His Hobby Is Something to Crow About

Twenty-seven years ago , Sandy Wohlgemuth quit playing golf because of bursitus in his left shoulder. He turned in his golf clubs for binoculars and has been an enthusiastic birder ever since. Wohlgemuth and his wife, Marge, live in Reseda. One of our kids was 6 or 7, and he had asthma, and he was a very bright kid. My wife decided he needed something to stimulate him, and she bought him a bird book. So we all got involved, and it just kind of grew.

You see the birds in your back yard, and you see all these birds in the book, and you want to see more. Then you buy a pair of binoculars. It became an interesting way to pass the time.

We would go out and try to find other places to find birds because the back yards aren’t the best places in the world. So you find different habitats. You go down to the beach. An estuary is a great place.

There’s Malibu Lagoon, which is one of the few places left in Los Angeles County where you can see water birds, long-legged waders, the herons and egrets. You go up to Mt. Pinos in the Tehachapi Mountains, because the birds that are at higher elevations are different from the ones that are down below.

You learn more about it, and it becomes a great aesthetic experience to see a beautiful bird. There are some gorgeous birds in the world, and there are different shapes and different colors and different sizes.

When you’re out looking for birds, you’re looking for something that you haven’t seen ever, then you start making notes. You can’t keep all this stuff in your head, when you get up to a couple of hundred birds.

I keep a journal from the very first day we started this. That’s 27 years ago. I’ve already filled one book that’s about an inch and a half thick, and so I started on another one.

We’d go camping, and we’d try a place where we hadn’t been before. It would have different birds, different animals. We didn’t ask the kids. We just dragged them along. We had three boys and they all had binoculars.

Birding adds a lot of zest to just going out and camping. I’ve seen people in Yosemite Valley, for instance, just sitting there and playing cards all the time. I mean, they can do that at home. One year we camped in Yosemite Valley, and we spent our time watching a great woodpecker coming right up to where we were camped, a huge bird that we usually have trouble finding.

We went to Texas several years ago, in an old station wagon, and all our equipment and a tent, because Texas probably has the concentration of more unusual birds than any other state including California.

In a foreign country where you don’t know the language, you don’t know where the facilities are, where you can stay, you go with a birding tour group.

They take you out early in the morning and you go back at night and you look for owls and night birds and so on. You see a whole different spectrum of birds. They rarely come up here.

We went to Costa Rica, and we went to Mexico twice. Mexico’s a gorgeous place for birds. You can see 400 birds or more on a two-week tour. That’s 400 birds you’ve never seen before.

Birding takes you out of yourself, getting out in the open air, walking a little bit, getting a little exercise. Birders don’t get a lot of exercise, but they do stroll along, and the cares of the world sort of drop away.

If I don’t go birding for a week, or God forbid, two weeks, I need a fix. I’ve got to go out and see the birds. To me, it’s a kind of a renewal. I want to go out and see, even though I’ve seen all those birds I saw yesterday. I get a great deal of satisfaction out of seeing them again.