I am a person that has a lot of hobbies. Besides birding, I enjoy hunting and fishing, photography (obviously), and cycling. Today I’m going to talk about cycling a little bit because it’s my hobby that most people don’t connect to my birding obsession very well.
A few years ago, I got a mountain bike from our local bike shop because I had discovered the sport of downhill mountain bike racing and thought it looked like something that I could do. The only problem was that I live in Iowa and there isn’t much downhill mountain biking to do here. We do have a lot of trails on public land that allow biking though, so I started going out and getting to know my area on bike. My favorite part of biking the parks was how much more of an area I could see because I was so much faster than when I would walk.
Fast forward a couple of years and I decided that I’d like to travel farther faster and the way to do that was to get a gravel bike. Back to the bike shop I went and bought another bike. At first, I was not so sure about actually biking on our gravel roads on such thin tires so I stuck to the paved roads. Out of those country roads on a warm summer morning you can see all sorts of wildlife and beautiful scenes.
My wife then introduced me to a local man who also liked to bike and we started meeting weekly to either ride our mountain bikes on the trails in the park or to take our gravel bikes out for some miles. He then encouraged me to signup for a gravel race and reminded me that you don’t necessarily have to compete at the races, but they can just be a fun way to get out on the bike.
We still bike together weekly and sometimes twice in a week. This past Saturday morning we were planning to meet up to get some gravel miles in. I’ve been trying to prepare for some races better than I did last year. My friend mentioned that he knew another guy who is preparing for Ragbrai, the annual bike across Iowa event, and that he might like to join us for this ride. I had a route in my mind that I wanted to ride because it had been a while since I had ridden it and my friend hadn’t yet experienced the beauty it offered.
When my friend (James) mentioned it to his friend (Aaron), Aaron was hesitant of the route because of the gravel, a feeling I completely understood. Aaron suggested another route that he rides on his lunch breaks every day. He told us that it has lots of hills and lots of miles. I agreed to change plans and after James and I scouted the route on a map, I knew this was going to be a beautiful route anyway because it’s a route I used to drive when I was a conservation tech.
We all met up on Saturday morning and headed out. Aaron was right, this route offered lots of good hill training and the road wasn’t very heavily trafficked. I loved that there weren’t many crop fields along the route, but instead a lot of CRP, hay, and cattle pastures. At one point, I had gotten a little ahead of James and Aaron and was coming down a hill with a hay field on my right. All of a sudden, a bird song that I knew but hadn’t heard in a while hits my ears. I hear it a couple more times and images of Kansas and field work begin running through my head.
It was a Grasshopper Sparrow! I had never seen or heard this species in Iowa before and thought that my only chances at getting one for my year list this year were my South Dakota trip in a couple weeks or our family trip to Kansas this August. I was so excited that I began pumping my arms in the air and pointing to the field where the bird was. I had slowed down at this point to let James and Aaron catch up to me so I could tell them what I had heard. I appreciated their enthusiasm, but knew that they weren’t as excited as I was about the bird and that’s alright.
We got to our turn-around point and I let them know that I was going to stop at the field and submit a quick eBird checklist so that it would officially count for my year list. After submitting it, the rest of the ride was spent thinking about how I would have never discovered the Grasshopper Sparrow if I had taken my other route. What made it even more enjoyable was that I was with a couple of friends when it happened. Even if I had stuck to my original plan and gone out on my own, the excitement wouldn’t have been quite as high.
So, how does cycling connect to birding? Even though I’m not carrying my binoculars or my camera most of the time, I do have my ears open to the world around me. Cycling takes my down country roads that aren’t heavily trafficked and often have more birds than what you find hiking in a park. There is so much habitat in Iowa that is along these country roads that some of the most uncommon species utilize.
I now have seen every sparrow species expected in the state of Iowa, another group of birds closed out for this year. My list continues to grow and 200 keeps getting closer and closer. I leave for South Dakota next Friday and know there are going to be some birds there that I haven’t yet spotted this year.
The List
Grasshopper Sparrow