Birds Keep His Spirits Soaring

Autumn begins and ends early for Guy McCaskie.

And each year it brings him the same bustling routine.

In June, he starts visiting eucalyptus groves along the San Diego County coast several times each week, with occasional trips to the Laguna Mountains.

Throughout July and August, he rises at 3:30 a.m. to drive to the Salton Sea on weekends, ignoring--or trying to ignore--the blistering desert heat.

During those months he also frequents the shores of North County lagoons such as Batiquitos and San Elijo and, as September gives way to October, he visits Point Loma and the Tia Juana River Valley almost daily.

Finally, in November, McCaskie’s autumn comes to an end.

Movements Dictated by Birds

McCaskie is a field ornithologist--a birder. His movements at this time of year are dictated by migrating birds, some of which begin to seek their wintering grounds as early as June. Others head south in subsequent months and by November the great fall shifting of the world’s bird populations is virtually complete.

Late summer and autumn are busy times for all birders, whose numbers have grown rapidly in recent years. The National Audubon Society’s membership has doubled to 550,000 over the last 10 years and the society estimates that as many as 30 million Americans watch birds at least occasionally. In San Diego, the society’s local chapter and the Natural History Museum now sponsor regular classes on bird-watching.

But few people pursue birding with the passion McCaskie does. Although he works about 50 hours a week as vice president in charge of contract management for the Trepte Construction Co., he still finds time for another 50 hours of birding every week. He’ll drive or fly hundreds of miles on a moment’s notice for a glimpse of a single rare bird.

He carries his $700 binoculars with him wherever he goes and recently he purchased a four-wheel-drive station wagon so he could reach remote bird-watching locations via roads that would tear the innards out of an ordinary car.

All that seems like odd behavior for anyone, much less a construction company vice president. But McCaskie, 51, a precise man with a love of logic and an offbeat sense of humor, has never been much concerned about what other people might think of him.

At the same time, he has always known exactly what he wanted to do when it comes to watching birds. A resident of Imperial Beach, he is considered not only one of the top field ornithologists in the United States--he’s the one who started the current birding craze in California back in the early 1960s.

“Guy certainly got things started in this part of the world,” said Elizabeth Copper, who has known McCaskie for years and is herself considered one of the top field ornithologists in the state.

McCaskie first became interested in birds while growing up in Scotland. Collecting bird eggs is a common hobby for schoolboys there, he said, the way collecting and trading baseball cards is for American boys.

As a teen-ager, he attended a private school in northern Scotland, where the teachers informed him that he had to have an “official” hobby. McCaskie chose bird-watching and eventually became president of the school’s bird-watching club.

After serving in the British Army, McCaskie moved to the Lake Tahoe area of California in 1957 and began working in construction. In 1962, he moved to San Diego to study civil engineering at San Diego State University (one of only two schools in the state that had an undergraduate program in civil engineering at that time), and by the time he graduated he was already working at Trepte.

“I’ve always been fascinated by construction,” McCaskie said. “I like seeing buildings being built. . . . It’s just that I have a hobby--bird-watching--that’s strictly opposite.”

While he was getting involved in the construction business, McCaskie was revolutionizing birding in California. “The style of bird-watching then (popular in the state) was very different than it is today,” he explained. “People would get together and look for birds the way they go to look at desert wildflowers or something. They went to see things that were bound to be there--like acorn woodpeckers in the Laguna Mountains.

Blown Off Course

“In Great Britain, the idea was to try to find some (rare) vagrant,” a bird in a place it isn’t normally found. Some vagrant birds have been blown off course by storms; others apparently have faulty navigational instincts and simply migrate to the wrong places.

“To me it seemed anticlimactic to not look for unusual birds,” he said. “I couldn’t live with the style of birding (that was popular here), so I became a loner.”

He began traveling throughout California, keeping a list of all the different birds he saw. It wasn’t long before he had added 20-25 species to the roster of birds officially known to have alighted at one time or another in the state. And it wasn’t long after that that a younger generation of birders began to follow McCaskie’s lead.

“They found that looking for vagrants (and other unusual birds) was a lot more exciting than going out with some old ladies in tennis shoes and gawking at some common bird,” said McCaskie. “And that’s what keeps (serious) bird-watchers going--the thrill of finding something unusual.”

Driven by Competition

Increasingly, they’re also driven by competition with each other. Most birders now keep personal lists of the birds they’ve seen statewide, along with separate lists of those they’ve seen in various counties. But McCaskie’s list of birds seen in California, with 540 different species on it, is by far the largest.

Someday someone will probably pass that figure, Copper said, but McCaskie has enough of a lead that it probably won’t happen soon.”

McCaskie likewise has the largest list of birds seen in San Diego County--450. “It wasn’t until after I got here and we started (looking) that we realized what a gold mine” the county is for birds, he noted. The wide variety of habitats here--from coastal marshes to desert valleys--supports “the greatest variety of birds of any single county in North America,” he said.

That’s one of the main reasons McCaskie settled in San Diego County, just as the nearness of the Tia Juana River Valley is the main reason he lives in Imperial Beach. “The valley used to be the single best spot in the state” for bird-watching, said McCaskie. “That’s when it was in its healthy agricultural state. There were irrigation ditches . . . and crops of alfalfa that supported a lot of birds.

