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[ Dad | How he taught me | Twenty from the list | The margins | Cape May, September 1999 | The List ] Hi. I'm Shawn Falkner. I'm 19 and I go to the community college here in South Jersey. My dad was Barry Falkner, and he saw 547 species of birds in North America. He died last October. I'm not really a web page person, but my friend said I should write some of this down, and he showed me how, so this is that. Dad Dad grew up in South Jersey and started birding in the spring of 1968, when he was 18. The story is that a cardinal kept fighting its own reflection in his mother's car mirror, and he got curious and borrowed a bird book from the library, and that was it for the rest of his life. He went to pharmacy school in Philadelphia and was the pharmacist at the drugstore in our town for twenty-four years. Half the town knew him as the pharmacist and the other half as the guy with binoculars in the car. A lot of people knew him as both. He married my mom, Carolyn, in 1977. I came in 1980 and my brother Andrew in 1983. Andrew doesn't bird. He came once. That was enough for both of them. On Tuesday night, October 13, 1998, Dad had a heart attack at home, after supper, and he died before morning. He was 48. He had been at the hawk watch the Saturday before. I keep coming back to that. He had a really good Saturday. How he taught me He started me at the kitchen window when I was five, with the feeder. He wouldn't tell me what the birds were. He'd say, "What do you see?" and I'd say "a brown bird," and he'd say "what else," until I said something like "striped chest, brown cap, pumps its tail," and then he'd hand me the book. Song Sparrow. He said if you look at the bird first and the book second you will remember it forever, and if you do it the other way you'll forget it by supper. He was right. He got me my own binoculars when I was eight. After that I went everywhere with him: the Christmas Bird Count every December, the Delaware Bay beaches every May to see the shorebirds eating horseshoe crab eggs, and Cape May every fall. He made me learn the hawks by shape and by how they fly, not by color, because "by the time you can see the color, it's gone." He never said "good job." When I got something hard right he'd just nod and write it in his notebook with my initials next to it. I didn't know until I went through his notebooks this year how many times he did that. Twenty from the list He kept his life list in a green ledger in the order he saw them, with the number, date and place. Here are twenty I picked. Some are rare, some aren't, but they're the ones he told stories about.
The margins Dad's field guide was the National Geographic one, the 1987 edition, held together with duct tape. He wrote in the margins in pencil, tiny. I've been reading it like a book. Some of what's in there:
Cape May, September 1999 This September I've been at the hawk watch platform at Cape May Point State Park every weekend, with Dad's binoculars, from about nine until it slows down. The official counter is up there every day doing the real count. I just keep my own, in Dad's kind of notebook, the way he did. Mr. Del Cassidy, who birded with Dad for twenty-five years, sits next to me most days and checks me on the sharpie-or-Coop ones. He's usually right. Here are my numbers.
Partial days, my own count, not official. 9/4-6 is Labor Day weekend (three days). The first two weekends were slow. Mostly ospreys going over one or two at a time, and the monarch butterflies, which come through by the hundreds this time of year and land in the goldenrod by the platform. The peregrine on 9/11-12 was Sunday afternoon, the 12th. It was almost five and I was packing up, and Mr. Cassidy said "Shawn," and there it was, low over the dunes, coming straight at us, and it went right over the platform and out over the water toward Delaware like it was late for something. Dad's favorite bird. I'm not a person who thinks things are signs. I sat back down anyway and stayed until the light went. Then Hurricane Floyd came through on Thursday the 16th, and that Saturday the wind was northwest, cool and clear, and the sky just filled up. Sharpies coming in over the trees every few seconds, kestrels hanging over the field, a broad-wing kettle over the lighthouse. Everyone on the platform was yelling numbers. Dad used to talk about days like that. Now I've had one. This weekend was the sharpies' weekend, and the falcons are starting to come through. October is supposed to be peregrine month. I'll be there. The list Dad's whole list is too long to put up, but I typed in his hawks, shorebirds and warblers, because those were his favorites, and I started my own list underneath, from scratch. See The List. Also: Backyard Birds of Wisconsin, by Walt and June, who keep a checklist of every bird in their backyard outside Eau Claire. Dad's list started in a backyard too.
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Dad's Life List
