PAUL LEHMAN
Paul Lehman, known to many as the bird sage of Cape May, has been a fixture on the local birding scene since 1994. Born in the New York area, where he started birding at the age of eight, Paul went to college in 1974 at the University of California at Santa Barbara. And it was in California that Paul made his name as one of the country’s leading birders, as well as an expert on birds and the effects of weather on bird migration and bird “fallout.” He has been a tour leader since the late 1980s, and was the editor of Birding magazine from 1989 to 1997. Paul is the range-map compiler and editor for a number of major birding books, including the Sibley East and West guides, revised editions of the National Geographic Society and Peterson field guides, and the recent National Wildlife/Ned Brinkley guide. He is the editor of New Jersey Birds, and is often called in for help with the identification of problem birds.
When did you first come to Cape May?
I grew up in the New York City area and started birding as a kid of 8. First went on trips with a New York area Audubon Society chapter which had a couple of trips each year down here to Cape May—in 1971, 1972 or so—fall trips; but the weather was not very good, and we didn’t see many migrants, but we did see dribs and drabs. One bird I remember was a Hudsonian Godwit in the Cape May Meadows back when the habitat was much better—way more open.
There were cows then, and an electric fence.
There were cows. And I remember going to Stone Harbor in the evening and there were gobs of herons coming in to roost at the old heronry site, not like today. We stopped at some muddy cove on the way, and there was a Black-headed Gull, my life Black-headed Gull. I also remember making the mistake of walking down a private drive off Lighthouse Avenue, and they must have been banding hawks, probably Bill Clark in his early days of banding. And we walked in there and they shooed us out because we must have been disturbing the hawks. Those are my remembrances, that and staying in a hotel on the beach, probably near the Second Avenue jetty, and watching the flags blowing in the wind, and the wind blowing in exactly in the wrong direction.
So you were aware of the weather back then?
Well, I knew even then, early teens, that you needed some kind of west wind for migrants and hawks, and it was an east wind blowing, the wrong wind.
How did you end up in California? When do you come back east?
I’d moved there in 1974 when I went to college at UC Santa Barbara; I stayed there, got my undergraduate and graduate degrees, and then taught there as well, all for a total of twenty years. And I birded all over California and other parts of the West. In about 1986 I did my first of several World Series of Birdings. I did it statewide and I did it for a California company, called The Nature Company. It was a California team, and during a four-year period I think we did it three times.
I was on Pete Dunne’s team then, and we won in 1990, so I must have met you at that time or earlier, but I don’t remember; it was, I think, the last time Zeiss won the World Series. Fun times.
We’d come early, scouting, and stay a day or two later birding in Cape May. Really during that period I started to meet some of the Cape May birders. I also got to know Pete Dunne better; we’d met earlier in California. And there were other connections.
And you began to bird in Cape May at other times, didn’t you?
On a couple of other visits when we came here, in the early 90s, it was nice—we showed up when they had regular Thursday night get-togethers, pot-luck dinner parties usually hosted by Louise Zemaitis. And we met other birders. I already knew David Sibley; he’d lived briefly in California and he’d also spent lots of time in Arizona, so I knew him more from there. He’d traveled all around and gotten much of the knowledge for his book.
You knew others?
I had met Clay and Pat (Sutton) in the 80s, but the one person I already knew quite well from New Jersey was Bill Boyle. So when we hooked up with the Cape May pot-luck dinners, I met Louise, Vince Elia, Jimmy Dowdell, and, a little after, Richard Crossley and other active birders of the time. Kevin Karlson and Dale Rosselet moved here from north Jersey; they were another pair we met. We liked the birding community here. In Santa Barbara we were among the youngest birders; here we were actually slightly older than the median age of the active birders.
Plus it was great to bird here; the best birds were mostly only a few minutes away. In California, birds in the Bay Area or San Diego were hours away; it was a long haul. And in Cape May it was great when you got to see everybody locally. My wife at the time, Shawneen Finnegan, also liked the area, had birded here and gone to the pot-lucks and made friends here, such as with Pete’s wife, Linda.
So when did you formally move here?
We moved to Cape May in 1994. We had decided it was time for change. I had Eastern roots, and it was close to my family. Shawneen had been a California girl almost all of her life, but she said, “OK, but only if we go to Cape May.” We liked the scene, and the town.
So we moved in early September ‘94 to the infamous rental duplex on Sunset Boulevard.
I thought you owned that.
No, and we just fell into it. The owners stayed weekends only and lived in the Philly suburbs and they had kept the mid-level unit open. It was a hassle for them to rent it to strangers, and they wanted a year-round naturalist who would appreciate the view. So they went to the Bird Observatory while Louise was working there, and we’d told her we were looking, and trying to find anything. And she told them, “I have just the people for you.” So we took it.
So lucky!
I knew where it was, but didn’t know how good it was for birding until we showed up the day we moved in, and I started a serious yard list.
The first bird I saw on that 5th of September when we arrived was a Laughing Gull, and before we even went inside, the owner said, “Let me show you the back yard.” There was a single pine tree in back yard and in the pine tree was a Cape May Warbler, how appropriate, which isn’t all that common in Cape May. We went into the living room and looked out the big windows, saw a Forster’s Tern fly by, then maybe a mockingbird and about the fifth bird we saw was a Bald Eagle flying right over the house. So I said, “OK, this will work.”
How long were you at the Sunset Boulevard house?
