Electric Birding

By Gary Metzger

My and my wife Joan’s life in a retirement community in State College is going very well; we continue to spend lots of time and energy watching our beloved birds. Our feeders in our garden space Eastern Redbud tree are busy, and we were fortunate this Spring to watch a clutch of black-capped chickadees fledge from the nest box under our cottage’s eaves. We continue to be delighted with all of the great birding in the numerous state parks, state game lands and the seemingly endless state forests in every direction of the compass from our new home.

My joy in exploring to find all of the “good” birding spots within reasonable driving distance is still going strong. We’ve found lots of winter raptors, including northern harriers and rough-legged hawks, out to the West in the Woodward area. Nearby Colyer Lake surprised us with an amazing flock of 233 tundra swans in February and Tussey Mountain is the place for migrating golden eagles in late winter. Sand Mountain, down Route 322, is a good spot to look for red crossbills and Mountain Church Road in the Bald Eagle State Forest is our favorite spring spot for singing hermit thrushes. Cerulean warblers and American redstarts are seemingly everywhere down on the Lower Trail. Up to the North, Black Moshannon State Park and associated forests and State Game Lands (SGL) are always full of birds. Nearby Scotia SGL is our local go-to place in the for golden-winged warblers, American woodcock and Eastern Whip-poor-wills.

Last summer we finally decided that we would be acting more responsibly if we weren’t burning a lot of gasoline while enjoying nature and searching for birds. Our Toyota hybrid got good gas mileage, but still… We know that North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds in just the last 50 years, and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels has played a significant role in those losses.

So, we bought an electric vehicle. It’s a Subaru Solterra, similar to the Foresters that we’ve enjoyed driving in years past, and this model has been an absolute joy these past 9 months or so. It has proven to be very economical to maintain and fuel—no oil changes and it’s costing us roughly $30 per month for the wind or solar generated electricity that we use to charge the batteries. The PA Public Utility Commission maintains a “Papowerswitch.com” website which allows any resident of the Commonwealth to switch to renewably generated, non-polluting electricity. So, for us, more birding and less guilt…

Much of our birding now involves slow and careful driving on little-travelled back roads— lots of gravel SGL and forestry roads. There is essentially no engine noise and with our Merlin cellphone app and our own ears we identify all sorts of birds as we go, stopping to explore the really birdy spots. It has added a whole new dimension to our exploring and finding and enjoying birds, other wildlife and the natural world at large. When the time is right for you, maybe you’ll consider a quieter, cleaner birding transportation alternative. Happy birding!