Man writes of 17 years watching birds at 1 Gilbert site

Neely Ponds study documents species during 1,103 visits
By Srianthi Perera The Republic | azcentral.com Tue Feb 19, 2013 8:05 AM

Tom Cole charts his life via bird sightings.
“I can explore my life using birds as the milepost,” said the 61-year-old retired game programmer and English-as-a-Second-Language teacher in Chandler, who has authored a database report, memoir and guide — all rolled into one.

Cole based his book, “The Intersection: Seventeen Years of Bird Processing on One Street Corner of the World,” on bird sightings at Neely Ponds, Gilbert’s first water-recharge facility.
From 1995 to 2011, Cole visited the recharge facility at Cooper and Elliot roads 1,103 times (it’s 4 miles from his Chandler home). The results — more than 13,000 birds from 149 species — are incorporated in the 263-page, self-published book.

“The Intersection” also captures the universal experience of bird-watchers, who spend hours, often alone, looking at birds and taking notes on their behavior.
Cole’s remarks are often amusing.

For example, here’s a note: “The bufflehead is a diving sea duck that stopped in to visit a few times at Elliot and Cooper roads. The male is snow white-blindingly white. It spends so much time under water that you’ll see him surface and you’ll say, “There he is!” to which someone says, “Where?” and you say “Over there — oh, but he dived again!” A minute later someone says, “There he is! and you say “Where?” and they say ... Well, you get the idea.”

Although new and sophisticated data formats exist to provide a more immediate way of researching birds, Cole’s work took place during a time when data technology was in its infancy.
“Cole chose a number of pathways through the young field of personal data management and has emerged with what amounts to a long-term, unfunded, citizen science project in a perfect, usable data format,” Pennsylvania birder Kate Atkins stated in a review.

Krys Hammers, president of the Desert Rivers Audubon Society, said Cole’s methodical way of recording the bird sightings gives insight to “what has been seen right there in that same little area in his own backyard.”

Hammers said such observations from years past are significant to birders.

“He really notices the behaviors ... It’s interesting because we all want to know how habitat changes and climate affects birds and their behavior and the sightings that we see. That’s what’s kind of important as a birder. Just to know what changes have occurred and maybe what causes those changes,” she said.

Cole said that a beginner birder may use the information with a standard field guide to get their new hobby off to a faster start, while an experienced birder may find the book interesting and helpful to plan a day’s birding.

It all began when Cole, a former ESL lecturer at Arizona State University, mused out loud to a friend that he hadn’t seen a long-billed dowitcher in ages. The friend directed him to Neely Ponds.
“The next weekend, I took his advice, and afterwards it became my habit to get up most Saturdays and Sundays and drive to the site with my dog, Noodles, a 6- by 4-inch notebook, and my Swift Audubon 8.5 x 44 Porro binoculars,” he wrote in the book’s introduction.

Over the years, Cole’s notes filled dozens of notebooks. He bought a commercial bird-listing software program and entered every bird he had seen at the site, plus others he had seen in other sites over the years.

“The software did much of what I wanted it to do, but I soon became dissatisfied with it; it only provided a place for notes that were associated with a single bird’s sighting,” Cole wrote. “There was no way to attach notes to a day’s sightings in a particular place so you could use the software as a journal.”

Thus began Cole’s foray into creating his own “bird processor,” as he calls it. During this time, he programmed two databases from ground up to view the bird data he gathered.

Cole also has authored several ESL grammar texts and created the programs for educational arcade-style computer games, among them Fish Trek, Preposition Pinball, Diamond Mine, and ESL Baseball. “The Intersection” is his first book on bird-watching.

Cole’s bird findings are also submitted to eBird, a citizen data collection site sponsored by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which is shared with the Avian Knowledge Network and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an open-source font of information for conservation biologists worldwide.

The birder notes species such as black-bellied whistling-duck, black-hooded parakeet, phainopepla and American robin are seen rarely at Neely Ponds. However, the northern mockingbird,Anna’s hummingbird, mourning dove and Albert’s towhee are common visitors to the site and have been sighted about 500 times by Cole.

As for long-billed dowitchers, Cole was rewarded with many sightings: between August 2003-May 2011, he saw 300.