birding

new life birds & repaired lifelist

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This past week has been a full one: I’ve added a half dozen new birds to my lifelist, sighted in or near my town! Over the past few days I’ve spotted a Lousiana Waterthrush, Yellow-crowned Night Heron, and Yellow-rumped Warbler, in Wells Run, the creek that runs through University Park. A few weeks ago I also saw a Cedar Waxwing in the tree right outside my house (whose identification was helpfully confirmed by my neighbor).

This morning at the pond I saw a Yellow-billed Cuckoo (eat those caterpillars, my friend!), a dozen or so Chimney Swifts (I’d seen these before but never confirmed their identity), and a pair of Orchard Orioles. As this list testifies, I’m still really only an advanced beginner: with quite a few common birds out there yet to be spotted, I’m a far cry from jetting around the world chasing rarities. Which is good, because that gets expensive.

The pond also offered two very small ducklings poking around at the bank with their mother. While these are ‘new’ birds, they don’t make it onto the life tally. Sorry, very cute baby ducks. No sign yet of the goslings, but I’ll keep checking back. I wasn’t able to see the actual eggs, even with the binoculars, but I’m sure there must be some, as the goose has been sitting in exactly the same spot on each recent visit.

On a related note, I hadn’t realized that my lifelist coding was fubar. I apologize for that; it’s fixed now.

new life birds & repaired lifelist

Caspian Tern

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Yesterday I returned to the pond for the first time in a couple of weeks. In a stroke of luck, I timed my arrival to coincide with the presence of a single Caspian Tern, a bird I’d never seen before. Although I don’t always, this time I had my binoculars and Peterson’s with me. The time it took the tern to catch something to eat—about four or five dives, with some circling in between—was just long enough for me to positively identify it. Once it had the fish, it circled to eat it and then left, flying higher until I couldn’t see which direction it was heading.

It had barely gone when I noticed something odd swimming around out in the middle of the pond. At first I thought it was a small duck, but the trusty binoculars revealed it to be the head of a mammal. I was pretty sure that it wasn’t an otter—the head was too large and square for what I remembered of otters from my many early-childhood visits to Shedd. It seemed unlikely that it was a beaver, and peering at photos once I got home led to the conclusion that it was a muskrat. I don’t know if it’ll stick around; I hadn’t seen it before this weekend.

In addition to those two unusual sightings, I saw several regular favorites: red-winged blackbirds (both male and female), ducks, song sparrows, and a downy woodpecker. I also saw the pair of Canada geese that I saw on my most recent prior visit, and it looks like they’re nesting (one was in the same spot on the island as last time; the other was keeping a pretty close eye on the muskrat). I look forward to seeing the goslings later in the year.

Ever since the years when Trumpet of the Swan was one of my favorite books, I’ve hoped to be able to see birds actually hatching. I’ve never wanted to get too close to their nests, though. Maybe this year—with the nest visible, but not accessible—the timing will be right and I’ll get lucky.

Caspian Tern

Lesser Scaup

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Earlier this week, I added a bird to my lifelist: the Lesser Scaup. I saw a group of them bobbing in the Tidal Basin, looking knackered (quite frankly). There didn’t seem to be any hens; I had initially thought that the slightly dingier ones were hens, but Peterson’s clarified that they are distinctly brown. According to my Birds of Virginia guide, they are resident year-round throughout the state, so my initial assumption that they were migrating through was likely incorrect (although they still could have been recently returned from their winter vacation).

At any rate, I had seen scaups in Oregon, but I didn’t (at the time) know what to look for to tell the greater from the lesser. On these ones, the slant of the head was clearly noticeable (I knew what to focus on this time around), and they were close enough to the shore that I could estimate their size with greater accuracy.

Lesser Scaup

The Big Year, by Mark Obasmick

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The Big Year, by Mark Obasmick, is my favorite book of those I’ve read so far this year. It was wonderful. I had no idea when I picked it up that it was going to be so rich, make me laugh so much, or push all kinds of achievement-anxiety buttons. What writing!

Here’s how much I got hooked on a journalistic account of three driven men chasing rare birds around North America in 1998: I didn’t just miss my stop on the Metro on my way to the bookshop, I got off the train at the wrong stop, transferred to another line on autopilot, and rode it all the way to my usual Tuesday stop, and didn’t realize I had gone to completely the wrong place until I looked at my watch at that stop and said ‘oh no, I’ve missed my bus! Wait…there’s no bus here…this is the wrong stop…I am in the wrong state…how did I get here?…this is not my beautiful wife….’ That’s how much I had to know how the year ended. Not even who won, but what happened: which birds did they finally get to see? Which mountains did they scale, which birds eluded them until the very end? Did they help each other? Did they not? Did one get to wipe that smug smugness off the face of the other?

I knew a few things about myself before picking up this book. Like, I get anxious when engaging publicly in things I’m not good at. Or, that I enjoy the thrill of seeing a new bird for the first time, and am comforted by seeing a favorite bird again. I had no idea, though, that those things would dovetail so neatly while reading this book. Midway through, I had to put the book down to be reassured that (1) I’m not ‘behind’ because I am 32 and only have a lifelist of 100 birds long, (2) I’m not a total failure because I can’t tell most shorebirds, warblers, or seabirds apart without agonizing over my Peterson’s, and (3) things are not going to fall apart if I don’t get on the internets right now and start planning trips to all of the places in the U.S. where you can see a bunch of birds at once that everyone knows about except me. That’s how well Obasmick captures the driven competitiveness — as well as the smug self-assuredness — of the kooky people and kooky challenge they’re undertaking.

Alongside the inferiority-complex-inducing narrative of the bird chasing and identifying — which was laced with so many resultant ludicrous situations and happenings that I nearly fell off my chair laughing at several key points — is a similarly engaging, but less anxiety-producing, narrative of the history of bird watching in the U.S. This side of the book is the balm, the soothing reminder that bird watching is an activity peopled by those who love birds and get a thrill out of seeing them and finding them, of all levels of skill or experience. Obasmick places these three men in their historical context, and in so doing creates a craving to read the other key narratives of bird chasing and Big Years: Kingbird Highway and Wild America.

Mostly, the book made me want to read less and bird more. Thankfully, spring is on its way.

The Big Year, by Mark Obasmick

birds in Oregon

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One of my favorite parts of any trip to a new region is seeing birds I’ve never seen before. My trip to Portland last month was no exception, and I was happy to catch sight of even the common regional birds. I’ve updated my lifelist to include the birds I saw out there, bringing my total of birds seen in North America up to a whopping 104! I’m still working on gathering photos of the European birds, but the list itself is complete.

birds in Oregon