Bird by bird.

Eubanks, Ted Lee

... I've been a creature of the elements
and keep on being a corpse in the city:
I cannot abide the niche,
prefer woodlands with startled
pigeons, mud, a branch of
chattering parakeets,
the citadel of the condor, captive
of its implacable heights,
the primordial ooze of the ravines
adorned with slipperworts.

--Pablo Neruda,
"The Poet Says Goodbye to the Birds"

Begin with place. Place is to birds as sky is to stars, as sea is to fish. Birds without places are like leaves without trees. To interpret birds, begin with bird places.

But what to make of bird places? They are scattered, like the birds.

Bird places are beads without a strand, threads without a loom. How to weave these bird places into an interpretive tapestry, where the color of one thread compliments and enhances the next?

This question intrigued me in 1992. Texas Governor Ann Richards had asked me to serve on a task force that would develop a nature tourism strategy for the state. The Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) would chair. The results of that effort, Nature Tourism in the Lone Star State, were published in November 1993.

Watchable Wildlife held its annual convention in Corpus Christi at practically the same time. The tourism task force held a news conference the day before Watchable Wildlife to present the results of the report. Several of us remained through the week to attend the conference.

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Late in the conference, TPWD's Madge Lindsay and I started chatting about how to take the findings of the nature tourism report and implement them throughout the state. I mentioned an idea that I had for developing a trail that would connect birding sites, and Madge remarked that she had become interested in a new program from TXDOT called the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) that might fund such a project.

We both understood the disconnected nature of birding sites around the state. We also were interested in seeing if connecting sites in a trail would enhance interpretive opportunities. Were themes and stories that were obscure on an individual basis more apparent when seen across a larger interpretive landscape? Would collections of sites and habitats reveal the conservation imperatives behind much of TPWD's work? Would traveling recreationists be more inclined to invest in longer trips if the birding trails supplied an abundance of birding opportunities?

We wasted little time. The first segment of the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail (GTCBT), the Central Texas Coast, received ISTEA funding and soon we were underway. I was brought in to assess the nominated sites, write the interpretive text, assist with public meetings, and to plot the trail and its segments (which we called loops). On September 8, 1994, Roger Tory Peterson spoke at the GTCBT's dedication ceremony in Rockport, less than a year since that late-night epiphany at the Watchable Wildlife Conference in Corpus Christi.

I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.
--Pablo Neruda, "Bird"

Birding trails have aged well. From that precarious start trails have arisen in most states and numerous foreign countries. Many are exclusively geared to birds and birding, while others have expanded to include wildlife and other aspects of nature.

Not long after beginning the Texas trails, I became involved in helping the state of Virginia in developing their bird and wildlife trail. In Oklahoma we organized the Great Plains Trail. The birding trails we assisted in Louisiana become the America's Wetland Birding Trail, highlighting the threatened relationship between coastal birds and the disappearing coastal wetlands in the state. In recent years we developed the interpretive plan and enhancements for the Wetlands and Wildlife National Scenic Byway, the first birding scenic byway in the nation. And currently we are assisting the Society for the Study and Conservation of Caribbean Birds (SCSCB) in organizing the Caribbean Birding Trail. One size clearly does not fit all.

Washington, Arizona, Alabama, Utah, Nebraska, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Maine, North Carolina, and Florida are but a few of the states that have followed suit and developed their own series of birding trails. There are birding trails from Costa Rica (called birding routes) to Zululand. All of this began as a slight flicker of an idea during a late evening conversation in Corpus Christi, Texas.

A people's poet,
provincial and birder,
I've wandered the world in search of life,
bird by bird I've come to know the earth.

--Pablo Neruda,
"The Poet Says Goodbye to the Birds"

Birding trails offer slivers of Neruda's world bird by bird, place by place. These trails place birds in situ, within a context. But to what end? Are birding trails little more than travel guides, or do they offer interpretive insights? Are there stories behind the obvious?

Begin with the basics. The connection of beginnings to ends is a road (conveying people). As pavement, as a surface, roads are in themselves bereft of interpretive value. To the same end a connection of all points between beginnings and ends is a map. Roads and maps are joined at the hip.

The connection of all experiences between beginnings and ends, however, is an interpretive trail. An interpretive trail meanders along a continuum, intermittently punctuated with moments of epiphany, poignancy, and bliss. Interpretive trails give meaning to a place, not simply directions.

Interestingly, we see a similar schism within bird art. There is illustration, such as birds in a field guide, and then there is art. A few artists, such as Louis Agassiz Fuertes, were accomplished at both. Field guide illustrations are two-dimensional cartoons, good for their intended purpose (giving a name to a bird) and little else.

As interpreters, we find the emotion and meaning in the art. As Freeman Tilden said, interpretation is an art in itself. As interpreters, we cannot imagine interpreting a bird without placing it within its natural milieu. Yes, birding trails have succeeded as recreational venues and as tourism magnets. But birding trails, foremost, are interpretive platforms. Birding trails offer an array of places that are purposefully organized to tell the stories of birds.

Organized. Yes. But manufactured? No. No one can predict the specific interpretive opportunities that will arise at any given moment along a birding trail. However, trails can be designed so that the chances of a transcendent moment, seeing one's first Wilson's phalarope sweeping for brine flies in the shallows, or a purple gallinule tiptoeing through a marsh, or an almost invisible common pauraque nestled in the leaf litter, are finely honed.

Birding trails, as interpretive platforms, are in their nascence. One reason for this retarded development is that birding trails, in general, have been sponsored and developed by wildlife agencies or tourism organizations. Birding trails today say a great deal about what can be seen and where, but less about why one would care. Is there a quality or purpose to an interpretive trail that sets them apart from the traditions that, at this time, constrict such agencies and organizations?

Certainly the next generation of interpretive trails will adopt the technology of the moment. Already birding trails have shifted to the Internet and now smart phone applications. But let's also consider the words of Henry David Thoreau: "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

Yet we interpreters do have something important to communicate, and interpretive trails, like birding trails, are our telegraph. As the creators of these trails rush forward to adopt the gizmo of the moment, the need for the art of interpretation to flesh out their offerings only becomes more critical. We have proven the popularity of birding trails. Within two decades they have been adopted around the world. But now that we have built the telegraph, what do we want to say to Texas and to Maine?

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Ted Lee Eubanks is the founder and CEO of Fermata Inc., an Austin, Texas-based interpretive planning and development company. Ted is a lifelong birder, and has served on the boards of the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology.