Warbler Watcher Waits In The Woods

As Bob Lamothe walked along the Mill River, he positioned his Canon camera towards the sky, prepared to capture birds in flight — and was reminded of shared migration patterns that help people and avians alike call back and forth between their homelands.

A retired professor and multipotentialite, Lamothe spends two hours each day exploring the woods around his Hamden home in search of feathered friends. 

On Wednesday morning Lamothe was warming up to the spring weather while watching for warblers wandering through East Rock Park.

He makes a point to tread lightly. But he took a break from his usual silent stroll to talk with some human onlookers curious to find out more about his passion project for the ​“Word on the Street” segment of WNHH FM’s ​“Love Babz Love Talk.”

“Warblers are Haitian birds,” Lamothe informed his listeners, who included several stray bird watchers and residents passing by while making the most of the unclouded April day. ​“They live in Haiti for nine months out of the year. They’re little colorful birds that hop around like crazy.

“In April and May they fly up to the states where they can find tons and tons of bugs and have eggs and babies. East Rock Park is one of the best known migratory places for warblers.”

“We always say those are our Hatian migrants who come up for the medical care and good food here and then find their way back home.”

Lamothe himself was born in Haiti, right outside of the country’s capital city Port-au-Prince.

“We had a huge cage with pigeons and roosters running around the house,” he recalled. ​“Some days my parents would open up the cage and the pigeons would fly out and around. They’d go swimming in the basement.”

When Lamothe was 13, his parents sent him to live in Connecticut, where he graduated first from St. Lawrence and Notre Dame schools in West Haven before receiving additional degrees from Yale and Columbia. The first time his father came to visit him in the states, he bought Lamothe a camera to take photographs of his new home.

Lamothe went on to teach French, English and math at Norwalk Community College for decades. He has led lessons in Haitian Creole at Yale as well. 

In January, he finally gave up on grading student essays. He found he had more free time to pursue his hobbies, which include not only photographing birds, but practicing the Merengue, East Coast Swing, and salsa dance styles as well as playing harmonica in a local band.

“My friends call me a Renaissance man, but I don’t think I’m old enough,” he said with a laugh, adding that he is in the ​“over-60 group” — but still under 70.

While his fascination with birds has stretched his full life span, the practice has gained a more practical purpose in his later years.

During the pandemic, he said, ​“I did not dare go out … I got totally out of shape and put on some weight.”

Now, with the exception of rainy days, he makes sure to spend at least two or more hours everyday hiking around Connecticut, whether that’s climbing to the top of East Rock or driving to Hammonasset for better views of the beach.

His bucket list includes building the muscle necessary to make it to the top of Sleeping Giant, as well as getting glances — and snapshots — of two hard-to-find Northeastern birds: The Kingfisher and Pileated Woodpecker. 

In the meantime, there are plenty of other species he plans to photograph this spring. ​“Connecticut is definitely fun this time of year,” he said. ​“There are nesting bald eagles all over the place. Peregrine Falcons right here in East Rock. And then you have your typical house birds like cardinals, blue jays, black birds and sparrows,” Lamothe enumerated.

Each bird boasts its own story, he reflected. Ospreys, for example, migrate from the United States to Argentina each winter, usually coming back on the same date to the exact same nest as they return to each year.

Winter in New England is equally rich with wildlife, he added. ​“In January alone I took about 5,000 photos of snowy owls,” in Stratford, Lamothe said. ​“It’s a lot of work going through the photos… usually sometime during the slow days of winter you pop them out” for editing.

In the summers, Lamothe usually migrates himself, flying out to Arizona, Colorado, Nevada or Washington State to catch even more species. He tries to document the diversity of his subjects — from hummingbirds the size of bumble bees to hawks with four-foot wing spans.

“I’m just accumulating information all over the place,” Lamothe said with a smile.

“I’ve met a lot of more knowledgeable people than I am,” as well as plenty of young rookies to whom he offers mentorship.

He shared some tips for interested amateurs. For instance: ​“Place yourself in the right direction and learn about the bird you want to photograph.”

“If you don’t know their habits. you won’t be able to guess their movement, and you might miss a good shot,” he explained. For example, ​“birds of prey like to poop before they take off. If you see a bird of prey on a branch and he poops, just get ready and you’ll have a flight shot!”

He also advised: If you buy a camera, get a Canon, not a Nikon. ​“It’s like what we have with Yale and Harvard,” he said. ​“The Canon is Yale, the Nikon is Harvard.”

For the most part, bird watching involves silence and solitude. But Lamothe is also aware that he is part of a broader community of Black birders who are often excluded from the field: A 2011 study by the Fish and Wildlife service reported that 93 percent of birders surveyed were white while only four percent identified as Black. And everyone remembers the story of Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher who had the police called on him by a white woman, Amy Cooper, at the start of 2020 after he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park.

“That’s my cousin,” he joked of Christian Cooper.

“You do have to think about safety,” he acknowledged.

He glanced over at a large dog running free of its owner — a white woman — while he spoke. 

“I feel relatively safe walking around” Hamden and New Haven’s parks, he said — but admitted he gets nervous around ​“dogs that are loose.”

But, he reflected, ​“If I were a woman I might feel a little more intimidated, because sometimes there are no other walkers.”

Not every environment feels as comfortable as New Haven County. ​“I remember a few years ago landing in Tampa and there was, right on the highway outside the airport, a mammoth Confederate flag,” Lamothe shared.

“So far, I must knock on wood; I have not had any personal incidents while traveling. Most people who are interested in nature are also very modern thinking,” he argued.

On a more immediate level, he cited concerns about rampant littering.:“That’s the one thing that irks me — people throwing bottles and papers all over the place. But a lot of volunteers walk around and they don’t get paid but they pick up the litter.”

“So,” he figured, ​“one hand washes the other, in a sense.”

Now that Lamothe’s own daughters have left the nest and he is settling deeper into retirement, there is time to expand his avian connections even further — by sticking close to home.

Rather than traveling this summer, he plans to remain in the area to attend his Yale college reunion — and to start work on a children’s book.

The 40-page story will tell the tale of a family of sparrows ​“decimated by house cats” — the number-one killer of bystander birds — whose surviving members ​“bring in eagles as reinforcement” to fight back against the thoughtless murderers.

While Lamothe maintained that ​“all Haitians like farm animals,” the one exception is cats.

“Somewhere in their brain development, they’ve got a psychotic gene,” he said of the felines. ​“They kill for the sake of killing.”

The title of the book, he previewed, will be Avian Avengers.

Watch the full interview below.