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Harriet Marble’s Bird Encounters of the Earliest Kind
Harriet Marble of Chester keeps pencil and binoculars at the ready when she runs a breeding bird survey. She has counted birds for the national program for over three decades. [Photo by Liz Larcom]
By Liz Larcom Early one June morning, Harriet Marble of Chester stood on a rural road next to her vehicle’s front fender listening and watching for birds on one of her assigned breeding bird survey routes. She took note of each, and then stopped when her timer sounded. With a schedule running 4-5 hours from before dawn, Harriet encounters few people on her route, but this day a man walked over and asked, “Would you give me a lift to the Agency? I need to catch a ride on the shuttle to get to a doctor’s appointment in Great Falls.” “Sure, but I have to make a lot of bird stops along the way,” she replied. She wasn’t kidding. Only a mail carrier stops more often than Harriet does. In fact, a morning on a breeding bird survey entails 50 stops, each for exactly three minutes and each a half mile apart. That’s what happens when a researcher plans your birding. When biologist Chandler Robbins wanted an accurate way to sample the birds of early summer, he wanted to know how they fared from year to year across the country. With the effects of DDT just becoming clear, he created the method volunteers still use today, giving it a trial run in 1966 in the eastern U.S. In 1979, Harriet got word that the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service wanted volunteers with enthusiasm and strong bird identification skills to follow a strict regimen along a road the Service randomly selected. Desiring to use her knowledge even if Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks seemed uninterested in hiring the University of Montana alumnus with the Masters in Wildlife Management, Harriet said, “Yes.” Then she listened to hours and hours of bird tapes to polish her identification skills and headed out. The experience passed muster. “I did one route and I liked it so much, I asked for another,” recalls Harriet, smiling. Getting up early? “Once you’re up, it’s the best time of day,” she says. She doesn’t doubt the value of an early start. When she arrives a halfhour before dawn, “The birds are already going at it.” Later Harriet added two more routes, all of which she must do between Memorial Day and the first week of July. She must choose days with passable roads, little if any rain, and winds less than 13 miles per hour. Thankfully, forecasting accuracy has improved since Harriet began 36 years ago. Now when she awakens, she doublechecks for any changes then sets out with confidence. Much of the time her routes run through wheat, stubble, and rangeland, but at other places, she counts at a prairie, pothole, or creek. Wherever the half-mile mark puts her, she surveys, (Continued on page 63)