BIRDS-EYE VIEW

At first glance, Michael Woodruff is a lot like most 15-year-old Spokane boys.

An easy smile betrays his gratitude for a newspaper interview that has left his sister by herself to rake the leaves in the yard.

He shows the scars on his ankle and shoulder with a hint of pride. He seems to be at ease with the pitfalls of being a teenager even though the September mountain biking accident that fractured a bone in his hand has left a big hole in the violin section of the Spokane Youth Orchestra.

“I needed a break from practicing, no pun intended,” he said, wearing that smile even bigger.

The orchestra’s loss was a gain to birdwatchers who saw a spike in postings from Woodruff on the e-mail network Inland Northwest birders use to share their observations.

“This is my sport,” he said, holding a binocular as though it were a football. “I like downhill and cross country skiing, water sports and bike riding, but I love birding.”

Sporting standouts have natural gifts. Adam Morrison has soft touch with a basketball. Bode Miller has uncommon balance on icy ski slopes. Michael Woodruff has the rare ability to concentrate and peer through 10-power binoculars on ocean swells without getting seasick.

One of his favorite trips was with his father, Roger, on a Westport charter boat tour that motored 40 miles offshore to find pelagic birds in September. “I added 14 species to my life list,” Michael beamed. “That’s the only way to see these birds because they live out on the ocean. We had albatrosses 30 feet away.”

“He had just broken his hand and he had a big, heavy cast on,” recalled his mother, Krista. “So he was walking around the house for a week holding his hand up in front of his face to build up the muscles in his arm.

“I was afraid my dad would cancel the trip if I couldn’t hold up my binoculars,” Michael said.

If he had his way, every family vacation would have a birding factor, but he said he realizes he has to be respectful to his brother and sister, who enjoy birdwatching in, shall we say, a more balanced way.

“They roll their eyes a little at my birding obsession, but they’re very tolerant,” he said.

Birding is not the most common hobby among young people, including his freshman classmates at Upper Columbia Academy. “I think it humors my friends,” he said. “I go out birding at the (Spangle) sewer ponds almost every day. I have permission from the manager. Only my better friends know that.”

He’s privately building bar graphs of species abundance for his school’s campus, yet he said he’s never applied birding to a school project, yet.

“My biology teacher has been pushing the idea of creating wildlife habitat using the water from the sewage treatment plant. We need to get our case ready, it has potential.”

“When we go hiking,” Krista said, “Michael has his binoculars hanging around his neck and he’s always veering off the trail to net a butterfly or slogging into a lake to catch a dragonfly.”

His favorite Web sites include ebird.org.

His most-prized possessions include a Swarovski 20-60 power spotting scope his dad unselfishly shares and a digital camera he bought with his own money.

In two years, Michael’s snapped 40,000 photos of birds. “I’ve only saved about 3,000 of them,” he said. “I’m getting better all the time.”

Two of his bird photos are featured on the 2005 poster for the national Project FeederWatch program sponsored by Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The fall issue of Washington Birder includes Michael’s story about birding in Pend Oreille County based on his family’s fall hiking trip near Sullivan Lake.

“I’d hoped to find a boreal owl up there,” he said. “I think they must be getting used to (calls on) tapes. I whistled in a saw-whet owl just after dark, but I couldn’t find a boreal owl.”

He’s found a bounty of other birds, though.

Since his father introduced him to birding at the age of 8, Michael has observed 540 species out of more than 900 known to inhabit North America.

“My dad has 592 on his life list, but I’m gaining,” he said with a competitive edge. “I might get four lifers on a trip while he gets two or three. In our Arizona trip alone I got 18 lifers.”

The pair has made a handful of notable birding forays, including a trip to the Washington Coast for shorebirds and a two-day, 88-species trip late last winter based around seeing an errant redwing, a thrush from Eurasia that shook the birding world when it made a temporary home with robins in the Olympia area.

Every sighting is documented on yellow note pads that have begun stacking in corners of the house.

“Those are his lists,” his mother said. “He has his day lists, hourly lists, home property list, state list — I don’t know what he doesn’t have a list of.”

Cornell’s FeederWatch program is an added incentive for Michael and other birders across the country to stock up on bird seed and document the species that frequent their yards. Observations from across the country are fed through the Internet into a national database that can be useful in documenting population trends and even the spread of disease, such as avian flu.

Mountain chickadees, Steller’s jays, flickers, pigmy nuthatches and other delightful species have been attracted to the feeders that now occupy the Woodruff family’s swing set.

“The swing is getting pretty tippy,” Michael said, noting that it’s probably a death trap for kids, “so it’s better that we give it to the birds.”

In his spare time, he’s been whittling away at an online Cornell ornithology class, learning a lot about himself as well as birds.

“I don’t like the anatomy part so much as I like studying bird behavior,” he said. “I think it would be cool to be a researcher or a birding guide in the tropics.”

Up to now, however, most of his birding is concentrated close to home, where he and his dad have documented 131 bird species around his family’s 25 acres south of Spokane on the flanks of Tower Mountain.

He has listed 201 birds for 2005 in Spokane County compared with 282 species recorded this year by the entire Spokane Audubon Society. His overall county list is up to 220.

Turnbull Wildlife Refuge and Phileo Lake are two of his favorite local birding spots.

And like most teenage boys, he’s anxious about spreading his wings in the next stage of his life.

“I should get my drivers license in February,” he said. “That means I might be able to get to the Little Spokane River area and some other good birding places. That’ll be nice.”