Five Species Before the Yard List Takes Over

The sextant has a 4×40 monocular. Davis Mark 25, plastic frame, tested on a crossing to Hawaii in 1987. I’ve been using it to sight the Sun, measuring angles I can’t yet reduce to positions because the almanac doesn’t arrive until Thursday.

This morning I brought it outside to try a horizon swing and caught something moving in the viewfinder. Not the Sun. Not a benchmark or a hilltop. A hawk—rough-legged, I think, circling maybe 200 metres overhead.

The monocular holds 4× magnification, same as the spotting scopes birdwatchers use for distant raptors. I’d been pointing it at celestial bodies that follow published tables and terrestrial landmarks that hold still for theodolite triangulation. But birds move.

Tracked it for maybe thirty seconds before it spiralled northwest and disappeared. The optical precision that resolves a sextant horizon to an arcminute now has to follow a target that doesn’t care about my measurement timing.

Went back inside. Looked up what I’d just seen.

Roger Tory Peterson published the first modern field guide in 1934. Before that, bird identification meant shooting specimens. You couldn’t ID a bird through binoculars because no one had systematized the field marks—the visual features that distinguish species at a distance. Peterson invented that. Wing bars, eye rings, tail patterns. The first printing sold out in a week.

The rough-legged hawk has dark wrist patches on pale underwings and a dark belly band. That’s the field mark. Saw both through the sextant scope before it banked away.

Downloaded a field guide app. Started a list: one species, logged at 09:47 MDT. Then walked the yard perimeter and added four more in twenty minutes. Black-billed magpie (white wing patches, long tail). Common raven (wedge tail, heavier bill than crow). American crow (smaller, fan tail). Black-capped chickadee (black cap, white cheek).

Five species. Phoebe Snetsinger’s life list had 8,398.

She got a terminal melanoma diagnosis at age 50, took a birding trip to Alaska instead of staying home, and the cancer went into remission. Spent the next eighteen years traveling the world, documenting 85% of all known bird species. Died in a vehicle accident in Madagascar in 1999 while chasing her 8,399th.

There are roughly 10,000 bird species globally. I have five. The gap is absurd, but the list structure is already working—I want a sixth.

The jargon distinguishes commitment levels. “Birdwatcher” is casual. “Birder” is serious. “Twitcher” means you chase rare birds other people found. If you miss it, you’ve dipped out. If others see it and you don’t, you’re gripped off. A 1969 glossary said “bird-watcher” was “ambiguous” and “should not be used to refer to the serious birder.”

I’m clearly a birdwatcher. Maybe a birder if I keep the list going. Definitely not a twitcher—I’m not driving six hours to see someone else’s sighting. But the yard list is real. Five species in thirty minutes without leaving the property.

The theodolite pointed at fixed survey stations. The sextant points at predictable celestial bodies. Both require optical precision and careful logging. Birds require the same magnification and the same attention to field notes, but they don’t hold still and they don’t appear on published tables.

Forty-five million Americans identify as birdwatchers. The hobby drives $41 billion annually in ecotourism. The income level skews above average, probably because good binoculars cost more than a used sextant.

I already have the optics. The field guide is free. The only thing stopping me from logging species six through ten is going back outside.