PAT NEAL: Birdwatching with a chainsaw

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, February 25, 2026

BIRDWATCHING IS my life. Most of my best birdwatching has been done with a chainsaw. Birdwatching with a chainsaw is considered unethical in some circles, by the same people who say it is wrong to birdwatch with a shotgun.

Critics can say what they want, but do they have a Cinnamon Teal on their life list? I do, with stuffing and gravy.

A life list is a permanent record of the species you have observed.

It measures your achievement as a birdwatcher.

You don’t have to say how you saw the bird; you just have to see them.

Whoever dies with the biggest life list wins. And if you’ve got to play a little rough and knock down a few trees to tag some serious life-list numbers, toughen up.

Birdwatching is not a sport for your more sensitive types.

The fact is, you often can’t see the birds for the trees.

Cutting the trees down can get the birds moving and afford some excellent birdwatching possibilities.

That’s how I checked off a Northern Shrike, a Clark’s Nutcracker and a flying squirrel in one day!

I know what you are thinking. A squirrel is not a bird, but they might as well be. Flying squirrels are nocturnal, which makes them difficult to observe until you cut their tree down.

Flying squirrels are relatively easy to distinguish from other squirrels — they fly. The other squirrels do not.

Where there are squirrels, there will be hawks hunting them. Of which, the great white northern goshawk is the largest and most magnificent.

Go ahead and look, but you probably won’t see one unless you are a logger.

Goshawks swoop through the timber like feathered ghosts, picking squirrels off the tree limbs at subsonic speed. They are part of a great spring migration of raptors that are heading up the Pacific Coast just now.

It is a prime opportunity to see the Gyrfalcon, the largest North American falcon. The Gyrfalcon rules the sky by making a point of chasing ravens off their perch.

The bald eagles are flying sticks and tree branches back to their nests to repair the damage from the storms of winter.

As the days lengthen, our nation’s symbol begins to engage in some mating rituals, which are embarrassing to watch.

Female eagles are easy to identify since they are larger than males.

They are said to mate for life, but the weird thing is that right about mating season there’s usually an extra male hanging around. He’s probably a migrant looking for a new territory.

It’s like a soap opera with the same plot re-written every year.

I used to enjoy watching eagles on the river. It was a symbiotic relationship.

They would perch on limbs over the water and peer down between their talons at the fish.

Then it was just a simple matter of anchoring up and fishing until you caught one.

Then I would clean the fish and feed the guts to the eagles to fulfill the social contract.

Eagles can live for 20 years or more, so there is the very real possibility that I have been feeding some of these birds their whole lives. I used to say the eagles never lied about fish, until they did.

It’s no secret we’re having a poor year for winter steelhead. Now, instead of me watching for eagles, the eagles are watching me.

They squawk and flap like they expect me to hurry up, clean a fish and get them a meal.

Eagles don’t understand catch-and-release fishing, but it is now the law of the land.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.