JESSIE BARRY
Jessie Barry has an ABA North American life list of 660 species, and has just completed a stint as the first female migration counter at the Cape May fall hawk watch. She serves on the Washington Bird Records Committee and is a former director of the Rochester Birding Association. She has researched monsoon-molt-migrants in Sinaloa and Baja California Sur, Mexico; measured mercury levels of tropical raptors near Puerto Maldonado, Peru; and studied redpoll mating systems and behavior in Barrow, Alaska. She’s been on first-place teams in the Texas Birding Classic and the World Series of Birding. She is a coauthor of the “Ducks, Geese, and Swans” section of the National Geographic Complete Birds of North America (2005), and appears in the “Take Field Notes” chapter of the recent Good Birders Don’t Wear White. She holds a degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Washington, has written technical papers on a variety of bird-related subjects, and is the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards. Jessie is also a freelance artist and has had artwork commissioned by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, among others—and she is all of 22 years of age.
Early in December, 2007, Jessie drove up from Cape May Point to CMBO-Goshen, where we spoke for several hours:
RR: You grew up in the Rochester area?
JB: Right on the shore of Lake Ontario, just a couples miles from Braddock Bay, so I was exposed to the hawk migration there from a very young age. I’d see hundreds of vultures and Broad-wings going through, right over my yard.
RR: How young were you when you developed a real interest in birds?
JB: I was about ten when I really got into birding and I started a life list…and then in sixth grade my science teacher noticed I had an interest in birds…he caught me reading a field guide, in class, and he’s a really avid birder and he kind of took me under his wing, I went out on my first CBC that winter…and I’ve been birding ever since.
RR: That’s great when a teacher takes a real interest in a student, and the encouragement is important.
JB: Without his interest in mentoring me, I don’t know where I’d be now.
RR: Do you want to mention his name?
JB: Kevin Griffith…and one of the cool things about him is that I’m not the only one he’s fostered over the years…do you remember Jeff Bouton (a former Cape May hawk counter)? Jeff had Kevin as a science teacher twenty years before me.
RR: You went to VENT (Victor Emmanuel Nature Tours) youth camps early on, didn’t you?
JB: Actually I first went to the ones in Texas and Washington, but I ended up coming back to the Arizona camp a few couple times as a counselor, to help the kids to find birds and see what was going on for myself.
Roadtrapping American Kestrels at age 11.
Photo by: Kevin Griffith.
RR: So you were meeting a lot of pretty big names in the field at a young age…
JB: Yes… at the age of 14, I went to my first national birding event…the World Series of Birding in 1999 with the Leica/ABA Tropicbirds, and it gave me a chance to bird with Michael O’Brien and Louise Zemaitis for the first time. I got life birds and remember going out in the middle of the night for Barred Owl…I just learned so much…and that was my intro into the national birding scene, and later subsequent opportunities and internships and scholarships came my way.
RR: So did you hold onto this all through high school? Was it hard?
JB: I think middle school might have been a little harder as far as the kids were concerned…but I kept going through high school, and by college it was pretty easy.
RR: And your folks were pretty helpful?
JB: They were very supportive…they weren’t birders at the time, but my dad has always been an outdoors guy…family birding really started with my great-grandmother…she was another Jessie Barry…and her son ended up being a goose biologist in the Arctic, so that’s my grandfather’s brother…and I grew up hearing stories of him banding geese in the Arctic…
RR: And so it’s in your genes a little bit.
JB: You could say that...
RR: And college? Didn’t you just graduate this year?
JB: Yes. I went to the University of Washington, in Seattle…I originally thought it would just be a temporary deal…that I’d be there for a year and then transfer to Cornell. But when I got there, practically the first week I was there, I ended up contacting a professor who was a curator of the museum, and right off the bat he ended up giving me keys to the museum, introducing me to his graduate students, and offering me tons of field work…So I jumped right into that…And I ended up spending all four years there.
RR: So you could get internships quite easily…
JB: And the summer right after my freshman year I was offered internships to go either to Alaska or Russia, and that was followed by Peru, and Mexico, so they just gave me tons of research experience all over the place.
RR: And you came to Cape May in August? And where did you stay?
JB: David Mizrahi found a place in Cape May for the seasonal staff, and it’s awesome. David takes good care of us.
RR: Do they (NJAS) pay you enough so that you can save a little money?
JB: With the monthly stipend and the housing included, I can’t really complain.
RR: So you room with the seawatchers and the interpretive naturalists? College kids, mostly…or just post-college, in between…
JB: Yes, it’s mostly a just post-college crowd, a team of eight this year. It’s a five room house and we share a couple of bathrooms. It all works out, we have a great time together.
