Birding the world

Tom Crabtree has been birding since he was six years old. In order to pursue that passion, he heads up the law firm of Crabtree & Ramsdorff in Bend, where he's practiced law since 1981.

When he's not in the courtroom serving as public defender, you'd have to search for him at the edge of the willows along the Deschutes River, looking for warblers, counting snow geese at Summer Lake Wildlife Management Area, or pussy-footing around one of the thousands or more locations throughout Oregon where birding is best.

"People have often asked me, 'What bird do you like best?'," Tom says with a chuckle. "My answer is, the bird I just saw, and the one I'll see next."

Tom's been enjoying and identifying birds since he was a child living in Massachusetts, and the desire to see more of them never wavered, from grade school, high school, college in St. Louis, law school in the Willamette Valley, studying for the bar, and right up to today.

"I arrived in Oregon in my third year of law school," Tom recalled, "and was fortunate to run into Harry Nehels, one of Oregon's top birders, and Jeff Gilligan, a retired attorney in Portland, another exceptional birder. They knew the best birding spots and were wiling to share them with anyone who appreciated and enjoyed birds."

Tom has, literally, been around the world searching for birds to add to his World Life List of almost 1,000. In Samoa, Tom was astonished to find a laughing gull, a common gull found on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and occasionally in the Salton Sea of California, but only the second record of the species in Samoa.

"I think the most colorful birds I've ever seen were in Samoa," Tom said. "The fruit doves for one, and the flat-billed kingfisher - but then there was also the cardinal honeycreeper, the equal to hummingbirds in the New World.

"There's another thing I enjoyed about birding in Samoa," Tom said with a big grin. "The International Date Line is there, I could look west and see the birds I'd see tomorrow."

As we talked about Tom's life with birds, over lunch at SOBA in Bend, he suddenly stopped, and said, "Did I ever tell you about the time I went to Madera Canyon to see an old flame?" He hadn't, so I waited. "Put this in the story," he said, "and I'll send you the picture. It is an 'old flame' because this individual has come to the same feeders for the last nine years. A 9- or 10-year-old tanager is an old bird. And since this bird is a flame-colored tanager, it is an 'old flame' - got it?

"Attu Island, the westernmost and largest island in the Aleutians of Alaska, is a great place to see birds tomorrow and yesterday as well," Tom recalls. "The International Date Line makes a big bend at the end of the Aleutians, so you can be looking at birds both days, and on top of that, you can see Russia from your front door step."

It was there that Tom first saw the brambling, a very colorful Eurasian finch.

"It's a regular visitor to that end of Alaska, and like the white-headed woodpecker of Sisters, a common backyard bird," he recalls.

Tom is a member of the Oregon Bird Records Committee, a nine-member group that evaluates all reports of rare birds reported in the state. Anyone can go to http://www.oregonbirds.org/ORchecklist.pdf to obtain the newest edition of the Official Oregon Checklist. With that document and a good pair binoculars and patience, you too can start your Oregon Life List of Birds.

Tom also taught birding classes at COCC for several years, and gains a great deal of satisfaction when he sees some of his students of those years carrying on their great love of birds.

Some of his fondest memories are when he was birding with his two daughters and son over at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns.

"I'd be busy calling out the birds to my kids, and the girls would be picking up rocks, but my son seemed to be getting birdfever. Today, the girls are archeologists and my son Nate is into photography, but sometimes focuses on birds more than other things."

In addition to being on the Oregon Bird Records Committee, Tom also heads up the Christmas Bird Count (CBC) for Bend, a responsibility he's enjoyed since 1983. He took a five-year sabbatical from running the CBC when Craig Miller, another top Oregon birder living in Bend, took it over - but Tom's back in the saddle again.