Maggie Smith

by Mike Stiles

I will occasionally highlight some of our county birders on these pages. This month I will introduce you to one of the few female birders in the area, Maggie Smith.

Unlike some birders who have had a passion for the sport from an early age, Maggie started birding at age 62, but has certainly made up for lost time. By her own admission she is somewhat compulsive at her hobbies, loves to learn, and is very competitive. It's no surprise that she has quickly become one of the top birders in the area, with a county list (as of this writing) of 369 birds.

She grew up in New Hampshire and has always loved being in nature. Maggie spent many childhood days in the woods in search of rare flowers, in particular a type of orchid called Lady Slippers. She attended Brandeis University and certainly shares some of the feisty liberalism of fellow classmate Abby Hoffman. She and her husband moved to the central coast in 1983.

She became interested in birds when, while walking her dog in the Pismo Dunes she heard the piercing call of a hawk. Back at home on her computer, she searched through the online recordings of hawk calls and concluded it was a Red-shouldered Hawk. She started bringing a pair of binoculars along on her walks, and continued to research her sightings on the computer. She soon found Slocobirding, the county rare bird email listerv, and would read what the local birders would find, and enter each bird name into a search engine, to learn what she could of each species.

Through the county listserv she discovered Oso Flaco Lake. One foggy morning along the boardwalk that crosses the lake, she recounts, a male Yellow-headed Blackbird, shining through the fog, was the bird that really set the hook, and she started birding there every day. It was there, under the willows along the entrance road, that I first met Maggie in 2004.

She credits two local birders, Alan Schmierer and Tom Edell, for helping her become the birder she is today. It was Alan, again at Oso Flaco Lake, that showed her a stunning male Scarlet Tanager in his spotting scope. They started birding together and Alan showed her many of the county's birding spots, and often took her out to the Carrizo Plain, no doubt Alan's favorite spot in the county.

Tom Edell, our county's "official" bird record keeper, was excited that Maggie was birding Oso Flaco every day. It has great potential for rarities, but is decidedly under birded. As a newcomer to the birding world though, Maggie had reservations about posting her bird sightings to the public listserv, so Tom very patiently helped her with identification issues, and most importantly helped her understand distribution, and arrival and departure dates of our county's migrants.

To this day Maggie works hard to understand the status and distribution of local birds, a lesson that every birder should work on, beginner or expert. Knowing when a bird is expected to arrive or leave our area is arguably as important as knowing what to look for in identifying it. Of course birds do show up at odd times of the year, but if you think you see a Ruby-crowned Kinglet in June in our county, for example, you might want to take another look at the bird.

Maggie and I both wondered why birding is such a male-dominated sport (at least in the "top tier" of birders), and we couldn't come up with a valid answer. I do know that Maggie's knowledge and careful observations have earned her the respect of the local birding community, and she's very simply a joy to be with in the field.

Burrowing Owl on banner by Cleve Nash.