A Fortuitous Wipeout

I went skiing for the first time yesterday.

Mt. Spokane was beautiful, with softly but swiftly falling snow and snow-laden trees bending over the trails. It was beautiful from the car. Outside, it was what I can only describe as "dang cold."

I had only decided to come on the trip because it was cross-country skiing instead of downhill. I wanted my falls to be short and painless as possible. And I knew I would have very little concentration available for the wider world if I strapped slippery boards to the bottom of my feet. But perhaps if I was on flat ground I would be able to look about me.

The falls were short--and many. During one of the last ones I heard a twittering close by. I stopped trudging and looked up. A flock of brownish chickadees played in the snowy branches. The novice side of me screeched "Mountain Chickadee!" because, of course, I hadn't studied properly before I came. But they were close enough to touch, and I stood staring as the others trudged on to the lodge and lunch.

There were probably twenty of them, and their calls were similar to other chickadees but different enough for even my ears to distinguish. Perseverance at the Sibley later caused my to strike my forehead. Duh, Chestnut-backed Chickadees!

Ravens soared silently over the treetops. I trudged on. Only three more wipeouts to go.

A Good Kind of Ponding

There is a pond past which we drove daily throughout my childhood. I went back there yesterday with new binoculars in hand. When my mom found out where I was going, she wanted to come too.

On one side of us was the street we live on: a relatively active thoroughfare to the north where there used to be a shallow ditch, a ditch our childhood bikes knew well. On the other side, there were Mourning Doves in the field adjoining the pond, and they flushed as we tromped through the tumbleweeds. I found myself looking for other doves among them, then remembered that white-wings, ECDOs and incas were quite unlikely here. There are downsides to heading west.

Over the pond of interest flew Brewer’s Blackbirds, much more easily seen and identified twenty feet away in the sun than fifty feet away in cloudy backlight. Right after handing over my binoculars so Mom could see the American Coots, I noticed a large shorebird close by and itched to take back the optics.

As I gripped them, the yellowlegs flew toward the shallow middle of the pond and joined three Black-necked Stilts who rested atop their ridiculously long pink legs. Beyond them were a Great Egret and a very gray Great Blue Heron; in fact, I’d prefer not to talk about the very embarrassing flub in which I called it a cormorant.

One gull patrolled the pond, sometimes swimming and sometimes flying near enough so I could see its bill and eye: a California Gull. The only other swimming birds were a rather large group of Pied-billed Grebes.

My dad came to join us and I was able to point out the more interesting of our finds. He saw a coot with a “red cheek,” but it was too hard for me to find it at the great distance across the water.

As we walked back to the house together, I glimpsed a couple of tiny birds flitting from one tree to another. I finally caught one perched and gasped; another Anna’s Hummingbird, this time the full-grown male. “Mom!” This time she got there in time to use the binoculars and watch him fly away. We were amazed at how fast he could fly over the houses and out of sight.
The rest of the activity in the tree I was pretty certain was caused by yellow-rumps, based on my imperfect audio identification and yesterday’s visual.

I was the last to head inside, lingering to try to confirm my warblers. I traced other movements and presently spotted two flickers in the nearby juniper. They flew away before I could call Mom again. Red-shafted Northern Flickers. We’ll see them again, I hope.

Go West!

My competitive nature always gets me there.

I'm back in the habitat in which I ignored birds for two decades. Even after I received my birding calling, I was fearful of going it alone out here in the West.

But the more we talked about lists and birds we hadn't seen, the prouder I was of some of the Pacific birds even the guru himself hasn't yet seen. I decided I needed to pay more attention on my trips west so as to build my meager arsenal against his entirely overwhelming Oceania list.

My parents' California backyard bustled with fluttering specks, and I reached for my binoculars. Why did I always think there just wasn't anything to see in this rapidly citifying suburb?

A little flock of Oregon-style juncos played in the pool area, whistling to one another and never stopping for a rest. A Western Scrub-jay pecked around under the citrus trees. A Yellow-rumped Warbler chirruped (I can almost distinguish them now) from our nearby tangelo tree.

A mockingbird played in our neighbor's tree, which hangs over the fence into our yard. As I finished examining him, I saw another smallish avian form resting on a prominent twig. Was that...was it really....

...a hummingbird?

I've seen hummingbirds at flowers and feeders, but I had to take Sibley's word for it that they ever perched. And now here was one only twenty feet away, occasionally turning to test my powers of observation for the Sibley study I'd be doing later. Bright green glossy back; dark, uneven band on throat (not entirely dark like, say, the black-chinned); blackish wingtips and grayish-green speckled front; thin, straight bill.

Breathtaking.

After several minutes of this restricted oxygen, the bird moved to a more secluded branch, but I hoped it would wait for me to summon my mom to see it. Alas, she wasn't inside the door; I couldn't risk losing it by not going back. Only a couple more minutes and it disappeared into the tree.

A perched hummingbird. In my backyard. On Christmas Eve eve.

A perched Anna's Hummingbird.

May wonders never cease.

On the Edge

The guru led a tour of the habitat border between East and Central Texas on Saturday. I had noticed that the flora is markedly different between Dallas and the eastern border, but it happens so gradually on the trip that it was worthwhile to trace it scientifically for once.

I drove this time and secretly resolved never to pick on him again for driving errors. It is difficult to be a good birder and a good driver simultaneously, though there were times when I was neither.

