For earth scientist Cin-Ty Lee, observing the world includes the view through his binoculars. WORDS SCOTT SOLOMON | PHOTOS TOMMY LAVERGNE ILLUSTRATIONS CIN-TY LEE AND TANYIA JOHNSON
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IN-TY LEE arrives on campus before dawn. He does not
head straight to his office, nor does he stop at the gym. Instead, for an hour or so, he can be seen slowly walking the grounds, peering through a set of large, black binoculars.
“I generally avoid the residential colleges, because I don’t want to look creepy,” he jokes as we make our way through the open space behind Wiess College. Lee is looking for birds, and for the last 12 years he has been meticulously noting every species that has touched down on Rice’s campus. The current total is 216, which Lee guesses might be a record for an American university, except for a few coastal colleges in California. It is impossible to know for sure, since most schools don’t keep track of such things. But for Lee, a professor of earth science, watching birds is more than
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a numbers game — it is a way of connecting to the natural world. He does it mostly for fun, but he also sees his observations as forming an important set of data about which birds can be found where, and when. “It’s almost obsessive-compulsive,” Lee admits. “I go out almost every day, and you could say, you’ve seen all the birds by now and every year is the same, but it’s not true — there’s always a little bit of unpredictability.” The biggest surprises come during the spring and fall, as thousands of birds pass through the Houston area on their way to and from their wintering grounds in Central and South America.