The Log | School News

Bird Watch For Nicholas School researcher, vocation and avocation meet in Duke Forest

By Laura Ertel

“Hear that?” Jeff Pippen stops mid-sentence, cocking his head to one side and listening intently, then points off into the Duke Forest woods.“‘Peter, Peter, Peter.’ That’s a Tufted Titmouse.”

  Minutes later, another pause. “Hear the one that sounds like ‘potato chip dip, potato chip dip’?” That’s an American Goldfinch, he explains, noting that its call echoes an undulating flight pattern that makes it look as though it’s flying over the ridges of a Ruffles potato chip.

  “I cannot be outside and not hear birds,” grins the amiable Pippen. On a walk down the Shepherd Nature Trail in Duke Forest, Pippen, a research associate at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, continues to point out birds, butterflies and dragonflies. There’s a Common Grackle. A Great Crested Flycatcher. An Eastern Tiger Swallowtail butterfly. An Eastern Tailed-Blue butterfly. A Common Whitetail dragonfly.

   It’s this level of enthusiasm and expertise that led the Office of Duke Forest to enlist Pippen’s help to create a complete inventory of the birds and butterflies found throughout the University’s nearly 8,000 acres of recovered farmlands and forest.

A Birder is Born
Not every birder is bird-intense, but how else would you describe a guy who routinely jumps in his car at a moment’s notice and drives five hours to the Outer Banks to see a rare species that was just reported from there? Or, who drives from 3 a.m. to midnight in an attempt to break the record for most birds seen in a 24-hour calendar day? Or, who keeps detailed lists of every bird he has seen— categorized by county, state and country?

  Pippen stumbled into birding almost by accident. In 1985, while completing his master’s degree in biology at the University of Michigan, he asked around about a good summer course to complement a plant class he was taking. He heard rave reviews about a bird class, but the prospect of studying birds was uninspiring.

   “But enough people said the bird class is the best class at the biological station that I finally said, ‘Fine, I’ll take the stupid bird class,’” he said. “And literally, it changed my life, because now a majority of my activities are planned around birding, and birding led into butterflies. Now, even our family vacations are planned around where Jeff can go see new birds and butterflies!”

  Today, Pippen is part of a network of serious birders dedicated to seeing as many different species as possible. They keep in touch by phone and email, sounding the alert when a rare bird is sighted and converging on the site to add it to their personal “life lists.” When he and a friend were the first to see a Pacific-slope Flycatcher in North Carolina, they immediately picked up their cell phones and summoned their cohorts to Jordan Lake to share their find. His love of birding led naturally into butterflying, and eventually into dragonflies and damselflies as well as reptiles and amphibians. Now Pippen looks for each of these on his birding trips. He even discovered a couple of new sites in Duke Forest where the uncommon Four-toed Salamander resides.

The Air Out There
Pippen’s “day job” at Duke is as a research associate for William H. Schlesinger, now the dean of the Nicholas School, working on a large-scale, national study to determine the effects of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide on pine forest growth. The Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE) study uses technology developed and owned by Brookhaven National Laboratory. One of several FACE sites nationally, Duke’s site is funded largely through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

page 1 | 2 | 3