We’d only just stepped into the field when we saw it.

"Osprey carrying a fish!" Judy shouted, and everyone lifted their binoculars to where she pointed. Up above our heads, maybe forty feet in the air, was a bird of prey with a wingspan of more than five feet carrying a big fat fish in its talons. The fish, who'd been plucked from the nearby Delaware Bay minutes earlier, was definitely still alive and not at all pleased. Through my binoculars I saw his tail flipping back and forth so madly it looked like he was the one flying.

It was a terrific sighting, especially for so early in the outing, and all ten people in our group gasped with delight—even the naturalists, like Judy, who spent most of their time looking at such things. But we'd just gotten started, and we planned to spend the next two hours out here in the muggy, buggy marsh looking for more.

We were bird watchers.

Well, they were. I was just a newcomer with borrowed binoculars and an as-yet unschooled affection for all creatures great and small. And actually, to be more precise, they were birders. Bird watching is a more casual pursuit, something you can do while leaning out the window to your backyard. Birders are people who bird, which is the verb for taking bird watching to a more devoted level.

I'd been looking at birders for years of visits to my mom's house in Cape May Point, N.J., a tiny beach-front town with such strict zoning laws that only one business is allowed to operate there—the corner store, Harriet's, or what used to be called Harriet's a million years ago when we first started visiting. I knew from my parents' casual interest in the hobby that serious birders keep a tally of every bird they've seen called a Life List, and many birders travel the world to add to it. Sooner or later, their life lists bring them to the Point.

For various reasons, the Point is one of the most important birding destinations in the United States. For one thing, its variety of landforms attracts a variety of birds. The mudflats are where the shorebirds, such as gulls, get their food, and they roost on the sand bars. Ducks and wading birds (egrets and herons, mostly) live in the marshes near the beach, and lots of other birds live in wooded areas like the nearby Pine Barrens. Also, because of its location at the southernmost tip of New Jersey, almost all birds that fly south for the winter stop at the Point for food and rest before leaving the security of land for their journey across the ocean. During each year's fall migration, for example, as many as 60,000 hawks fly over South Jersey.

But though the birders are a real presence here, they're a curiosity. Cape May—the town—draws vacationers from all over who want to stay in pastel bed and breakfasts in refurbished Victorian homes and go shopping for junk. Not the birders. They stand around in clumps of three or four, oblivious to the noisy families and couples drifting by them on tandem bikes. They point up into the trees and whisper, and in their official-looking garb—hiking shorts with a thousand pockets, binoculars dangling from leather t-straps to keep them from digging into their necks—they strike a neat balance between nerdy and intimidating. In love with nature and a little bit eccentric, the birders are the heirs to the legacy of John Audubon, the 19th century naturalist who depicted every known species of bird in North America in his lifelike paintings—and who was said to tramp around his father's land outside Philadelphia wearing satin breeches and silk stockings. Beyond keeping Life Lists, they get involved in other activities that bring them here in droves—like the Cape May Point Hawk Watch in the fall, which is pretty much what it sounds like and involves a lot of staring up at the sky.

The hub of all this activity is the Cape May Bird Observatory (CMBO), which is part of the New Jersey Audubon Society and is housed in little cabin that also functions as a store. The CMBO, which organized our field trip, is directed by Pete Dunne, the closest thing Cape May has to a birding celebrity. Tall, masculine and cool, the native New Jersey man is like the John Wayne of birding. He's also a celebrated and unusual writer whose essays often stray from the conventions of nature writing. In More Tales of a Low-Rent Birder, one of his essay collections, he writes from a variety of perspectives: his own, other grizzled birders', even that of birds on the wing. His writing ranges from incredibly moving, as when he writes about the death of a Golden Plover, to unabashedly nerdy: that book includes a humor piece called "The Secret Birding Journal of G. Washington of Virginia." In the introduction to More Tales, naturalist Kenn Kaufman writes that thirty years ago, before Dunne's career as a conservationist and writer, New Jersey was barely acknowledged in naturalist circles.

These days, the people who satellite the CMBO are no-nonsense and not a little competitive. When I called in to see whether the Fourth of July holiday would cancel a scheduled walk, the woman on the phone trilled, "Things like that don't usually slow us down!" I was starting to wonder if I was a match for these people; a three-day weekend is exactly the kind of thing that slows me down. Still, my curiosity about these strange birding folks—that, and the lovely evening in early July—led me to the South Cape May Meadows to gaze at the empty sky and wait.

