A gray jay perched next to a parking lot in Terra Nova National Park, Newfoundland, Canada/Kirby Adams

As a birder and naturalist, I have a love/hate relationship with roads and parking lots in national parks. On the one hand, it’s not difficult to agree with Ed Abbey that all pavement is the opposite of progress. Roads kill things outright and bring more tourists, a certain percentage of which will be destructive in their own way. Then I stop and think about the best birding spots I’ve found in the parks – and a majority of them of were either in a parking lot or within sight of some kind of pavement.

There are a few factors contributing to that observation. The most obvious is that I haven’t strayed terribly far from the roads in many of the parks I’ve visited. In several trips to Everglades and Yellowstone, I can’t recall any significant backwoods exploration. If I’m visiting as a birder, there often isn’t any reason to wander far. The entire bird list for Everglades can be had with a few stops along the Main Park Road and a short walk on Anhinga Trail where the parking lot barely recedes from view. Here’s where John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt would point out that I haven’t seen the real Everglades. I won’t argue that point, but I have seen the real birds. Most birders are flexible enough to slide gracefully along the continuum between tourist and explorer, depending on mood and logistics. In the Everglades, I’ve been more of a tourist-birder.

Another thing about roads in parks is that they tend to build them to go to the best places. The most scenic and interesting spots are often the birdiest. Riparian corridors, waterfalls, cliff faces, lakes, and shores are all bird magnets. Even if there wasn’t a road that stopped at the best vantage points along the Atlantic shore of Acadia National Park, the birders would bushwhack to those exact spots anyway. The best spot for a postcard photo is, by definition, the best spot to scan for loons.

You don't have to go off the well-trod path to get photos like this one of a Roseate Spoonbill in Everglades National Park, where Kirby Adams snapped it from a parking lot.

The elephant in the room is possibly what makes parking lots into birding hotspots more than any other factor. Disturbance makes birds easy to see. I’ve written several times about the parking lot at the Miner’s Falls trailhead in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore being one of the best bird spots in the park. The main reasons for that is that it’s exceptionally difficult to find birds in the dense forest down the trail. They’re there, without a doubt, but good luck actually seeing one. You can hear the thrush and warbler song at dawn, but if you enjoy actually watching birds, you’re in for frustration. The parking lot opens a spot in the woods where you can see birds in the canopy.

The other way disturbance makes for better birding is the bit of unpleasant truth that edges attract more diversity. Edge habitat is a dirty word in ecology. One of the worst aspects of habitat fragmentation is the creation of edges. More contact between ecosystems means more invasion by disruptive species, whether native or not.

This isn’t lost on birders thanks to the cowbirds. Brown-headed Cowbirds are nest parasites. They deposit eggs in other birds’ nests then move along. The eggs hatch quicker than the host eggs, allowing the cowbird chick to roll the other eggs out of the nest or at least to get more food than the other chicks when the parent birds raise the cowbird as one of their own. This was a brilliant strategy for the nomadic cowbirds that followed bison herds. There’s no time to incubate eggs and raise fledglings for a month when the herd could move out in three days, so you make other birds do it. The nomadic nature of the cowbirds also prevented them from putting undue pressure on local birds year after year.

Today there are no roaming bison herds and the cowbirds’ open habitat weaves in and out of forest land across the country. Where open land meets forest, cowbirds meet birds that have no evolutionary adaptation for dealing with nest parasitism and no ability to withstand multiple years of nest failures thanks to the no-longer-mobile cowbirds. Edges play as important of a part as the bison loss in making cowbirds a native, but invasive, threat.

Still, birders tend to seek edges. Warblers and other insectivorous birds flock to sunlit forest edges on cool mornings and evenings to feast on the insects clustered there for warmth. Parking lots provide perfect edges for that kind of birding. Some raptors like to hunt from forest edges where they can see farther but still have relative camouflage. Whether cruising down a road or hiking a trail, birders stop and linger at clearings.

It's unlikely that President Roosevelt and John Muir were looking for birds atop Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park/NPS

So, at the risk of inviting scorn from Ed Abbey’s ghost, I’m thankful for the roads, parking lots, and visitor centers in national parks. I don’t think we should build too many of them, but my arbitrary line is drawn more centrally than that of a backpacker, I imagine. Is there hypocrisy in that coming from someone who professes the need for preservation of true wilderness? Possibly, and I’m willing to own that hypocrisy. Birds need wilderness and the vast majority of people need roads to allow them to see birds, which in turn prompts them to protect the wilderness, some of which was destroyed by the road. It’s a delicate circle, but I think the National Park Service has done a fine job of it for the past century.

I have mixed feelings when I see that famous photo of Muir and Roosevelt at Yosemite. Part of me wants to join them to see the real wilderness that Teddy asked for. Then the birder in me sneaks through and says, “Guys, there were probably a half dozen warbler species in plain sight down by the stable clearing!” I like that ambivalence. Being able to slide between the tourist and the explorer allows me to enjoy a park immensely whether I have three weeks or 40 minutes to experience it.