The Bottom Lines : For a Watcher of Harlequins and Ospreys, Seeing Is Creating

Like a man obsessed, Bob Neuwirth led his weary Pasadena Audubon Society followers through bone-chilling winter winds in single-minded pursuit of a harlequin duck.

Focusing his high-powered scope on a Huntington Beach lagoon and finding his prey, Neuwirth instantly became a study in conflicting emotions.

Here was this eastern fowl, a treasure for any western birder’s life list, inexplicably cruising in the Bolsa Chica wetlands. On the other hand, someone else had spotted the harlequin earlier and had told Neuwirth where to look, so for him it did not really count.

“It was supposed to be there and it was there,” he said. “There was really little challenge. The whole thing was cut and dried.”

Such are the fine points among birders, a species as paradoxical as this exotic fowl swimming alongside the Pacific Coast Highway that borders the wetlands in Orange County.

Alternately jubilant and dissatisfied, Neuwirth goes through life insatiably questing after just one more bird. And then another and another.

As on that frigid winter day, he usually has company. Neuwirth was leader of this particular Pasadena Audubon Society outing, inspired in part by the quest for the mysterious harlequin. On weekends when Audubon is not sponsoring a bird watch, Neuwirth usually goes alone or with friends to scout some likely rich resource.

With skin apparently impervious to weather, with innards that can go for hours without food or drink, he steadfastly looks and trudges onward.

In a particularly rich run of luck, Pasadena birders identified 74 species in one recent outing. Those satisfied quit. Those obsessed--or stuck in Neuwirth’s carpool--continued for a total of 92.

“I’m not a numbers person, so I don’t really want to talk about that,” he said. Then, reluctantly, he revealed that his life list--the record most birders keep of what they’ve seen--has about 425 species. But he complicates his with codes: one code for birds he spotted himself, another for birds that other people pointed out, sometimes a mark deleting those he can’t remember having seen after the passage of a few years.

Mickey Long, staff naturalist at Eaton Canyon Nature Center in Pasadena and a director of the Audubon Society, called Neuwirth “an exceptionally good birder” whose life list ranks high, considering that there are an estimated 800 bird species in North America. Neuwirth has been official compiler of the local annual Audubon Christmas bird count for eight years and is a frequent leader of field trips.

It all started when he was a kid, Neuwirth said, when his home in the East Bronx (“the poor part of the Bronx, not the nice part”) was surrounded by swamplands. A sweet bird song lured him into the rubble where, crawling on hands and knees, he spotted a yellow-throated warbler. He learned what it was later by checking in the library. So he usurped the family opera glasses, kept looking for birds and checking libraries, and he was on his way--”to the detriment of my school work,” he said.

Now Neuwirth is 59, a relocation specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Los Angeles, a Pasadena-area resident since 1966, and one of Pasadena Audubon’s most serious, dedicated birders. He digressed occasionally along the way, Neuwirth said, but having a heart attack in 1972 brought up the question of meaning and purpose in his life, and birding has been the best answer.

“This is the thing I want to do,” he said. “It’s very important to me--more important than a lot of other things might have been. When I suddenly stumble on something unexpected . . . .

“I saw an osprey yesterday,” he interrupted himself. “Just the way it was flying I knew it was an osprey. I got a moderate high over that. I’ve seen dozens of ospreys, but I’m really impressed with myself that I could see that form and know it was an osprey.

“If I didn’t know it was there, it wouldn’t be there. So I created that. There is creativity in this. Do you understand?”

Zenlike, referring to the riddle of the tree falling in a forest (if nobody hears it, is there a sound?), Neuwirth continued:

“These things are all around us and we don’t know it. For every osprey I see--in a sense create--there must be a hundred other things that I’m not aware of. What have I not seen? This gets surrealistic.”

But it doesn’t have to be that way for anyone else, he said. Birders tend to concentrate on birding, and seldom philosophize on what it means to them, so it’s anybody’s guess why they do what they do.

“I have this need to have people admire what I’m admiring,” Neuwirth said. “A feeling of wanting to show people there’s something there for them. And it can be anything they want it to be.”