Chris Parrish has an iPod. But you might be surprised at his
choice of songs. Bird songs.
He has stored more than 20,000 of them.
Parrish’s passion for birds started when he was 11, and
started working on his Boy Scout merit badges in a Los Angeles
suburb. It took him six months of climbing trees and peering
through his grandmother’s old double-magnification opera
glasses to identify the 40 bird species required for the badge.
It was the beginning of a passion that has shaped much of his
life. Today, Parrish ranks among the world’s top birders. His
life list—birders’ version of a trophy cabinet—counts
more than 5,000 birds, well over half of the species known
to exist today. He has traveled to six continents and contributed
to
the definitive book on the birds of Venezuela. But he still
keeps his day job as a professor of math and computer science
at the University of
the South, a small liberal-arts college in Sewanee, Tennessee. Parrish majored in math in college mainly because it allowed
him to finish his degree faster. He then went on to earn his
Ph.D. in mathematics at UCSD. Because graduate school left
him no time for birding, he pursued his first job in a place
where he could see as many birds as possible and taught at
the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela,
for 14 years. Venezuela is one of the world’s biodiversity
hot spots, with 1,300 bird species and Parrish has seen 1,000
of them.
Parrish’s passion for birds has taken him all over world,
including most of South America, England, the Russian Far East,
Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, India, Bhutan, Australia and Kenya. He passed the 5,000 mark two summers ago, during his fourth
trip to Brazil. Near the Sao Francisco River, he spotted the
crimson-fronted cardinal, a bird known only in a small range
of central Brazil. “It is basically black above and white
below, with a red crown, red whiskers and bright yellow eye,” he
says. “It lives in shrubby areas along a few of the major
rivers that go north to the Amazon. Great bird!” — Laura Barlament
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