- November 23, 2024
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Margi Haas steps out of her River Club lanai outfitted for an evening of birding: digital camera slung over one shoulder, Nikon bins (that’s birder slang for binoculars) clipped to a harness strapped to her back. The harness helps support the weight of her gear much like a brassiere, as Haas wryly points out. It also protects against neck strain caused by hours of gawking up at trees through heavy optics — an ache grudgingly referred to as “warbler neck” by those in the field.
“We birders find ourselves going into a trance state,” Haas says of the endeavor’s all-consuming nature. “I’ve walked so far enthusiastically birding that walking back can feel daunting.”
A psychotherapist, public speaker and coach, she’s well aware of the benefits of meditation. Birding to her is easier, though, and in many ways more therapeutic than stillness.
She walks in the direction of the wooded wetlands that hem in her golf course community. It was in this spot five years ago that Haas, then a casual bird-watcher, felt the urge to wade into serious birder territory after witnessing 34 swallow-tailed kites glide into the high canopy of a tall longleaf pine behind her home one July night. The observation was so rare that she still talks about it in presentations at nature parks and Audubon societies around the area, including Sarasota Audubon Society, for which she serves as program director.
Says Haas, “That tree changed my life, my interest in birds.”
The swallow-tailed kite is regarded as something of a bird de resistance in Florida. Revered for its sleek body, forked tail and ability to seemingly glide for miles without flapping its wings, kites can be challenging to spot for a number of reasons. First, they build their nests in the highest crooks of pine trees. Second, they spend most of their time in flight, traveling between nests in the southern U.S. and pre-migratory roosts in Central and South America, a 10,000-mile round-trip odyssey they embark on each year.
“It’s a gorgeous bird,” Haas says. “The kind of bird people wax poetic about.”
Ten years ago, the former headhunter couldn’t tell a house sparrow from a finch.
A driven entrepreneur with degrees from both Harvard and Stanford universities, Haas spent the first three decades of her career in New York City, engrossed in the study of a distinctly heavier species: humans.
Haas remembers sitting on the edge of her bed facing the lake, looking out past the old mossy trees at a ruckus of birds she’d never seen before. Watching them soar in and out of the landscape, listening to them all atwitter, she felt an immediate sense of peace.
Highly cerebral and preternaturally adept at reading people, Haas found she was a natural fit for Wall Street, even when she felt at odds with the ethos of that world. Not long after landing in the financial district, she launched her own business, an executive recruiting firm with offices in Manhattan and Tokyo, where she’d routinely fly to recruit bilingual business execs for senior-level positions. Having spent much of her 20s in Japan, Haas had another unique advantage over many of her high-powered peers: She could speak fluent Japanese.
“I found myself coaching people, always asking them if they really wanted the job I was trying to put them in,” Haas says. “It was like I was blowing my own cover.”
Not one to ignore her instincts, she decided to get licensed in psychotherapy, counseling and other alternative healing modalities while running the firm. As usual, this inclination gave Haas even more leverage with executive-types, many of whom seemed unhappy, stuck on a hamster wheel or clearly on the wrong career path.
“I was always more interested in what made people tick,” she says.
In those years, her burning curiosity did not extend to birds, except for noting the occasional robin when she was out walking the dog, a signal that spring was about to start in New York.
In case you didn’t notice, bird-watching became a thing during the pandemic.
Once viewed as a fuddy-duddy pastime for khaki-clad retirees, the leisure pursuit was appropriated by hipsters in the past year and a half. Although it happened under the radar in urban areas across the U.S., the craze was documented by The New York Times, Associated Press and National Geographic, to name a few publications. As social distancing and quarantining became the norm, so too did interest in the great outdoors. Add boredom, technology and existential dread to the mix, and voila, you’ve got the perfect captive bird-watching audience: millennials.
“I think birding became accessible in ways it hadn’t been before,” says Lee Amos, the land stewardship manager at Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast. “People say it’s fun, but maybe it feels fun now because it’s easy.”
Goaded by birding apps, such as eBird and other bird-watching and identification apps, millennial homebodies found themselves trekking for the first time into parks, preserves and faraway fields in search of birds they’d never heard of before. Some of these apps, eBird included, actively encourage competition among bird nerds. Haas herself holds the No. 10 spot on eBird’s list of Top eBirders in Sarasota County.
