Raul Reyes would have been the first to laugh if someone had told him he would enjoy bird-watching. Birds did not move him. "I knew several birds, that was it," he said.
Also, he is blind.
But now Reyes, 58, a mechanic from Edinburg, Texas, who lost his sight to diabetes and botched laser surgery, spends delicious hours in mosquitoey subtropical thickets in the birding mecca of the Rio Grande Valley, helping lead other blind and visually impaired men and
women in bird-watching, or bird-listening.
They are the "Blind Birders," as Gladie Cruz, 24, another leader of the group, boasted on her T-shirt, which also had a green parakeet logo and the slogan "We Can't See You -- But We Can Hear You."
Studying CDs of bird songs the way sighted birders consult field manuals and carrying tape recorders instead of binoculars, they ooh and ahh over the extraordinary array of 500 identified species that make South Texas, with its migratory way stations, one of the world's birding capitals.
And for the first time, these birders will be included in one of the pastime's biggest events, the eighth annual Great Texas Birding Classic, which runs from this Saturday to April 25, along three tiers of coastline from Beaumont south to Brownsville. Participants who tally the most birds, using ears and eyes, in midnight-to-midnight segments get to allocate more than US$50,000 in prize money to conservation causes of their choosing.
The more limited blind birder's event, on April 18 in this area around the booming border city McAllen, has been officially designated, with cheerful good humor, the "Outta-Sight Song Birder Tournament."
"They thought it was a pretty cool play on words," said Roy Rodriguez, a leading bird-watcher here who has been working with the group as a project of the Rensselaerville Institute, a nonprofit organization seeking innovative approaches to community problems; in this case, how to better the lives of 12,000 blind people in a poor four-county region of the Rio Grande Valley. The area includes Starr County, by many indicators the poorest in the country.
"Few people realize the number is so large because the blind rarely venture outside -- they live in self-imposed exile," said Eric Ellman, local project director of the institute, based in Rensselaerville, New York. Its methodology is to seek out and sponsor community "spark plugs" like Cruz and Reyes to rally their peers to action.
In their competition, three teams of three blind birders each, along with a sighted and more experienced fourth member wearing a blindfold, will be guided through thickets for eight hours, seeking to compile the longest list of birds identified. The teams, named for business sponsors, which put up US$500 each, are the Wild Bird Center Inca Doves, the Espana Tweety Birds and Damar's Kingfishers. No special prizes have been announced yet for the blind birders.
On Saturday, team members and a dozen sighted birders gathered at the 4.8 hectare Frontera Audubon Center in the border city Weslaco for some practice.
One of the first to be dropped off was Jessica Garza, 31, a massage therapist from neighboring Pharr, who sported a cap with a plump cloth cardinal stitched to the bill.
"My parents were always naturalists, hunting and fishing," Garza said. "At the time I had full sight and never paid attention."
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