Dogging the Bird : Is Chris Faanes your typical weekend bird watcher? Don’t count on it.

Chris Faanes’ field glasses are filled with bufflehead and bobolinks, dowitchers and kittiwakes, godwits, gadwalls and golden-eyes, all of them among the more than 1,800 bird species he’s doggedly pursued across North America.

In the last decade, Faanes has spent tens of thousands of dollars traveling from Panama to Alaska, peering through binoculars at boobies, phoebes and towhees, red-breasted sapsuckers and yellow-rumped warblers.

Each one he sees, he puts a check by its name.

As a result, in May when the American Birding Assn. publishes its annual List Report, a compilation of members who submit tallies of the species they have sighted, Faanes will sit at the top of the North American list with 1,627 out of a possible 1,850.

Faanes, 42, heads the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Ventura. An ornithologist by training, he was first aware of bird watching at the age of 4. He listed his first bird, a northern bobwhite, near his Wisconsin home when he was 10. As soon as he got a car, he started driving around the state looking for birds.

“When one of my professors asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I told him that I wanted to list more North American species than any other person.”

The achievement of that goal hasn’t come without a price beyond air fare and hotel bills. Some have dubbed Faanes a ticker, a person who, upon achieving one objective, presses ahead to the next. Critics of tickers shrug off big lists for being as much a factor of time and money as birding skill.

The disdain for tickers is one of several issues that divide those who treat wild birds as a hobby.

“Bird watching” is a broad category that a U. S. Department of the Interior survey ranked as the second most popular outdoor activity behind gardening. Bird watching differs significantly from what Faanes does, which is birding.

Racing to Locales

Birders are dedicated, often intense, individuals who spend vacations in distant places where they can observe and list birds. These longer trips are punctuated by infrequent dashes to locales where a rare bird has been spotted.

When Virgil Ketner found a Xantus’ hummingbird near his east Ventura home in 1988, he announced the sighting on a call-in tape, one of several across the nation that notifies the birding community of rare sightings.

“The next morning at dawn, there were over 100 people there waiting for it to get light,” said Ketner, who put out a sign-up sheet for the visitors. “By the time the bird left two months later, there were over 1,000 names on the list.”

Those are birders.

Like pilgrims to the Xantus’ hummingbird, Faanes has accumulated a huge number of air miles traveled.

“It really kicked in 10 years ago. I got divorced in North Dakota and part of the healing process was to travel.”

When a flame-colored tanager was spotted in southeast Arizona, he leaped into action.

“I had a flight the next morning, landed in Phoenix, rented a car and drove 4 1/2 hours to where the bird had been spotted. I found it, got in the car, drove back, jumped on the plane and was in my office the next morning.”

A Steller’s sea eagle, a Siberian species, turns up on a glacier outside of Juneau. Score.

The St. Andrew vireo, a small bird found only on tiny Isla San Andres off Panama. Score.

There are just two corners of the area defined as North American by the American Birding Assn. that Faanes hasn’t covered: the remote Darien Province of Panama and Attu Island on the tip of the Aleutians by the international dateline. His passport is so overrun with visas, entry and exit stamps that he had to get extra pages from the State Department, and those pages are rapidly spilling over.

When a Fish and Wildlife Service pilot claimed to be more widely traveled, Faanes founded the North American Airport and Airline Listing Assn. to decide once and for all who had visited more airports.

The rules state that only airports with a three-letter designator code count (there are 35 such airports in California; Faanes has logged 20 of them), and that you only have to touch the runway.

Shortly after founding the NAAAL, Faanes and the pilot rented a plane and spent an afternoon doing touch-and-gos in Norfolk, Neb.; Columbus, Neb.; Yankton, S. D., and Sioux City, Iowa.

“Pretty bad,” Faanes said, acknowledging his compulsion to catalogue and categorize everything.

“One year I made it my goal to list the license plates from all 50 states and the District of Columbia by May. Well, that was pretty easy, so the big thing next year was to do it by March.”

The license plate exercise culminated the following year when Faanes was working in Nebraska.

“At one minute past midnight, I cruised the Holiday Inn parking lot in Grand Island looking for plates. I got a Vermont, Hawaii and 23 other states by 12:30 in the morning. That was the year I logged all 51 plates by Jan. 28,” he said.

“Pretty bad, huh? Someone asked me when am I not intense. I said when I’m below the Tropic of Cancer.”

