The Experience of Birding
Brookdale Park’s unceasingly busy, relentlessly noisy blue jays were definitely onto something when I arrived this morning. An owl? A raccoon? Me?
It turned out to be this beautiful little juvenile broad-winged hawk, looking as if might rather have chosen a different place to spend the night.
The Monday morning run to the bakery started out unusually well when Gellert and I noticed a great big bird perched on a distant transmission tower: an adult bald eagle, the first we’d seen from our yard here. It must have roosted in the neighborhood overnight, and I took its presence as a sign that a trip to Brookdale Park might be in order.
It was a beautiful morning, at last, cool enough for a jacket, bright enough for chimney swifts high overhead.
As usual, the best birding was along the Magic Edge, where the morning sun strikes first and the understory is densest. My timing was good, and I arrived just as the morning’s biggest flock did. Soon the trees and bushes were wimmling with birds.
After a long summer, it was great to be in the position of having to choose which bird to look at and which to let go. I ended up with eleven species of migrant parulids, including two bay-breasted warblers, and with them a couple of red-eyed vireos, a blue-gray gnatcatcher, and a very oddly colored scarlet tanager — he was a normal formative male except for the deeply colored, dull orange undertail coverts and vent, making for a weird contrast from below.
It was beginning to feel like a big morning. But the dog was getting fussy (why does he prefer romping in the dog park to lying quietly at my feet?) and the wind was steadily rising, so we wished the birds good travels — and resolved to return tomorrow.
There’s not much worse than a private joke a hundred years after everyone who would get it is dead.
Elliott Coues, whose birthday we mark today, committed a doozy in explaining the strange scientific name he gave the San Benito sparrow:
There are so many places named in Lower California for [saints] that I concluded to dedicate this Sparrow impartially to the whole calendar of them,
thus the All Saint’s Sparrow, Passerculus sanctorum.
I understand, in part: Coues was mocking, as only he could, the explosion of “San” names American ornithologists were giving small populations of Mexican sparrows, San Ignacio and San Lucas and San Benito. What I can’t figure out is whether a precise circumstance or, more likely, a precise individual called forth the Couesian wit.
Ideas? Or did the richer context of the joke vanish with its creator?
Seventy years ago yesterday, North America’s first wryneck strayed to Alaska’s Cape Prince of Wales, where it was shot by the skilled Alaska Native collector Dwight Tevuk.
The second — just barely out of Asia — was discovered on nearly the same date, September 2, 2003. It survived, so far as anyone knows.
In between those two Alaska birds came one of the most bizarre records in North American ornithological history.
On February 16, 2000, a strange dead bird was salvaged on a military base in southern Indiana. After a few months in a freezer, it was identified as, of course, a wryneck. The thawed bird was found to be in “an advanced state of mummification,” suggesting that it had been trapped inside a container and shipped dead rather than improbably making its own short-winged way across the ocean and mountains and plains.
Looking back all of fifteen years, what is notable about that Indiana record is less the bird than the way the mystery it created was solved. After relating in detail the steps taken to confirm the bird’s identity and the condition of its plumage, the authors of the paper announcing the find drew an interesting lesson:
The discovery process demonstrated the usefulness of the internet for identification of unusual birds. If posted widely, requests for information can yield expert opinions almost instantaneously. Such responses can greatly expand the resources available to individuals seeking to solve these ornithological puzzles.
Prescient words.