Birds of a Feather : Jim and Sylvia Gallagher’s hobby is no flight of fancy--the Huntington Beach couple spend many hours chronicling lives of winged creatures.

Perhaps, in the estuaries and thickets visited by migratory birds, there are little service stations where the birds can clean their windshields and refuel before proceeding south. And if the birds can pick up road maps there, the Huntington Beach house of Jim and Sylvia Gallagher must certainly be marked on them as a favored rest stop.

The Gallaghers have made their back yard into the Harris Ranch of bird comfort zones, with a pumice birdbath with dripping water to attract warblers, and all manner of feed--from home-grown sunflowers to caterpillars--to entice others. Once they get a crowd of birds, other birds are naturally attracted, including predators who also find a well-fed meal there.

Meanwhile, retired cop Jim sits in a blind--sort of a dog house with more headroom and less style--shooting away at them with a Nikon mounted with a 500-millimeter lens. Last Thursday he sat there from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. hoping in vain that a rare bird he’d seen at 8:15 would return. Sylvia works from four to seven hours every morning on an atlas of Orange County breeding birds, with maps and articles about each species. The book should be published early next year by the Sea & Sage chapter of the National Audubon Society, the largest of three Orange County chapters, of which she is an active member.

Had it not been for the book project keeping her tied to the computer, the Gallaghers would most likely be on one of their annual four-month jaunts looking for birds they haven’t yet seen. On one such birding trip last year, they hauled their trailer through Canada and up 460 miles of dirt road into the Arctic Circle.

Through such trips, their yard and visits to locals wetlands and parks, Jim has taken some 7,000 slides of 451 feathered species, while Sylvia, armed with a shotgun mike and a Sony recorder, has filled 116 cassettes with bird songs.

Not too surprisingly, it was through their love of birds that the couple met. Jim had called her once with a question in her capacity as bird information officer for Sea & Sage, but she doesn’t remember the call. What did impress her when she saw him first was his big lens.

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Sitting in their den Monday, Sylvia recalled, “Sea & Sage was making educational filmstrips at the time and needed photos, so we were in the habit of striking up a conversation with anybody with a long lens. A friend and I were birding in Santiago Oaks Park. I was standing way up on top of a hill and saw this man with a long lens going this way, and could see my friend and her party going that way, and I knew she would get him.

“ I got him in ’86. We just dealt with each other on a more or less professional basis for three or four years, doing photography for the filmstrips. We took a lot of day trips to the mountains. We went up seven or eight times trying to get the white-headed woodpecker, as I recall, and never could quite get it.”

“And we just got chummier and chummier,” Jim recalled with a smile.

Santa Ana native Sylvia, 58, recalls becoming interested in birds in 1968 while watching her mother feed some in the yard. She got some field glasses and a bird book, and the interest grew from there. A high school and college chemistry teacher much of her life, she’s taught bird identification courses since 1978.

Jim, 67, didn’t pay much attention to birds until after retiring in 1980 from 29 years on the LAPD, including 19 as a detective in Watts.

“I think that’s one of the reasons I went into it,” he said. “There’s so much stress involved in police work, that to get away from it and get interested in nature to me was really restful.

“I had been told I had a medical problem, something wrong with my heart--which I still don’t think I have--so I took up walking. I was walking with a friend in the Bolsa Chica wetlands, and he kept saying, ‘Hey, what bird is that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘They’re darned interesting things. You ought to know what they are.’ When he left, over a week later here comes a bird book in the mail. That got me interested.

“Then I took a class on identifying them, and I was amazed how awful the slides were, so I decided to do better than that. I bought a camera and lens and kept progressing to better cameras and lenses.”

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Even his failed photos can come in handy. In her bird identification classes, Sylvia sometimes projects one of his clunkers on the screen, challenging her students’ ability to tell what bird it is when its out of focus or barely in the frame. She’s graduated more than 600 students out of classes held in the Gallagher’s couch-crowded living room--but she’s not an easy teacher. When Jim helps her with the classes, it’s sort of a good cop-bad cop situation.