He is, above all, a lover of the lower latitudes. He’s visited 41 islands in the West Indies and imbibed a lot of rum in the process. The cumulative experience has made him a devoted fan of singer Jimmy Buffett.

“I have all 232 of his songs.”

A friend once asked Faanes how many geographical references he thought that there were in Buffett’s lyrics. Faanes sat down with a pencil and listened to all 232 songs.

“There are 112 geographical references. Mexico was the most frequently mentioned.”

Faanes’ listing zeal makes him a figure of controversy among even the list-building element in birding ranks.

Sightings Questioned

Lawrence Balch, the Illinois-based editor of the List Report, to be mailed with the June issue of Birding magazine, said some people consider Faanes’ sightings to be unreliable.

“That’s said frequently and vehemently,” Balch said. “I don’t have too many doubts about his North American total. He could be off by 40 birds and still be ahead of the next guy.”

Faanes said he’s been aware of the criticism for years.

“I’ve been making sure that there are a bunch of people around when I go chasing a new species, so that if any doubt arises, there are people who can say, ‘Oh, yeah, I saw it also.” ’

While the vast majority of his sightings are valid beyond question, a few have raised some eyebrows. Take the case of the Eskimo curlew, a species Faanes reported seeing in Nebraska.

At one time, the bird migrated in great numbers through the Great Plains to its High Arctic nesting grounds. Now it’s virtually extinct.

Balch said that although the sighting was not totally implausible, there have been no verified sightings for 10 years and few in the last 30. The Nebraska rare birds record committee, a group that determines if a sighting should be added to the scientific record, didn’t include Faanes’ Eskimo curlew.

“We didn’t even hear about it until six months later and only then through a newspaper story,” said Tanya Bray, a former member of the rare birds record committee. “A sighting like this is important not only to the birding community, but to the scientific community. It’s very unusual that it should come to us through a newspaper article and so long after the fact.”

“It was there,” Faanes countered. “I saw it.”

He even went to a museum and got a specimen of the Eskimo curlew, along with the other species he had seen it with, and re-created the scene to confirm the sighting.

“I looked at the curve of the bill on the Eskimo curlew, and there’s no doubt in my mind.”

Rare Finds

Paul Lehman of Goleta is editor of Birding magazine and a former member of the California rare bird records committee.

He said that in a rare bird sighting--for instance, the Xantus’ hummingbird, which was out of its typical range in Mexico--the bird will hang around for a few days and other people will list it.

“Now and then, everybody finds a bird that takes off and can’t be found again,” Lehman said. “But if it happens too often, it leads to suspicion.”

Don Desjardin of Ventura is one of the few people who has gone birding with Faanes since the Wisconsin native moved to Ventura a year ago. Desjardin defends his sometime birding partner.

“False sightings happen all the time. He’s made as many honest mistakes as anyone else,” Desjardin said. “In the birding world, you have people who think they know it all. That’s typical in this hobby where many people are over-competitive. Your credibility is always being questioned.”

Faanes counters the doubts with a challenge:

“Come along with me the next time I go birding.”

Where the Birds Are

Depending on how you count it, Ventura County is one of the best places in the country to go birding. Virgil Ketner, head of the annual Christmas bird count, said the county regularly ranks among the top 10 in the nation for number of bird species identified. Each of the public access birding areas listed below hosts as many as 100 species over the course of the year.

Lake Casitas: Eagles winter at the lake. During other seasons it’s excellent for wading birds as well as ducks, grebes and Cattle egrets

Ventura Sewage Treatment Plant and Santa Clara River estuary: Water birds love the waste water settling ponds and the adjoining estuary has shore birds galore. The area has a booming population of herons, American avocets, yellowlegs and sanderlings.

Oak Grove Park in Camarillo: Colorful orioles, California quail and great horned owls.

Wildwood Park in Thousand Oaks: Purple finch, warbling vireo and other woodland species

Big Sycamore Canyon, Pt. Mugu State Park: Species such as the scrub jay, California thrasher and brown towhee abound here. The canyon is also a great place for “vagrants,” species that are out of their normal range and thus constitute rare sightings.

For more information on birding locally call:

* Virgil Ketner, Ventura Audubon Society, 642-3480.

* Margery Coler, Conejo Valley Audubon Society, 484-1947.

Research by PANCHO DOLL / Los Angeles Times