Till last year, the end of July 2006. I was there just shy of twelve years, and ended up with over 300 yard birds, and the final bird was a Magnificent Frigatebird in late May 2006.
What’s kept you here for so long?
What attracted me to Cape May? Well, it was a terrific place to bird, the birds were close, a few minutes away, and there was this close-knit community, good people. For a long time my front deck was a good birding spot, or across the street at the South Cape May Meadows; you can’t beat that. I could work at home editing, work three hours and take a one-hour break, get back refreshed, and go back to work. If somebody called up about a rare bird I was usually within 5 or 10 minutes of it, not half an hour or an hour or more…
I don’t think I ever saw you in North Jersey.
I used to bird there more when I lived in New York. Since 1994 I birded a little at Sandy Hook. I would come up occasionally, or rarely, particularly to chase some rarity.
I do a lot of traveling and my “sickness” is listing; I travel a lot and put a lot of miles on rental cars, so when I’m home in Cape May I like to stay local. And what I also liked about Cape May was having really good birders here. You’d be challenged by them in a friendly way—a Sibley or a Crossley—and learn from them. Michael O’Brian moved here but then Sibley left. Things change. The makeup of the community has changed over the years but it is still great and you still learn a lot.
What was the final yard list when you left? Were there any holes? Have you started a new list for the new place on Lafayette Street?
It was 314, with no obvious holes. My new place on Lafayette St. has a pedestrian 146 after one year; can't see any water from there.
On flight days when I was in Cape May, I rarely saw you birding early with the crowds at Higbees, the Beanery, Hidden Valley, or anywhere else before 8 or 9 a.m.
Pete Dunne once wrote an article about that in the Peregrine Observer awhile back about when there would be a big flight at Higbees, and how after a couple hours people would ask “Where’s Paul?” and I’d still be sitting on my deck watching the flight there. Then I’d arrive at Higbees as everyone else was preparing to leave! The morning flight of birds going past my house and over the Meadows and the hawk watch…often contained a higher percentage of unusual things than at Higbees and the dike.
You’ve become a recognized expert on weather and its effect on bird migration and bird fallout. Isn’t a lot of this knowledge fairly recent?
Certainly we’ve come a long way with weather since the ‘50s and 60s. We’ve learned a lot more about weather and the subtleties of bird migration, and bird transport. Information about these subtleties of migrations, reverse migrations, vagrancy and such has only come to the fore for many people since the mid-1990s.
What about the Brown-chested Martin and the other rarities showing up in early November 1997?
The martin was a big thing for a lot of people who suddenly realized what the weather can bring. Before I had moved here, in ‘93 or ’94, I had already talked with David Sibley about what the weather can do to bring rare stuff in late fall…oddball things.
The whole idea of coming to Cape May in late October or November for rarities, or even the big flights of the short-distance migrants—sparrow fallouts and robins and flickers and kinglets and goldfinches—people didn’t know; they abandoned small birds for hawk watching or waterfowl at that point in the season…the idea of these massive flights of blackbirds, robins, and Yellow-rumps, it just was not well known. And now—“rarity season”—that’s become regular—and so, “Ho-hum, so what, another 50 Cave Swallows.” And White-winged Doves, Ash-throated Flycatchers, and Selasphorus hummingbirds just seem to come every fall. What was just unknown a few years ago has become regular; and people hardly came before that. Now you hope for something different every year.
Did you have particular memories from Cape May of big flights, rare birds, natural phenomena, odd things, that you will carry with you in future years?
Certainly big flights like the amazing 1.2 million robin flight several years back at the end of a fall weekend, plus several recent sparrow flights with 40,000-plus sparrows each time. As for rarities, there have been too many! But that incredible over-land Yellow-nosed Albatross one May, plus the November 1997 simultaneous assemblage of Brown-chested Martin, MacGillivray's Warbler, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Western Tanager, multiple Cave Swallows, and a slug of late, reverse landbird migrants do stick in my mind.
Any predictions about what new species may soon turn up in Cape May? Any species that you've somehow missed in your years here?
Given that I travel a lot and thus am gone quite a bit, I've missed my fair share of local goodies over the years, such as last winter's Band-tailed Pigeon, a couple different Gray Kingbirds, the great fallout of seabirds with Hurricane Bertha, etc. What I think are still overdue at Cape May include Pacific Loon, Little Egret, Tropical Kingbird, Hammond's Flycatcher, Sage Thrasher....the list goes on.
Do you have any particular restaurant(s), haunts that you are particularly fond of?
For dinner in season I like Gecko's (Southwestern cuisine). But there are many great places to eat in Cape May; too bad only a few of them are affordable! Tony's has the best pizza. And there's always Wawa!
Optics/cameras you're attached to?
I prefer angled eyepiece scopes to straight-through eyepieces. I use a Leica 32X wide-angle scope, which is a tad heavy, but the image sure is wide and bright!
Do you have any great interests in addition to birds and meteorology?
I have not bitten the butterfly or odonate bug—no pun intended. Inevitably I’ve picked up some things by osmosis, but I haven’t gone out of my way, much to the chagrin of some and much to the relief of others.
People will probably want to know your ABA-Area list and world list, and any quirky list total that you are particularly proud or fond of?
ABA Area List: 811. My quirky list is my Total Tickies list, the combination of ALL my state and provincial lists added together. Since the late 1970s I've worked pretty hard on that list, traveling all over the U.S. and Canada many times. My total currently is 17,448, the highest of anyone. A great way to learn bird distribution!