CAPE CHARLES, Va. -- Screenwriters and cartoonists often cast bird-watchers as timid eccentrics in funny hats with Sibley guides sticking out from their safari jackets and binoculars around their necks. The perfect disguise for a terrorist, perhaps?
But serious ornithologists tend to have a bit of Indiana Jones in them. Ned Brinkley, for one, has driven into hurricanes looking for birds blown off course to unusual places. He has floated through swamps searching for evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct. And he was not about to knuckle under meekly when he learned that officials worried about terrorism were about to ban visitors from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, one of the best birding spots on the East Coast.
Ever since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have grown accustomed to probes into their private lives and a great many new restrictions. From full-body searches at airport boarding gates to barricades around the Capitol, the nation has accepted many intrusive and prohibitive security measures as the price of safety.
Bird-watchers are oddly vulnerable to the new scrutiny. They carry binoculars, scopes and cameras. They like to go to such places as buffer zones around military bases and nuclear power plants, where lots of birds roost. They are sometimes turned in to police by suspicious passersby.
This time, Brinkley and a few cohorts were prepared to fight back. Their successful effort to regain access to the bridge islands illustrates how it is possible to continue their activities, even in a security-conscious age. But it requires concessions that once would have been considered extreme. It is a predicament many Americans are facing.
Today, the commission overseeing the span is scheduled to vote on a compromise negotiated with the bridge's executive director and head of security. Under the plan, scientists and researchers would be allowed to go on the islands that connect the bridge once they get a pass, renewed annually. Amateur bird-watchers would have to submit to a security check several weeks in advance and pay $50 an hour for a police escort.
"Why allow people whose intentions we don't know [to] dictate how our lives as Americans, our lives as Virginians, our lives as bird-watchers, are restricted?" asked Brinkley, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in Cape Charles when he is not leading bird-watching tours.
"It's patriotic to question bureaucratic decisions that impinge on our liberties. Are we vigilant or cowards? Are we creative, or passive and lazy?"
Their success also illustrates that bird-watchers have friends in high places.
They conferred with security experts who have worked for places that know a thing or two about counterterrorism tactics -- the Pentagon, State Department, United Nations, airports and nuclear power plants. They boned up on threat scenarios involving biological weapons and researched padlocks and high-tech ID cards. They offered to undergo criminal background checks and take crime-watch training.
"At some point, you have to choose between your lifestyle and increasing your security," said Tim Travan, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq who advised the bird-watchers on counterterrorism issues. "If you give up too many civil rights and have too-draconian security, what exactly is it you are protecting?"
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, a 17.6-mile span that costs $17 round-trip for a passenger car, connects Virginia's Eastern Shore with the mainland at Virginia Beach. The entrance and exit of two tunnels in the middle of the bay are secured by small, man-made islands of granite boulders. At the southernmost island, there is a restaurant and a fishing pier open to the public.