Case in point: From 2019 to 2020, eBird.com — a global, open-access birding database launched 19 years ago by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — reported a 24% uptick in its number of recorded observations. And last year, the project, which began as a way for “citizen scientists” to record, track and share sightings to help further the research of actual scientists, announced it had officially logged 1 billion bird observations.
During the height of the pandemic, Amos says he saw more people milling around Bay Preserve in Osprey (home to the Conservation Foundation offices) than ever before. Although that initial surge in usage has petered out, Amos says there are still some hangers-on, including a dance workout group. He sees this small change in behavior as a measure of hope, an indication of a growing desire to understand the environment and our place in it.
“The word is mindfulness,” Amos says. “Birders have always been mindful, but anyone who engages with nature on a regular basis is. Mindfulness sets you on a path of discovery and self-improvement, which leads to better wellness. There are studies out now about how powerful nature can be when it comes to treating health and wellness. It’s to the extent that doctors are prescribing it as a treatment for anxiety, depression and ADHD.”
So maybe this millennial birding thing isn’t just a lark.
It certainly isn’t for Haas. When she and her partner, fellow coach, public speaker and psychotherapist Leslie Austin, arrived in East Manatee County seven years ago, Haas felt like she’d washed up on an island with the Swiss Family Robinson.
She remembers sitting on the edge of her bed facing the lake, looking out past the old mossy trees at a ruckus of birds she’d never seen before. Watching them soar in and out of the landscape, listening to them all atwitter, Haas felt an immediate sense of peace. She had no idea watching birds could be so therapeutic. It made her think that had she watched them sooner, maybe she would have been spared the depression she experienced near the end of her time in New York.
Back at The River Club, under the pine tree where it all began, Haas focuses her binoculars at the highest branches of the tree. For the moment it’s vacant, which isn’t a surprise given swallow-tailed kites won't arrive in Florida until February or March. Not that Haas doesn’t have plenty of other feathered friends to occupy the tree until then, including fish crows, kestrels and bald eagles.
Undeterred, the birder roams on. She heads for the lake, crossing the rolling Bermuda greens on the golf course and one man rolling past on his golf cart. Thunder rumbles to the north over the interstate as clouds start to creep in from the east. Haas, admittedly more night owl than early bird, pays no attention to the watch on her wrist, having long-ago accepted the elasticity of time.
And then, as if scripted to make the usual cameo, a pair of sandhill cranes — the unofficial mascot of Lakewood Ranch — comes into view.
Nibbling at bugs in the ground, the bowed-over cranes eat head to head, their lank bodies touching at the feet to form a heart. “Look,” Haas whispers as to not startle them. “Over there, black-bellied whistling ducks.”
A mother duck and 11 ducklings are setting sail across the water in a perfect row. Haas, who is acquainted with this particular duck family, questions the whereabouts of the father duck as the babies float single file behind their mother into the middle of the lake.
Stepping out of the thicket and back onto the golf course, Haas perks up at the sound of a sharp rattling cry. Darkness is starting to set in, but this dogged rambler is not ready yet to call it quits. A belted kingfisher — one of the more alpha birds on the Florida wetland scene, thanks to its brazen call — swoops in over the lake low and fast. No sooner does the kingfisher pass when another bird appears from out of nowhere like a winged ninja and settles into the twisted branches of a nearby tree.
It’s a black-crowned night heron, and the fact that Haas can spot it in the dark, much less identify the species, is remarkable.
She keeps her sights on the bird for a while, even though it’s entirely obscured by foliage. Birding is like a “Magic Eye” book sometimes, an optical illusion. But just like everything else in life, once you lose focus on the thing you want, you risk finding something else entirely different.
“If I were independently wealthy, I’d have probably been an adventurer,” Haas will later muse. “Like a female Indiana Jones, just geekier.”
For now, she’s just content to turn in for the night, having enjoyed a sufficient mid-October bird show. The few washes of blue left in the sky have faded to pink, and the darker parts are bleeding into purple. The golden hour just before sunset is over, and now all that remains is a psychedelic hue and the subtle but beguiling winds of change.