“She tortures them and really makes them work to identify the birds,” he said, “and I give them the answers to end their misery.

“At the end of some of these courses, people go out with tears in their eyes because it’s over and they’ve had so much fun. You find these people are more or less loners who think, ‘Well, I’m the only one weird enough to have this interest in birds.’ Then you bring them all together and they wind up as teams and making friends.”

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Sylvia explained why so many flock to the hobby.

“I think we and other people become interested in birding because there are so many different ways you can enjoy birds. You can enjoy them as a collection, seeing how many you can list that you’ve seen. It can be a challenge to learn to identify them with smaller and smaller clues. You get so you know them by their voices, their flight behavior, the way some species flick their wings. And they’re beautiful: There are certain times when you don’t think about anything except that you’re just sitting there watching that beautiful bird.”

There’s a few things they feel the casual back-yard bird fan should know. For starts, if you find a baby bird in the yard, usually the best thing you can do is pick it up and put it back in a tree for the mother to look after.

“It’s absolutely wrong, an old wives’ tale, that they’re rejected if a human touches them,” Sylvia said.

“Another thing is if you have a hummingbird feeder, don’t put food coloring in it because there’s evidence it isn’t good for them. As long as there’s some colored decoration on the feeder, the birds will find it. We also see these feeders where the food is up too long. It should be changed every three days or so, so it doesn’t sour or go moldy. Honey also is definitely not good for them. It causes a fungal disease of the tongue.”

The birds in their own yard have other things to worry about.

“There’s a kestrel out there today, a falcon that’s been eating our birds,” Jim said. “For the last four years we’ve had a sharp-shinned hawk that comes in and eats them. For the first time, this year we had a Cooper’s hawk come in and spend the summer. She’d fly in and eat two or three birds a day. She’s the most skillful bird I ever saw. She hardly ever missed and barely even disturbs anybody except the victim of the moment. So I photograph that . I have a good shot of her with a bloody morsel.”

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It’s not a hobby for the impatient. He often waits all day to get a shot.

Sylvia recalled, “One time he stood on the edge of a marsh for hours on end with a camera with a great big lens with a big sun-shield on it, and a tree swallow came up and hovered around it. It’s a cavity-nesting bird and it obviously thought that cavity had been there long enough to be a good place to nest. That indicates how long he can stand there. He’s like a tree.”

And what goes through his mind during these long, silent hours of waiting?

“Well, I think about the fundamentalist right. That’s annoying the hell out of me. I tape Pat Robertson’s program every day, and he comes up with some of the stupidest things, like saying the other day that the devil is infiltrating the mainstream churches of the United States,” Jim said.

Since getting a computer three years ago, he’s become a compulsive letter-to-the-editor writer, including some that have been published in The Times.

Sylvia’s chief non-birding hobby is embroidery, mostly embroidered birds. She’s made a king-sized quilt, with the stitching done in bird shapes and embroidered with stunning bird designs, all species that nest in California.

“The quilt is a rectangle, and if you look at it as the state of California, where I located the birds on it is relative to where they nest in the state,” she explained.

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Certain of the local nesting birds, such as the gnatcatcher, have been in the news of late due to their endangered status. Sylvia feels it’s a matter that should concern everyone.

“I think biodiversity is symptomatic of a healthy planet. If we’re losing species--I don’t care whether they’re birds, insects, fish or you name it--it’s symptomatic of the fact that our planet is becoming a less hospitable place for any life to live. If you want to appeal to people’s selfish instincts, we need a healthy planet. To me that’s the kind of argument that should be attractive to people who didn’t give a hoot about birds.

“Of course, if you do give a hoot about birds, then you just can’t stand the idea of us losing any. They’re so beautiful and so fascinating that you develop an emotional bond to birds. When people become birders they usually just start with a casual interest and then develop this bond. I think that most people who become environmentalists become so because of that emotional bond they’ve developed with the wildlife.”