The Real Thing
By
I played hide and seek for several minutes this morning with this dashing male Black-throated Blue Warbler. One look at the picture should tell you who won.
It took me years to see my first “blue.” It’s one of the least common parulids in eastern Nebraska, and I didn’t actually come across one until 1984, on one of so many memorable mornings at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
In the years leading up to that lifer, I’d spent a long time drooling over paintings, photos, and skins of this species. Inevitably, I made unto myself a mental image of the species that somehow just didn’t match the bird when I finally saw it: both, the imagining and the visual reality, were beautiful, but they weren’t the same.
Somehow, in this and I think no other case, I’ve managed to preserve the template of imagination, in spite of having seen the real thing hundreds of times now. Every time I see the bird, there is again that exquisitely enjoyable jolt when expectation shifts to meet experience–it’s like confronting the memory of black walnuts with that first shockingly wonderful taste each October.
4 Comments
October 7th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
They are pretty birds. They always try hiding from me too.
October 7th, 2011 at 6:46 pm
No “confusing fall plumages” with this elegant dude. The transition from Dendroica to Setophaga didn’t change that. At least, not yet!
Am enjoying your blog. Well done!
October 8th, 2011 at 3:19 am
You’ll be surprised by knowing that in my room window 2 sparrow made there home :). I’m not disturbing them because they proven useful for me. There sweet screaming help me to rise up from sleep. Anyway I enjoyed this post. Thanks :)
October 14th, 2011 at 1:29 pm
The black-throated blue was the first eastern warbler I saw when I made my first trip east of the Missouri River. I was walking across campus at the U Illinois when suddenly at my feet was what I thought was a junco–and then it suddenly hit me that I was looking at one of the most handsome birds I’d ever seen, and at the time thought I’d ever see.