“But it’s deteriorating now--no doubt about it. Floods devastated things in the late ‘70s, and more and more houses are infringing on it.”

Ironically, the sewage overflows from Tijuana that have plagued the river valley in recent years have probably helped its bird life by discouraging human activity, McCaskie pointed out. “Sewage doesn’t hurt wildlife, as long as it doesn’t have toxic (chemicals) in it,” he said.

Huge Colony of Egrets

“The valley still has a great deal of value for birds. There’s a huge colony of egrets there, and two or three pairs of little blue herons nest here--which makes it the only place in the state where little blue herons nest.”

Still, the single best spot in San Diego County to look for birds is Point Loma. It’s a prominent neck of land that provides a haven for migrating birds of all types, especially on days when low clouds obscure the county’s coast.

The clouds make it difficult for the birds to use topographical landmarks to navigate, McCaskie explained. Thus they often wind up out over the ocean and when they tire and descend to look for a place to rest, they find nothing but water.

“They turn instinctively and head back in the direction they came from,” he said, “and the first thing they see is Point Loma.”

The second thing they’re liable to see is McCaskie, who visits Point Loma regularly, frequently on his lunch hour. But the construction executive will drop his work and rush out of the office any time a rare bird shows up anywhere in the state.

“I bird all the time every weekend, and during the week as time permits,” said McCaskie. “When you’re the vice president of a company they expect you to do some work. But if a really good bird shows up in San Diego, I can rearrange my schedule to go look at it. And if it’s further afield, I’ll rearrange my schedule to take a day off” to look for it.

Trish Seimo, McCaskie’s secretary at Trepte, noted that “we’ve all been instructed that when McCaskie gets a call regarding birds, we’re to interrupt him (and tell him about it), whether he’s in a meeting or on another call or whatever. And if he’s out on a project (site), we try to find out where he is and get hold of him.”

No Joke to the Boss

The policy of reporting rare bird sightings to McCaskie as quickly as possible is “a big joke to us,” Seimo added. “But Guy takes it very seriously.”

McCaskie conceded that there are “a few schedule conflicts, inevitably” between his work and his passion for birding. But he added, “I’m lucky to work for a company that is willing to go a long way to tolerate my idiosyncrasies.”

Gene Trepte, chairman of the board of the Trepte Construction Co., noted that when McCaskie does leave work to look for a rare bird, “he’s only gone overnight or for a day or so. He identifies the bird and then comes roaring back. And he’s a workaholic when he isn’t chasing birds.”

Trepte also said that as one of 12 members of the San Diego Zoological Society’s board of directors, “I’m sympathetic to what Guy is doing. . . . He’s worked for us for 25-odd years, and (his birding) has never bothered me.”

Even so, many people find it contradictory that someone as devoted to birds as McCaskie is would work for a construction company, particularly in San Diego, where continuing development seems to threaten some part of the environment almost daily. But McCaskie insisted there is no contradiction. Trepte Construction is a building company, not a developer, he pointed out, and simply contracts to put up buildings that have already been approved for construction.

And he added, “I’m not convinced all building is destructive to the environment. The two can--and have to--go hand in hand. If developers would get high-quality environmental consultants, and truly take a look at their recommendations, (the developers) could in all probability adjust projects so that they’re both economically feasible and have little impact on the environment.

The conflict between development and environmental protection is “truly a difficult question,” McCaskie said, “but we made a law that protects, for example, least Bell’s vireos.

Indicator of Riparian Health

“Now, the least Bell’s vireo is not just a little gray bird. It’s an indicator of the health of riparian habitat--that long, lush greenery you see along rivers. If the bird becomes endangered, it means that riparian habitat is endangered. Do we want to lose that kind of habitat in its entirety?”

The way McCaskie sees it, the solution is not to scuttle all dam, freeway and housing projects that would harm the vireo but to provide proper mitigation for them.

“But the problem is that too many (developers and government development agencies) want to short-cut things. They simply want to put in greenery,” not the proper plants that would support native birds and animals, he said.

In addition to his activities as a field ornithologist, McCaskie is a regional editor for American Birds, a magazine that contributes to the scientific knowledge of birds’ movements by publishing sightings from across the country. He also reviews the annual “Christmas bird counts” from all over California for the Audubon Society.

The counts--lists of all the birds that volunteers have sighted in various counties around the state--arrive at his house in a large crate shortly after they’ve been completed. “It’s a fairly large chunk of paper work to go through and it takes me about three weeks,” McCaskie said with a chuckle.

But, as with anything that has to do with birding, it’s a task he relishes. “‘Birding has kept my wits sharp,” he said. “Identifying birds is often something you have to do rapidly, like putting a jigsaw puzzle together from just a few clues.

Besides, said McCaskie, although he has been watching birds for some 40 years now, he still finds them intellectually stimulating and even a little mysterious. “How does a common cuckoo find its way to Africa? Why do juvenile sandpipers migrate south a month later than the adults?” he asked rhetorically.

“The more I get into it, the more unknowns there are.”