When I phoned Paul Mack to finalize plans to go with him on one of his bird walks in Friendship Cemetery, he asked if I had a set of binoculars.

The retired MUW biology professor, had told me about his daily walking tours in the cemetery six blocks from his Southside home. In the course of a year he has seen and/or heard 125 species of birds on these avian walkabouts, he said.

Call any time you want to go, he had said, and at 7 o’clock on a sultry August morning, we met in his front yard.

Speaking precisely and with an accent not from around here, Mack, 65, exudes the energy of a man much younger. He possesses another notable, though less observable, trait: Where most of us hear a cacophony of bird chatter, Mack hears distinct, individual voices.

On his tours, he will loop the perimeter of the graveyard tapping into his cell phone the names of the birds he sees or hears. Using an app called eBird, Mack uploads each day’s bird list to a database maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York.

Thousands of birders like him around the globe submit similar daily inventories, he says.

As we begin our walk, Mack tells me he had heard or seen seven species in the few minutes we stood in his yard talking: a cardinal, hummingbirds, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmouse, three blue-gray gnat-catchers, blue jays and a summer tanager.

As we round the corner from First Street to Eighth Avenue, Mack points out a red-shouldered hawk about 100 yards away. The bird is perched atop a dead tree beside the railroad tracks behind Wil and Dorothy Colom’s house.

“There’s a kite (a Mississippi kite),” he says pointing to another bird a block and a half to our east. “He’s probably not happy about that hawk being in his tree.”

The flash of feathers, a few notes of a song, that is all it takes. “There’s a house finch,” Mack says. “I know the shapes; I see his red head. There’s rarely a (bird) noise I hear I don’t know.”

As a child growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, nature wasn’t close at hand, Mack says. Though he didn’t use it professionally, his dad was trained as a biologist and occasionally he would take his children places they could get mud between their toes.

One of those outings was to a city marsh that was eventually paved over. Though he was only 5 at the time, the memory is vivid for Mack. “We caught tons of frogs,” he said. On the way home those tons of frogs escaped the confines of coffee cans Paul and his brother used for their temporary home. The escapees attached themselves to the windows of the car, a sight that evoked double takes from at least one passing motorist.

In his senior year at the University of California at Riverside, Mack stumbled upon what would be a lifelong calling. As an environmental science major, he figured a field zoology course was in order. What happened next is not an uncommon story: unassuming student signs up for course taught by inspired professor, and a life is changed.

In this case the prof was Bill Mayhew, who, says Mack, “totally changed everything for me.”

As we walk across the railroad tracks nine Canadian geese fly over. “Fall migration has started,” Mack says. Not an easy concept to grasp in the August heat.

Granted, there is the delight of being in nature and communing with these beautiful airborne creatures we share the planet with. I get that. But why are all these ornithologists — self-styled and university-trained — going to the trouble of making daily inventories of the birds in their backyards?

By way of an answer Mack says the black-belly whistling duck is moving into the area from the Gulf Coast. They were first seen here in 2014-2015 around the Highway 50 Bridge between Columbus and West Point. Now they are starting to colonize the area.

While he has his suspicions, Mack is reluctant to attribute shifting patterns of bird populations to climate change. He’d rather leave that call to the climatologists.

During our cemetery walk on this morning Mack has seen or heard 28 species of birds. He uploads his list to eBird as we walk back to his house.

“Once you start paying attention to it, you realize stuff is everywhere,” he says.

Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.