RR: And you started when?
JB: The first day [of the count] was September first.
RR: Did you ever get bored? It’s a long day and a long week.
JB: There were really only a few days when I truly got bored, there was always so much going on, on Bunker Pond, or the ocean, or usually someone would come up and talk, so, no, it usually was not boring.
RR: How many people do you think you talked to?
JB: The naturalists were counting, and it was often, 200-400 on a weekend…of course I didn’t talk to them all, but there were some great characters I met.
RR: I think the character quotient among nature people is probably higher than among the general populace.
JB: And I thought it was so cool in September and October when the Europeans started coming over…the Brits, the Finns, Irish guys, and you learn quickly that their type or style of birding is very different, it is so intense…
RR: People tell me that you had the best platform bird list ever?
JB: It’s coming along.*(See below)
RR: That Lesser Nighthawk wasn’t bad, a first state record I think.
JB: I could just see it from the platform, and there were “low level” kinds of rarities like Anhinga, White Ibis…
RR: You’re the first female hawk counter at the Cape May Hawk Watch. How does it feel?
JB: I don’t feel any different, but I was definitely treated differently…So there is still a difference there, but I don’t feel anything when I’m out birding with my peers…I never wanted to be the odd girl out…and I’m usually don’t feel like I am.
RR: There are so many great women birders, women naturalists around Cape May…Louise, Pat, Dale, did you get to know many of them?
JB: I think I’ve spent a good deal of time with most of them, either this fall or in the past.
RR: What are you planning now?
JB: Returning to Rochester to see my family, then out to Seattle to finish some work at the museum there, and then pursuing some writing projects, field work this summer, and maybe grad school in two years…I’d like to take this time and freedom to travel a little bit.
I’d really like to go back to the Arctic, and to Asia, and Spain, and visit the birders in Great Britain. I’ve been to southeastern Peru, Madre de Dios in the Amazon, on the Forest Falcon project; and in Mexico I worked with monsoon-molt-migrants, western passerines that undergo a short migration to molt where and when the Mexican Monsoons bring rain to the American Southwest and western Mexico before they migrate further south for the winter.
RR: Do you realize how fortunate you are? To have had so many people take an interest in you at such a young age?
JB: Definitely there’s the importance of birding mentors. NJAS has a “Take a Kid Birding” program, but it’s really only going to work if people take the initiative…but it’s a great program, and was important to me.
RR: I’ve led a lot of trips over the years, and it’s hard to find young birders, interested kids…you just don’t see a lot of them.
JB: Some people have it [a passion for birds], some people don’t…and it’s not something you can force on kids…but when you come across a kid who does have it, you should stick with them, go after them…a lot of the people I met when I was 14 or younger.
Jessie with ducklings at age 4.
RR: You’ve met Scott Barnes (the senior naturalist at Sandy Hook Bird Observatory). Pete Bacinski, Rich Kane, and others started taking him out when he was 12, and his mother was really good about taking him places, but I think he led a double life—his birding buddies were grownups.
JB: Young birder programs have gotten a lot better, even in the ten years that I’ve been in them, there’s now a lot of opportunities for young birders to meet other young birders, which is really key, even if you are the only one in your state you find kids who live in other states…you keep in touch…It’s nice to know you’re not the only one out there.
RR: Do you have any other people you’d like to mention?
JB: I would like to thank CMBO and the birding community…they’ve been so special to me and helpful and thoughtful, dropping off coffee…saying hi on the platform.
RR: Are there any particular highlights of your hawkwatch season that you’d like to mention?
JB: Yeah…the highlights…It’s gotta be the big flight days…a thousand kestrels going by…But one of the coolest raptor interactions I saw this fall was on the far side of Bunker Pond, where a Goshawk was chasing a Cooper’s Hawk, and the Coop just flipped over, talons-up…and the Gos just came and grabbed it, they locked talons, they spiraled down a little bit, and broke up, and then the Goshawk went right after it, flipped over again , spiraled down and out of sight. That was a pretty exciting chase…
RR: I don’t think the Cooper’s Hawk eventually fared very well—an unequal contest, and Goshawks are pretty ferocious
JB: (Agrees).
RR: You’ve worked at the University of Washington’s museum, haven’t you…where there are trays and trays of dead birds…study skins…?
JB: Yes, they have about ~70,000 bird specimens, study skins, spread wings, tissue samples and eggs. I’ve been on active collecting trips out of the country and in. It’s interesting to see how people react to the whole subject of collecting, but it’s really so important to continue active collecting in this day of age, because you never know what you’re going to learn a hundred years from now…museum collections are really the only source of new information about birds from the past.
