It’s a cold crisp early winter day – December 28, 2013 to be exact – and Ralph K. Bell is ready to look for birds on the roads around his Clarksville farm. The truck is warmed up and fellow birder Jordan Wolfe has his binoculars out and ready. He’ll be riding with Ralph, verifying sightings, and tallying them on the list that will be sent to the National Audubon Society for the 2013 Christmas Bird Count. Llew Williams has driven from Morgantown to count the birds on the Bell farm while Ralph, at age 98, settles for the comfort of his truck, driving slowly with the windows down on back roads and through forgotten coal towns from here to the Monongahela River and back. It’s a drive he’s been taking every year since he first started winter bird counts in Greene County for Audubon in 1958.
I snap this photograph of old friends saying hello, then, coffee mug in hand, jump in the front seat to ride shotgun with Ralph, watching, listening and learning. I’ll be writing yet another story about this annual count that gives science a snapshot of bird populations and, by extrapolation, planetary health in the Northern Hemisphere. Although not a dedicated birder, I maintain a feeder and do my part by writing about the environment and encouraging others to become citizen scientists. And every year, Ralph calls me and says “Hello kid! I have the numbers. Are you ready to write?” This year I’m excited because this is my first time going out with Ralph on the Clarksville Count, a 15-mile circle that includes the river habitat that has been attracting more than ducks and herons. The Clarksville count recorded its first bald eagle in 2009 and the chances of seeing one of these big birds today has me eagerly looking skyward.
It’s sunny but with a cold wind blowing and no snow to offer contrast some birds will be hard to spot, hunkered down in thickets. Still, the sun draws them out. Nuthatches, juncos and crows, cardinals, blue jays, song sparrows and house sparrows, titmice and chickadees dart and sing as we dip down past marshy creek beds and cruise along abandoned fence lines and pasturelands. Ralph identifies each voice, even when there’s no bird to be seen. “I’ve always had to listen harder because I’m colorblind.”
After 40-some years, Ralph knows the neighborhood. We come around a bend and sure enough, there’s a pair of mockingbirds dancing from branch to branch in a big tree, flashing the white bands on tail and wing that identify them. Ralph nods.
“I’ve seen them here before. They nest here.”
Today when we follow Ten Mile Creek to the Monongahela River we count plenty of wild ducks and herons and the occasional soaring red tail hawk – but no eagle. Then back up Black Dog Hollow Road near Fredericktown to the scattered houses of Sandy Plains.
Ralph gets out of the truck to graciously accept Delores Doman’s tally from her birdfeeder, fastened two stories up to the outside of her kitchen window.
“Nicholas Teagarden made this for me and he put it up, too. It’s his Eagle Scout project,” she tells us. “I can put feed through the window and really see the birds up close. Last summer a mother woodpecker brought her babies here so they could eat and I watched them grow up. Everyone should have a feeder like this.”
As we drive, Ralph notes the missing bluebird boxes and empty barns. “When that farm had cattle, the rock doves were lined up on the barn roof.” Bird populations hinge on access to food and shelter as humans displace their native habitat, he tells me, not for the first time. And not for the first time I nod my head in agreement and make a note to mention it in the story I’m about to write.
Ralph turned 99 on January 27, 2014 and I stopped by as winter began giving way to spring for one last visit. It was farmer time around the kitchen table to compare notes on the weather, and swap stories about birds and the habitat we share. Yes, eagles were returning, it’s good. Purple Martins are back as well. People need to keep feeding if they want birds in their backyard. Ralph’s homemade, no nonsense old bird feeders, seen through the back porch window were filled and dozens of birds were feasting. Pieces of corrugated tin hung above them at strategic angles – the better to keep hungry hawks from crashing the party. It was so Ralph K. Bell I had to smile. Practical, to the point, and full of good cheer. Framed by quaint lace curtains, it was a photograph worth a thousand words.
Ralph admitted that day he was slowing down but still managed to get out to mow his fields when it was time. And he was there to greet but not walk with his fellow birders for the spring count on the roads around his farm on May 17, 2014.
Ralph’s obituary reports that on May 20 he told daughter Joanie he was tired, adding “I’ve had a wonderful life and loved every minute of it.” He died that day, leaving us this secret to living a long life: “Keep moving and never retire.”
