birding with barry
by peter kinzler
Photo: Trevor McKinnon
Recently, longtime Hollin Hiller — and my close friend — Barry Pearson moved into a memory care facility. His wonderful children, Amy and Greg, had done amazing things to enable Barry to stay in his Marthas Road home, but it finally became impossible.
During his 51 years in Hollin Hills, Barry was actively involved in the community. He was the longtime warden of Goodman Park, and was part of a Hollin Hills gourmet club.
My wife Ginny and I had known Barry and his wife Connie from the time we bought our house in 1982, but our close friendship didn’t start to develop until 2004, I believe, when the Hollin Hills pool was desperately short of members and money – and some were calling for it to close.
I asked Barry if he would take on the responsibility of rescuing it as chair of the pool governing committee, and he agreed – if I would agree to be vice-chair.
The rescue operation was a great success, and it turned out to be the beginning of a great friendship as well. You really get to know someone when you work closely for an extended period of time, and we discovered that we had much in common. We both loved sports, and went to many West Potomac football and basketball games long after our kids had graduated. We also shared a sense of humor, often based on identifying the absurdities of everyday life.
What we did not share was a love for birding. Barry loved birding; me, not so much. But I did join him once on a birding trip in 2019, and, as Barry is not here to dispute the truth of the following account, you will have to take my word for it that my recounting is 100 percent accurate.
Whatever the truth of that lie, I can honestly tell you Barry read the original, and loved it.
Birding With Barry
The email read simply, “Ben Jesup is leading a birdwalk for the Audubon Naturalist Society on Sunday, August 25th . . . you are welcome [to join].”
I’d never been birding, although I enjoy taking pictures of birds. This I do mostly while Ginny and I walk the Mount Vernon path by the Potomac River. Over the years, I have taken hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures, mostly of egrets and herons because they often congregate along the Potomac.
Before receiving Ben’s invitation, I was content with my birding experience, particularly in light of my friend Barry’s description of his birding group. They get up very early to assemble around 7 am to go look for birds and listen for their calls, come summer or winter or rain or shine (two of each pair are disqualifiers for me). They then spend 2 or 3 hours recording the number and kinds of birds they see.
While I have always viewed such activity as more than a bit nerdy, there is one birder I admire: Wendell Cox. Wendell was a longtime Hollin Hiller who lived large. He had a loud and audacious personality which, of course, carried into his approach to birding. As Barry reports, after his group goes birding, they go to Denny’s for a bite to eat (another quarrel I have with birders. Why not go to a classier place, such as Wendy’s?) and to report their bird counts.
On the occasions when Wendell would join them, Barry says the leader would go around the room to get people’s counts. A typical count for most birders, including Barry, might be, say, 30 cardinals. When the leader reached Wendell, he would cry out, “two hundred and twelve!” Wendell’s count was invariably multiples of everyone else’s.
You can see why I had never joined the ranks of birders. But the day was supposed to be in the 70’s with low humidity, the expedition was not scheduled to start until 8 am, and it was being headed by my friend and bird expert par extraordinaire, Ben Jesup. I decided to go if Barry would come along.
So, at 7:45, Barry and I headed over to Huntley Meadows. Before we started, Ben encouraged us to take precautions to avoid ticks. Specifically, he suggested we tuck our jeans inside our socks. For those of us who didn’t think of ourselves as nerds, or at least a pocket protector or two short of being a total nerd, that eliminated any remaining pretense. You could be Robert Redford and still appear to be a nerd if you put your pants in your socks (that would definitely be the case if you were wearing shorts).
The walk started slowly. Actually, Ben set a pretty fast pace. The slowly part was that we didn’t stop much initially because we didn’t see or hear much in the way of birds at first. With our assortment of physical limitations, Barry and I were at risk of losing touch with the group of younger birders entirely until Ben started identifying the calls of common wrens and cardinals. Although many such birds fly around our house, I have never been able to identify even one bird’s call. Barry knew most of the calls, even telling me which was which at the same time as Ben.
After a slow start, Ben led us to a marsh overlook where I was able to get several pictures of … egrets and herons, of course! I finally felt comfortable; back in my idiom. As we then ventured off the paved path into fields, I became more concerned about avoiding poison ivy and ticks than about spotting birds. But Ben became more and more animated, calling out the names of the 34 different birds he saw or heard. Some names – Tufted Titmouse, Eastern Wood-Pewee – were so odd I thought surely Ben had made them up. There was one bird, a Killdeer, I was willing to take home on name alone, sight unseen (as was, in fact, the case), in the hope of reducing the deer population that is seeking to clear-cut our yard.
Ben got so excited that he started pointing out wasps, butterflies (9 species), dragonflies (6 species) and even varieties of plants; all of which I’m pretty sure are not birds.
Barry, on the other hand, is far less caffeinated than Ben. He, too, loves birding (he gave me a copy of Petterson’s Field Guide to Birds for my 75th birthday), and he clearly was enjoying the experience. He even taught me how to use my binoculars to see birds instead of just sky and random trees.
As the hours passed, my enthusiasm began to flag and I began to think more and more about my Achilles tendon problems. My body said, “Abandon the walk and try to make it back to the car alive.” Ben said, “I know it’s been a long walk, but there is one more field we could visit.” Barry and I looked at each other. He asked if I was game and I said, “uncle,” that was one field too far.
So we split off from the group and headed back to the car. As always, the walk back was twice as long as the walk out – particularly as we were barely moving. I arrived home, exhausted, nearly 4 hours after we left. It took me a full afternoon of napping and a night’s sleep to recover.
The next day, I called Barry and begrudgingly told him I understood his obsession with birds now and I might go birding again some time. But, if I do, I swear I will never tuck my pants into my socks again.
So long, my good friend Barry.
– Peter Kinzler, Stafford Road
Huntley Meadows
The elusive Killdeer. Photo: Charles Homler