Tom Kemp doesn’t need binoculars to know that a house wren is nearby. All he
has to do is hear the loud song packed into the little bird.Just by listening, Kemp knew which songbirds
were busy Tuesday morning in the woods of Cricket Frog Cove, south of Bowling Green. There were red-winged
blackbirds, cardinals, bluejays, robins, flickers, a gold finch, wrens and a Baltimore oriole.“We do lots of
bird watching by hearing also,” he said. “Once upon a time, I could identify all birds by song.”“That’s a
flicker,” he said, as a songbird broke the morning silence.Kemp, a retired biology teacher who lives in
Bowling Green, has been fascinated by birds for nearly 50 years. His older brother was a birder, “so I
tagged along with him.”As a birder, Kemp knows this is the biggest week of the year for American
birdwatchers.“This is the peak of migration,” he said. “Many birds use the Great Lakes as a migration focal
point.”But while many of his fellow birders were crowding together to catch glimpses of birds at Magee Marsh
near Lake Erie, Kemp prefered the more quiet setting of Cricket Frog Cove this week.“It’s wall-to-wall
people” along the lake, he said.

Bird watching takes patience — aided
by technology when desired. This week, Kemp came armed with his binoculars and an iPod packed with 300 bird
calls.“I don’t have any music on here. It’s all bird calls,” Kemp said.By playing the song of the red-winged
blackbird, for instance, Kemp can draw the bird closer since it had territorial tendencies.“Sometimes they
get mad,” he said. On Tuesday, that happened when the bird responded to the iPod song by swooping in and
perching on a nearby branch, puffing up his red wings so he looked more formidable to possible
competition.Other birds, like the flicker, just respond in song.“He acknowledged it,” Kemp said as he heard
the flicker echo in the distance.“If you do this long enough, you can tell birds by their silouettes and the
way they fly,” he said.Kemp has a particular fondness for songbirds, many which are returning to the region
after spending the colder months in southern climates.“I like the fact that they migrate,” he said. “Many
spent the winter in Central and South America.”The birdwatcher also enjoys seeing the unexpected.“It’s fun
to find an out-of-place species. It happened in my yard yesterday,” when a clay-colored sparrow showed up,
he said.Kemp has traveled the world in search of birds. He has been to Australia, Africa, Asia and South
America. His next goal — Nepal. As always, he will study up on the native birds, such as the pheasants of
the Himalayas.Once he drove to Massachusetts to see a rare ivory gull, which is typically found only on
northern ice flows.“It’s a bird I had dreamed about seeing pretty much my whole life,” he said. Was it worth
it? “Oh you bet.”Though he has seen winged creatures around the world, Kemp never tires of checking out
local birds.“I’m still discovering things about it,” he said.Kemp participates every year in the annual
Christmas bird counts in the region. Over the years, he has noticed a declining population.“Overall, there
are certainly fewer birds than there were,” he said.The biggest threat to birds is the loss of natural
habitat areas, and ferral cats, he said.The most common birds of this region include grackles, red-winged
blackbirds, and the red-breasted robins.“You’d have to make the case for robins,” he said.His least favorite
are house sparrows, who tend to be piggish about food.“They out-compete some of the native birds,” he
said.And despite the bad reputation of bluejays for eating eggs and nestling birds, Kemp likes jays.And
while it hardly seems fair, the males are typically more brightly colored than females as a matter of
protection. “That’s the way it is in the bird world,” he said.Though birdwatching can be a solitary sport,
Kemp said he has learned much about the region from fellow birders Chris Gajewicz, Chuck Anderson, Phil
Chad, and Jeff and Becky Cullen.