Five Species Through a Monocular Aimed at Something Else

Spent forty minutes Monday morning standing in the field with the sextant, waiting for clouds to clear. Watched the horizon through the 4×40 monocular while the Sun crept higher. Kept the instrument ready.

A hawk circled into the frame at the field’s edge.

The magnification was enough to resolve wing-bar patterns—dark carpal patches on pale underwings, broad wings held in a shallow V. Wrote down the time: 11:47 AM. Sketched the pattern in the margin of the sight log.

Looked it up an hour later. Rough-legged hawk. Winter visitor, breeds in the Arctic tundra, migrates through Alberta September through April. Never noticed them before, but apparently they winter here every year, hunting over open fields.

Downloaded eBird.

The app opened to a checklist form. Location: my coordinates, pulled from GPS. Date and time: auto-populated. Start time, duration, observation type (stationary, travelling, incidental). Then a search field: “Which species did you see?”

Typed “rough-legged.” It autocompleted. Buteo lagopus. Confirmed. Count: 1. The entry went into a database that receives 100 million bird sightings annually from birders worldwide. My one hawk became data point #100,000,001-or-so for 2026.

Logged three more birds before lunch. Black-billed magpie (everywhere, always). American crow (five of them mobbing something in the spruce). Common raven (one, flying west, croaking). Species I’ve seen ten thousand times and never thought to count.

The list now reads: 4 species, 8 individuals, 40 minutes of observation.

That’s a yard list—species seen from my property. There are also life lists (every species ever), year lists (this calendar year only), county lists, country lists, trip lists. The constraint creates the game. Phoebe Snetsinger logged 8,398 species in her life list before she died—first person to break 8,000, though taxonomic reclassifications revised the count posthumously.

My yard list: 4.

Snetsinger: 8,398.

The gap feels motivating instead of discouraging, same way losing a chess game to a 2400-rated opponent teaches more than beating a 1200. You’re not competing with them. You’re establishing a baseline and seeing what’s actually here.

Rough-legged hawks hunt by hovering. They hang motionless in midair, scanning for voles, then drop vertically when they spot movement. That’s why I caught it in the sextant’s field of view—it wasn’t crossing the horizon, it was holding position against the wind, 200 metres out, doing the same thing I was: watching, waiting, measuring angles.

The theodolite pointed at benchmarks. The sextant points at the Sun. Both are precision optical instruments for angular measurement. Turns out they also work for identifying hawks if you’re willing to hold still and actually look at what’s moving through the frame.

Five species now. A boreal chickadee just landed on the spruce outside the window.