It's doable, but all the stars need to line up.” He and the other team members have been bringing those stars into alignment, and he is phoning to brief me. “To get 200, everything needs to be there and to call. “200 has to be a perfect day,” team member Dave Tripp tells me. As a friend of his once quipped about Big Days, Gallo says, “This isn't birding. Seconds count-there will be no pausing to admire one bird's dazzling plumage or another's melodious song, no studying a fascinating behavior or puzzling over an unexpected sighting. And it has to design a driving route that maximizes the number of sites the players can hit across the state and the amount of time they have at each one to see or hear the target species. To accomplish any of these objectives, the team needs to figure out ahead of time where the hard-to-find birds are likely to be found. Their goals: get 200 species, which no team in New England has ever been able to do beat the existing New England record of 195 species, set by their archrivals in Massachusetts in 2014 best their own 2018 record of 193. They'll go midnight to midnight on a day of their choosing. In just a few weeks he and five of his friends-some of the top birders in the state-will be doing their annual Big Day, competing as a team to find as many bird species in Connecticut as they can by sight or sound in a 24-hour period. Today Gallo is preoccupied with his next avian pursuit. Such are the pleasures of birding-marveling at life's diversity, pondering the rhythms of the natural world, feeding curiosity one question at a time, even in unglamorous locations. Maybe they'll get a head start, he muses. Although overwintering in Connecticut was risky, the survivors are now that much closer to where they need to be to establish a territory for the summer, find a mate and reproduce. But Gallo keeps returning because he wants to see when the Cape May and Tennessee Warblers depart for their breeding grounds up north. Now, with spring migrants starting to appear throughout the northeast, the sewage plant crowd is thinning. Birders flocked to the site all winter, trudging up and down the icy trail in hopes of glimpsing the rarities foraging in the tanks and evergreens. Gallo, a naturalist and birder, has been coming to the sewage plant regularly since last fall, when a motley crew of warblers-Prairie, Cape May, Tennessee, Palm, Pine and Yellow-rumped-that should have headed south for the winter decided to stay here instead. A Yellow Warbler belts out its not so humble brag- sweet sweet sweet I'm so sweet. Overhead eight Northern Rough-winged Swallows wheel in the cloudless sky, taking turns swooping into the water-treatment tanks to catch insects drawn to the nutrient-rich pools below.
He strolls along the paved trail outside the facility in Norwalk, Conn., scanning the pines on the left, the river on the right.
On a warm day in late April, Frank Gallo is getting his steps in at one of his regular haunts: the sewage plant.
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