About ten of us amateur naturalists met up there at dusk with the intention of finding creatures of the day and night during the brief twilight hours when they're seen together. Like a microcosm of the Point itself, "the Meadows" contains a variety of habitats. Located about a quarter mile from the ocean, the trail starts in a field—the one where we saw the Osprey with his catch—and winds through marshes and mudflats until it reaches the beach. Four CMBO naturalists led the way: our leader Bill, a married couple named Judy and Karl, and a soft-spoken, weather-beaten but ageless man named George who had floppy hair and a ring in one ear. Definitely a satin-breeches-in-the-woods kind of fellow.

In his book Pete Dunne on Bird Watching, Dunne says identification is the chief occupation of the birder, who uses information like size, color, call, and behavior to figure out what it is she's looking at. But first the birder has to find the birds. Binoculars are an expense—devotees sometimes spend hundreds on them, even thousands on a high-powered telescope, or "scope," as the birders call them—but they're key, especially when looking at birds in flight or scanning distant undergrowth for anybody who might be hiding there.

About as often as they saw a bird, though, the naturalists heard one. When a Yellow Throated Warbler who was singing away wouldn't come out from hiding, George stood facing the marsh and started unselfconsciously to make shushing and tsking sounds toward the dense undergrowth. (Both Peterson and Sibley, the two main bird guides, seem to be united in their difficulty in transliterating bird language into human, relying on funny shorthand like "gree-gree-gree." For a more precise approach, Algonquin has just published The Music of Wild Birds, based on a 1904 book that expresses bird song in musical notation.)

One of my fellow group members, a big man who looked to be in his late 30s and wore a long ponytail, followed suit and started chirping. The warbler never did emerge, but as we stood motionless waiting for him to come back a male American Goldfinch landed right in front of us instead. His mating plumage was a yellow as a canary's, and everyone was as delighted, as if he was the only bird we'd come out to see. In birding, it seems, you're more than happy to take what's offered to you.

Out on the beach we saw some Oystercatchers doing just what you'd guess Oystercatchers would do. Then Bill spotted seven Brown Pelicans bobbing far out in the surf. "They're huge!" exclaimed the woman beside me, her pants tucked into her socks to keep out the ticks. Sure enough, my guide told me their bodies were fifty-one inches long. At the other end of the spectrum was a tiny Piping Plover and her even tinier baby. They went running by us down the beach like the cartoon Roadrunner—feet blurred in motion, bodies held comically still. Bill told us that their nesting area on the beaches near the dunes had been so disrupted by runners and dogs that they were severely endangered. Even though the CMBO had cordoned off a nesting area near the dunes, only three Plover nests were made this year, and two got washed out. This baby was one of only five or six that hatched and survived. And we had seen him.

The best thing about our naturalist guides—besides their ability to spot things we never could have found on our own—was their interest in everything around them, not just the birds. Karl was obsessed with telling us everything about the flowers growing in the marsh, and George caught a little toad to show us his bumpy grey toes. Out on the beach I scooped up a skittering Ghost Crab after three other people grabbed for it and missed. I haven't had much of a forum for these tomboyish skills since childhood, but the looks of approval on my fellow birders' faces showed me that I do now. Birding wasn't some exclusive, rarified club after all, I realized then; all you have to do is love nature too, and you're in.

Back in the marshes, our day-meets-dusk moment happened suddenly. A male Black-Crowned Night Heron flew overheard, and we watched as the nocturnal bird tucked himself into the rushes for the night. In my binoculars he was a spooky sight, his round, blood-red eyes trained at the water below, looking for fish. Just then an elegant creature of the day went stalking by on stilt-like legs—a white Great Egret peering through the gloaming, looking for the last food of the day.

At home later that evening, I got to indulge in another pleasure of birding: making a list. Just as standing around and pointing at trees now seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do, tallying up one's nature sightings no longer struck me as so much competitive fussiness. It was more like this: Inventorying the birds I'd seen was a way of finding the time and space to recall everything about my experience of seeing them. Standing in the smelly marshes with my fellow birdwatchers, looking at some Queen Anne's Lace between my feet. Binoculars at the ready. Mist lifting off the water's surface near the end of the day, the sun an orange disc on the pond.