Feathered Frenzy

Steve Tucker is on a quest. It’s all about focus. And pursuit. He scans the landscape with binoculars, gets out his scope--”Got it!”

He tunes in to a call, scans the chaparral for the winged acrobat diving from branch to branch--”Got it!”

Steve is a bird hunter, one of Southern California’s best, yet his targets fly away unhurt.

The 15-year-old junior at Buena High School is trying to set a record for the most species seen in Ventura County in a year.

With his sharp eyes and keen ears he lives in an avian world most people never notice.

Recently, he sighted a bald eagle, the 299th species he has identified this year. He since has recorded his 300th.

The record, established only last year, is 302. With each new species, it gets harder to find the next. The days are running short.

On a recent Saturday morning, he enticed an older birding friend, Dave Compton, down from Santa Barbara with the promise of showing him a rare tufted duck. Steve can’t drive yet, so he has become an expert at bumming rides. On the way to Point Mugu, he told Compton about the bald eagle that he found at a local game preserve. Steve knew there were hunters out there with shotguns, but he had to check it out. Birding may seem like a tame sport, but it can be thrilling during hunting season.

And cold. On this morning, a storm passed, leaving blue skies and chilling winds that cut through clothing and numbed the hands.

They parked south of Mugu rock, set up their 20-power viewing scopes and scanned the flocks of waterfowl bobbing in the jade-green water. “Oldsquaw,” Steve said, zeroing in on the lone rare duck diving for fish among hundreds of other birds.

Within minutes, a car drove up and two men hopped out with their scopes. Then another car pulled up and three more birders arrived. They had all come in response to phone calls and the e-mail Steve sent out about a rare yellow-billed loon he had spotted out the day before.

“We found the loon, but a shark ate it,” Steve joked, teasing the late arrivals. The birders then argued about the sex of a second oldsquaw duck.

Steve said it was a male. “It’s a female,” countered a birder from Sherman Oaks. “That’s a solid black bill. Do you see any pink on it?”

“So it’s late in its bill development,” answered Steve with a smile. No one would say Steve lacks self-confidence.

He was 12, having recently moved to Ventura from the East Coast, when he looked through a fence at McGrath State Beach and saw “all these ducks I’d never seen before.”

He went home and looked them up in his dad’s bird books. He was hooked. From then on, he eagerly accompanied his father, an amateur bird photographer, on field trips.

Despite his age, the younger Tucker is already establishing a solid reputation in the birding community.

He writes a field notes column in the Ventura Audubon Society newsletter. The local Audubon chapter also enlisted Steve’s help in compiling a checklist of the 445 species of birds seen in the county. Reed Smith, who initiated the list, says Steve is never wrong.

“For Steve, finding a new bird is not a matter or life and death, it’s more important than that,” he said.

Kimball Garrett, author of field guides and manager of the Ornithology Collection at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, praises Steve’s “sharp” powers of observation.

According to Garrett, one of the secrets to becoming a really good birder is to start young. Identifying bird calls is literally like learning a language, and it is a skill best learned early. In fact, in the best birders, the ears are more important than the eyes. In the field, they are always listening for a new call. And they learn that a hidden bird may answer if the birder can utter a similar call.

The other secret is spending a lot of time in the field.

When the yellow-billed loon failed to turn up, Steve suggested they move on.

“Let’s go cruise the ditch,” he said, referring to a drainage ditch next to a sod farm in Oxnard.

At the ditch, Steve and Compton walked up the road, peering into the rushes growing in the standing water, looking for an American bittern that had been sighted by Don DesJardin, “Mr. Ventura Birder” to those in the know. DesJardin compiles Ventura field notes for the American Birding Assn. and maintains a Web site of bird photographs.

He and Walter Wehtje, who holds the county record for most birds seen in a year, were also out looking for the yellow-billed loon that morning.

The competition between Wehtje and Steve, known as “Mr. Ventura Kid,” is friendly. Wehtje established the record last year to set up a target birders could shoot for and to get them to explore new areas in the county. Little research has been done on the birds of Ventura County, and Wehtje, a graduate student in biogeography, says there are plenty of opportunities to find new species.

Steve stopped by shrubbery beside the ditch and began to cackle and make guttural bird-talk. He got no response. Up by the canal, a Virginia rail called, and a green heron burst out of the cattails and flew up the waterway.

To find birds, you have to know where to look. Some of the best places in Ventura County are man-made. The Ventura sewage treatment plant is one. Another spot is the Saticoy spreading ponds, created for ground-water replenishment. These places supplement the remnants of the once-extensive habitat that is now dramatically changed.

The Tamarisk hedgerows on the Oxnard Plain, where Steve led an Audubon group in October, is a good example. The Tamarisks--not native trees--exude a sweet nectar that supports green leaf-hoppers--not native insects--which in turn draw many varieties of warblers.

The native landscape would have supported the birds better than the exotic Tamarisk, according to Garrett, but the hedgerow trees now play an important role in the life of migrating birds.

The biggest threat to birds today is continuing habitat destruction and fragmentation, says Garrett.

Steve’s devotion to birds led him to camp out alone last summer near stands of old-growth trees in Eureka to survey the endangered marbled murrelets. He often got up at 3:30 a.m. and hiked down steep slopes in the dark. A highlight of the job was being able to hang around with people he could relate to. He thinks he would like to work as a biologist or ornithologist some day.

This fall, he picked up a job through e-mail. A woman in Wisconsin wrote that she was coming to California and asked if he would take her out to see some Ventura birds. He charged her $10 per life bird--in birding parlance, a life bird is the first time you have identified that species in your life--and made $80. In addition, he got help with his transportation problem.

No bittern showed up at the ditch on the recent morning, so the birders headed over to the Saticoy spreading grounds to try to find Compton the promised tufted duck. Compton is an experienced birder with an American Birding Assn. list--birds seen north of Mexico--now up to 499, so the duck would be his 500th.

It was even windier in Saticoy. Two red-tailed hawks soared overhead making almost no headway against the gusts, craning their necks down at the tasty-looking ducks floating on the ponds. Two turkey vultures sailed by, rocking from side to side on the wind. They would have liked to have the leftovers.

First pond? No tufted duck. Second? No. Third? No. The waterfowl were skittish that day. A flight of several hundred birds lifted off the farthest pond and took wing, calling. It looked like neither Steve nor Dave would add any birds to their lists that day.

But in the distance, birds remained on the fourth pond. Steve and Dave got out their scopes and scanned the flock.

“Got it,” crowed Steve.

Bobbing in the water was a small duck with a rounded dark head, a crest like a ponytail, yellow eyes and a pale gray-blue bill--the tufted duck.

“That’s a new life bird,” said Compton. “I owe you $8.”

“Ten,” replied Steve.

“Yeah, but I drove,” protested Compton, good-naturedly.