As you travel, make note of the wildlife

Outside, the snow falls, and it’s too cold walk in the woods, so my mind wanders to places I’ve been and places I hope to someday visit. I pull out the most recent addition to my library: “Fifty Places to GO BIRDING Before You Die by Chris Santella,” (2007, Stewart, Tambori, and Chang).

Santella interviewed 50 well-traveled birders, including tour leaders, artists, ornithologists, and writers, to come up with 50 “must-bird” locations. It’s hardly the ultimate list of “birdie” destinations; 24 are in the United States. But it’s a great starting point for ornithological dreamers.

John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, chose Gambell, Alaska, a God-forsaken outpost on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, closer to the Russian mainland than to Nome. It’s the place to find rare Asian migrants that rarely show up elsewhere in North America.

Author Kenn Kaufman selected the mountains of Ecuador at 6,000 to 7,000 feet for the spectacular diversity of hummingbirds and tanagers.

And Victor Emanuel, dean of bird tour guides, chose South Georgia Island near the southern tip of the world, an Antarctic destination few will ever visit. He found the sheer numbers of penguins, skuas, and seals particularly memorable.

My travel experiences are far less exotic and include many highlights that have nothing to do with birds. Among the memories I’ll never forget: my first glimpse of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, the smoking crater of Washington’s Mount St. Helens, the eastern front of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, Pennsylvania’s Rickett’s Glen State Park, West Virginia’s Dolly Sods, Ohio’s Hocking Hills, and the beaches of Lake Michigan.

My wanderlust began in college. A 10-day field trip to Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp hooked me on wildlife watching. I had close encounters with alligators, pileated woodpeckers, and a variety of frogs, turtles and snakes.

After graduation, I drove cross-country to graduate school at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. While there, I explored most of the national parks within a day’s drive. As an impoverished graduate student, I camped and scrimped on food. It was during these years that I gained an appreciation for American Indian cultures and saw my first prairie dogs, golden eagles, trogons, roadrunners, rattlesnakes and horned lizards.

In 1977, my wife and I took a whirlwind 17-day journey from Michigan to Washington across the northern tier of states. We saw wolves in Glacier National Park, mountain goats and harlequin ducks in Idaho, and our first old-growth forest.

As the snow continues to fall, the cascade of travel memories continues. Another highlight was a visit to Kodiak Island in Alaska. One day I watched brown bears fish for salmon; the next day I caught so many salmon my arms ached. And one morning I awoke on a boat in a foggy bay in the midst of a pod of killer whales.

My international travel experience is limited to the Western Hemisphere. A colleague and I took a group of students to Colima, Mexico, in 1983. We camped on the slopes of a rumbling volcano, and I tallied more than 100 live birds on that trip.

A few years later I led a dozen Elderhostel trips to Mexico. That’s when I discovered the Mayan ruins at Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. Bat falcons and white hawks flying above the ruins remain a vivid image in my mind.

Three years ago, I visited the Canopy Tower in Panama and saw flocks of parrots, six species of trogons, and motmots coming to a bird feeder.

Books like “GO BIRDING” fuel my desire to travel, to see things I know only from books. Time and money limit the possibilities, but that doesn’t keep me from dreaming. For example, I’d love to experience the vast herds of large mammals on the African Serengetti. And with places such as Belize, Costa Rica, Peru, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad, Tobago, New Zealand, Iceland, Nova Scotia and Madagasgar on my wish list, I admit my hopes and dreams are ambitious.

If Robert Browning’s advice, “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” is sound, then I’m the poster child for eco-travel. As I tick these places off my list, I promise to write about them.

X Send questions and comments to Dr. Scott Shalaway, RD 5, Cameron, WV 26033 or via email my Web site, http://scottshalaway.googlepages.com.