They’ve taken DNA from 1930s Prairie Chicken specimens’ skin, and the information helped when they reintroduced Kansas birds to an Illinois population that was really declining…When those guys shot those Prairie Chickens they had no idea that we would be able to extract information from the DNA of those birds…didn’t know what DNA was.
RR: Where and what would you like to do with grad school? Biology…ecology, ornithology?
JB: Definitely ornithology, I’d like to go somewhere with an active collection…LSU is probably my first choice right now…or the University of Kansas.
RR: I know Dan Lane went to LSU…there was another precocious kid, sometimes overly confident, but so smart, and he’d often see things that other, older eyes didn’t. And he’s since done amazing work in South America…I think actually discovered a few new bird species down there.
JB: Yeah—three, actually.
RR: Of course—you would know that…Do you know which ones?
JB: A twistwing, a barbet, and a tanager I think…A funny story when Dan collected that first tanager, he put it out on the windowsill to dry, and something ate about half of it overnight…and it was the first one ever collected.
Jessie with a Roadside Hawk in Peru, summer 2007.
RR: Do you draw?
JB: I started illustrating when I started to bird…I’ve done less of it in the last few years, but I still like it and I’ll get back into it.
RR: Field sketching is an important skill to learn and have.
JB: So important…every time you’re sketching a bird you’re going to notice something you hadn’t seen at first
RR: Do you get up this way (CMBO-Goshen) often?
JB: Actually, this is only the second time I’ve been here this season; there’s usually not many good reasons to leave the Point.
RR: This is north Jersey if you are a south-of-the-canal person.
JB: I’ve only come north a few times, to Brig to see the spoonbill and other things…We have a great social life right at the Point, past interns visit, visiting parents take us out to the good restaurants, and there’s Louise and Michael’s…
Those Thursday night dinners at Louise’s and others’ houses would feed us for days afterward, it stocked the frig’ at our place.
RR: Are you aware how special the natural history community Cape May is? There are actually not many places in the world like it. There’s always so much to learn…
JB: Oh yeah, it’s one of the main reasons I’ve come here over the years, so many extraordinary birders and naturalists, and amazing birding, interacting on a daily basis…
RR: Is it just birds you’re interested in, or have you focused on other things?
JB: I’ve concentrated on birds, but I’ve picked up a lot along the way…butterflies, dragonflies…I’m learning some plants, and I’d like to learn more…
RR: Tell me a little bit more about the monsoon molt-migrant passerine that you’ve studied.
JB: This was in the Southwest…Pretty much all our eastern migrants—warblers, vireos, thrushes, other songbirds—will molt on their breeding grounds and then migrate south. But in parts of the West it’s a little bit different, because most of the annual rainfall there comes in the winter, and by breeding season it’s pretty dry, pushing the passerines away from their arid breeding grounds to other areas of higher productivity…In late summer the Mexican monsoons come through the Southwest and western Mexico, which brings the migrants down there…to a region where there’s lots of food and insects and water. I worked with my advisor down there who’s pretty much developed this concept in the last twenty years…of monsoon molt-migrants…The western passerines going to these monsoonal areas post-breeding, molting down there—Southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, Sonora, and Sinaloa—and then continuing on south for the winter.
RR: You know, that’s just not something I’ve ever heard of.
JB: We’ve been adding to the list of species that do this, and so far it’s about half the passerine species breeding in the West. I worked on Western Kingbird, and Black-headed Grosbeak, Painted Buntings also do this…and we were collecting…Collecting allows us to see what’s going on in the molt, and we can compare our findings with other collections.
RR: Collecting is a red flag for some people. For a long time in Cape May some people have even objected to banding, which does a certain amount of harm to birds…
JB: I know, but I still think it’s important. Collecting is just poorly understood…but I don’t bring it up that often.
Keeping warm on the Hawkwatch Platform in November (and working on her platform list!). Photo by: George Myers.
RR: Especially now that with DNA you can do so much…
JB: It’s just such a big part of conservation right now and some people don’t realize how important it is…
RR: How hard is it to get collecting permits?
JB: Extremely difficult. Most of the museums have trouble getting them in the states or in Canada…One example was a reputable museum that could only get permits to collect crows, House Sparrows, and pigeons—and what can you do with that?
RR: You’re staying around for the Cape May Christmas Count. What other Christmas Counts do you do?
JB: I did my first one in sixth grade, I’ve done the Rochester count every year since…
Jessie later sent me her Cape May hawk watch platform list, which I’m told set a record. Including the state-record Lesser Nighthawk mentioned above, along with Barnacle and Cackling Geese, Anhinga, White Ibis, Ruff, Say’s Phoebe, Western Kingbird, and all the “winter finches” save Hoary Redpoll, it came to 235 species.
