA. "Birding on Borrowed Time" ($19.95, paperback) tells how Snetsinger began birding at age 34, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and continued birding around the world for 17 more years before her 1999 death in a car accident while birding in Madagascar. Before her death, she had listed about 8,500 of the world's roughly 10,000 known bird species.

"Birding on Borrowed Time" was flying off the shelves at the sales room of the convention, which resembled a mid-sized bookstore with some 500 separate titles for sale, in addition to binoculars, spotting scopes, bird song recordings, T-shirts and global positioning receivers.

You could find a bird guide to cover almost any specific spot on the planet, from "Birds of the High Andes" to "A Birdwatching Guide to Cyprus" and "A Photographic Guide to Birds of Peninsular Malaysia and Singapore."

On the main convention floor, commercial booths hawked everything from tropical bird tours to conservation literature. A young woman from the Owl Research Institute of Charlo, Mont., sold a CD of what seemed at first to be owls hooting but proved instead to be ORI President Denver Holt doing owl calls himself.

The aroma of money was everywhere. Blanca Cardenas, special events coordinator of the McAllen, Texas, Convention & Visitors Bureau, passed out fliers on the virtues of birding around McAllen, where the ABA plans to hold its convention in 2004.

Representatives of such high-end optical firms as Nikon, Pentax, Swarovski and Kowa offered telescopes and binoculars with four-digit prices to be borrowed by the day for bird tours.

"This convention is expensive," noted Dunne, the popular bird author and one of the convention's featured speakers.

Dunne, who had been trying out optics himself during the afternoon, sat down for a hotel-lobby interview as fans swarmed around him and shook his hand. "This is just a part of the birding community," he said.

Dunne offered three reasons for birding's growing popularity. First, he said, humans have a deep need for contact with nature, whether it be through hunting and fishing or simply observing. Next, he said, noting the preponderance of gray hair in the room, aging baby boomers have the right combination of money, education and interest in the environment to feed a birding frenzy.

Finally, he said, the spread of suburbia has allowed an entire generation of urbane and educated people, who in past centuries would have lived in cities, to observe nature in their own back yards.

"They may have never paid attention to a robin before," he said. "But now it's on their lawn. What is this thing that's waking me up at 5 a.m.?"

The entire history of birding, Dunne noted, is a brief one. Birdwatching was made possible by the availability of low-cost binoculars after World War II and by the publication in 1934 of the first popular field guide to birds by Roger Tory Peterson.

Birdwatching turned into birding in the 1970s, as documented by Kaufman's "Kingbird Highway." The book is an energetic account of a young man's low-rent birding journey, hitchhiking coast to coast in an all-out effort to see as many species as possible in a single year. As first practiced by young, aggressive birders in that decade, the contemplative pastime turned into nearly a contact sport, with birders trying to outdo one another at high listing.

Now birding may once again be at a turning point. Eco-tourism has become the norm, and it's common to meet birders who have listed hundreds of species around the world.

Technology, from instant communication to GPS navigation, has made finding rare birds far easier than it once was. Birding the way it's been done for three decades is beginning to have a faintly maxed-out feel to it.

One possible future of birding may be to turn inward, Dunne said.

"There are a lot of discoveries to be made within walking distance of your own home," he said. "The whole focus on traveling to great natural areas may shift. I love being here and seeing new places. But I've also got this wonderful road at home I love to walk every morning.

"Backyard birding is going to come of age. People are going to become more defensive of nature on their own properties."

Another possible future of birding includes expanding it to include other less well-known species. Kaufman, the keynote speaker for the convention, wrote his most recent book not about birds but about butterflies, which he says can thrill even the most jaded birder with their incredible variety.

"When you're an experienced birder - say you've been birding for 10 years or 20 years - it does amazing things to take up a new field," he told the conventioneers assembled for their Friday night dinner. "A dragonfly can be the equivalent of a starling or a house sparrow" - two invasive exotic species considered trash birds by most birders - "and really be a thrill."

Bob Keefer can be reached at 338-2325 or bkeefer@guardnet .com.

CAPTION(S):

A tree swallow emerges from its nest in the charred Elk Lake burn area.