The first lake-bordering neighborhood we drove through took two times around to find the public recreation area, but three factors pushed us on right away:

• There was nothing apparently on the water
• There were no public paths along the waterside
• There were several residents dressed in native hunting garb standing around a pickup truck at the waterside and staring at us

Down the road we parked by a bridge and scanned the water; Ruddy Ducks, Ring-necked Ducks, Lesser Scaup and Buffleheads congregated a good ways out. David spotted a tern over the water, but it never came cooperatively close. He identified it by elimination: Forster's.

At Lake Tawakoni (pronounced Tah-WAH-koh-nee, I found), we hung out by the spillway and watched hundreds of vultures, mostly Black, roosting in the mud. David ventured down a steep concrete slope while I watched from firm upper ground. He asked me what kind of sparrow sat on the fence. It only took him listing two or three field marks until I figured it was a Savannah Sparrow. I don't think I'll ever learn enough birders' lingo to succeed at sparrows.

On a wooded path near the spillway, we were about to venture under the trees when a large, black bird with white wingtips sped by low overhead. Caracara! we both thought, and watched it until it shortly disappeared. Neither of us expected one in this location, nor the White-breasted Nuthatches in the trees. With some Sibley research, we determined that this would be one of the only places in which one could see both the caracara and the nuthatch. Yay for habitat overlap!

Later, near a bridge over the same lake, David wandered out onto another steep concrete slope, this time managing to lead me partway out as well. Wilson's Snipe also inhabited the slope further forward, and Northern Shovelers dabbled in the muck. After a tense moment on the return trip, the possibility of falling and dying was virtually eliminated and we proceeded to another bridge.

This one was quite rewarding. White things with gray above and below flapped around over the distant water, and I managed to identify them correctly as gulls; the guru did the rest by informing me that the leading white on the wing confirmed them as Bonaparte's Gulls. This impressive name fit them well, and they were the most interesting gulls I've ever looked at.

Least Sandpipers and a Spotted Sandpiper poked the mud. A pelican glided over. An American Pipit started out far away and blending with the mud, but it fearlessly approached us and we watched it turn for us at every conceivable angle. I wonder if it aspires to calendar modeling.

The incessant honking of a hybrid muscovy behind persuaded us finally to move on. We wanted to reach Matthews' Prairie before sundown. The said prairie was next door to nowhere and the tall grasses didn't look inviting; we plunged into it, however, in hopes of longspurs, sparrows, and maybe a Short-eared Owl.

Nothing flushed but meadowlarks, but David occasionally looked up at a large flock of blackbirds, convinced that the call he heard was not Red-winged. We approached the perched ones carefully in the waning daylight, hoping to confirm that they might be Brewer's Blackbirds. These nest at my parents' house, but seeing them in East Texas would be an entirely different matter.

Finally they calmed to the point that we could clearly distinguish the yellow eye of the males. At this point, we could see several Red-winged Blackbirds there too. David's sharp ear picked out a Bewick's Wren's scold from the low brush, and soon we spotted the little brown rascal. It was browner than the ones I see in the Cross Timbers area, just like Sibley warned (funny how that always happens).

As the twilight deepened, several harriers cruised low over the grass and we scanned them for owls. My fingers got colder and colder until David spotted the owl far away. Only several minutes of waiting brought it straight at us, haunting yellow eye, flat face and all. It took our breath until it disappeared in a dive greatly resembling the water hunters we had seen earlier. Hunting this way over land seemed quite a bit more treacherous, but though David assured me that owls have necks, I knew they would be hard to break.

We drove back to civilization hungry, tired, and satisfied. We had earned the Italian food to which we treated ourselves: fifty-two species in half a day. Three life birds for me and my first owl.

Lesson in Listening

Second Caddo Christmas Count: success!

Last year I went to my first count. I didn't enjoy it as much as my previous birding experiences because of three things: (1) everything about it was heavily dependent on listening, (2) there was very little time or opportunity for looking, and (3) it was very cold.

This year there was definite improvement in all three areas. It was temperate beyond desirability for December 3; the lighting was conducive to good looking and several birds were admirably cooperative; and my listening skills had sharpened over 12 months.

Listening might be the sense which most needs an example for understanding; because of how birds sing, we are not physically capable of teaching one another by imitation. This means we simply have to hear things over and over in order to distinguish them, and only when we have distinguished them can we label them.

"For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him" (Matthew 25:29). I don't think I would have had nearly as successful a listening lesson as I did on Saturday unless I had already given it some seemingly unsuccessful practice on my own. Even though I didn't know who I was hearing, I knew how the sounds differed from each other.

On Saturday I could finally count some chickadees, cardinals, kinglets, wrens, phoebes, sparrows, woodpeckers, and the occasional titmouse confidently with my own ears. I even made headway on nuthatches, warblers, juncos and blackbirds. As a beginning listener, I also appreciated the affirmation provided by the odd crow (American, of course).

I am also still enough of a beginning looker to be excited about my life birds for the count: the American Woodcock, Snow Goose, Sedge Wren, and Blue-headed Vireo were highlights of the day even for the old hats.

The trip put my life list over 200, modest for a Texas-dweller but encouraging in several ways. Since I still enjoy the looking and listening more than the counting, I feel blessed to have looked and listened to such beauty and variety. My eyes have been opened and my ears tuned; I work out my ornithological election not only with fear and trembling, but with joy inexpressible.