Birder loves a good feather report

Among naturalists, bird-watchers are odd ducks in that their amateur enthusiasm and participation are warmly welcomed by the scientific professionals in their field.

“The study of birds, probably as much as any branch of science, is not only informed by, but almost dependent on, interested amateurs,” said Kimball Garrett, ornithology collection manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

A case in point is 47-year-old Jon Fisher. By day, he is a sound-production administrator at Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale. And also by day -- often very, very early by day -- he is the go-to guy for every fellow birder in Los Angeles County agog with excitement at having spotted a Eurasian wigeon or burrowing owl or painted redstart or other uncommon winged biped.

Fisher is the compiler for Los Angeles Rare Bird Alert, an Audubon Society-sanctioned program that tips bird-watchers to verified, unusual sightings by their peers. Observers post what they consider to be extraordinary sightings on an online listserv ( www.groups.yahoo.com/ group/LACoBirds) or call Fisher’s cellphone. As compiler, Fisher monitors the postings and prepares a weekly report of sightings he deems credible (his report also appears at a website, www.birdswest.com, operated by the University of Arizona).

“Some of the postings are just too far-fetched, or the observer is not credible or experienced enough, so there is a certain amount of editing and filtering that’s involved,” Fisher said. “Everybody has access to that listserv, but it takes a certain amount of experience to know what’s most likely to be seen, what is unusual, what is really unusual.”

The last couple of years have been productive for those on the lookout for rare birds in the county. In September 2006, the upland sandpiper, which nests in the northern prairies of North America, was found for the first time along the lower Los Angeles River.

In September 2007, an Arctic warbler was spotted at DeForest Park in Long Beach, another first for the county. That same month, an Eastern yellow wagtail was found in the county for only the second time, at Malibu Lagoon. Both birds nest in Siberia and western Alaska.

“A very few of these Alaskan birds get turned the wrong way in fall and wind up traveling down our west coast instead of going through Asia,” Fisher said.

The large majority of sightings on the listserv fall short of such rarity, he said, “but there’s always a surprise. Just a few weeks ago, we had a trumpeter swan -- the first or second county record. It was at Edwards Air Force Base, which is restricted property, but a lot of birders have letters of permission to go there.”

Joining the trumpeter swan on Fisher’s March 13 rare bird alert report were 11 others, including a yellow-bellied sapsucker (whose belly isn’t all that yellow), a ferruginous hawk (whose leg feathers droop over its talons like the pants of a zoot suit) and a black-and-white warbler (striped like a zebra).

Fisher must tread cautiously, Garrett said. “He’s got to walk that line between making sure what gets recorded is accurate and valid, but also making people who are just interested hobbyists and amateurs feel that their observations are welcome, rather than just smacking them down.”

The rare bird alert is intended for the interested public, but Fisher also helps augment hard-core scientific data on birds.

For the last 15 years he has organized and compiled information from the Pasadena/San Gabriel Valley Christmas bird count, part of an annual continent-wide effort by the Audubon Society and Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology. Data from the count, one of several dozen in California, are rigorously vetted and used directly by scientists.

For last December’s count, Fisher marshaled 55 birders to canvass an area 15 miles in diameter. The star of the count turned out to be a Blackburnian warbler, a small, brilliant, orange-black-and-white bird native to the conifer forests of the northeastern U.S.

In addition to his work on the rare bird alert and the annual Christmas count, Fisher writes a column, Birds of the Season, for the Los Angeles Audubon Society’s newsletter, The Western Tanager.

“Jon’s just basically a dedicated volunteer,” Garrett said, “and that’s so true of so many people who work hard to increase our knowledge and the information we make available. There’s no money and glory in this. You wonder where they get the time to do anything else.”

Fisher’s office attire at Disney bespeaks his avocation: hiking boots, cargo pants, an un-tucked shirt with upturned cuffs, a long-sleeved T-shirt underneath. He looks as though he might at any moment grab his binoculars and digital camera and bolt for the forest or scrub land.

He was born in Los Angeles and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. He was 16 when his parents gave him unasked-for binoculars as a Christmas present. A little later he noticed two unusual-looking birds in a tree in the backyard of his family’s Altadena home. He trained his new binoculars on them, getting his first look at what was to become a life’s passion.

“Those birds were big and wild and pretty, and I didn’t even know what they were,” he said. “So I went to the library and figured out what they were: band-tailed pigeons.”

He and a friend became weekly library rats, devouring books about birds. They made trips to Eaton Canyon near Pasadena, where the avians they saw “tended to be very common stuff, but we had the books and we studied them like crazy at home. The cool part was to see a bird and know what it was.”

Over the ensuing 31 years, Fisher came to know the particular satisfaction of recognizing rarity in the seemingly commonplace. One such instance came in November 2006, when he and a companion, Barbara Johnson, spotted a rock sandpiper, which breeds in coastal Alaska and rarely calls on Southern California.

“The last one recorded in the county had been in 1968,” he said. “That was down in Marina del Rey, down on the breakwater. We saw it in almost exactly the same place. And it stayed all winter, just like the one did 40 years before. It’s a relatively nondescript little sandpiper; most people would walk right by it. But that’s probably the best bird I’ve ever found.”

Fisher goes birding at sunrise each Saturday and Sunday. He usually goes alone so he can linger for as long as he wishes to see if a slight disturbance in a distant tree develops into something interesting. A birder, he says, becomes attuned to details of motion and sound, and the more acute that sense becomes, the more readily the humdrum of everyday concerns slips away.

Bird-watching, he said, is different from observing other animals. “Birds are unique, and they can be seen year-around,” he said. “Compared to other animals, they have a higher potential for vagrancy -- birds off-course, birds out-of-area. Their beauty and variety are fascinating and, of course, humans have always looked to the sky, always wanted to fly like birds.”