Chapter Ten
Teetering on the edge of a railroad trestle with an angry mother osprey giving me the evil eye, I decided that the subtleties of birding weren’t for me. Instead of beating my head against the elusive wall of coveted species, I should just relax and enjoy the birds that were close at hand—though relaxation seemed like a distant memory as I weighed my chances of avoiding the rocks below if the osprey came at me. As she hopped off her nest and swooped down, I can’t say that my whole life flashed in front of me. I did treat myself to a brief rerun of the events that had brought me to the bridge.
On our way home from a dingy Chinese buffet in nearby Ionia a couple of weeks earlier, Linda had noticed an eagle-sized brown-and-white raptor plunging feet first into the Flat River in downtown Lowell.
“I think that was an osprey,” she said. “Turn around!”
“Can’t be,” I replied. “They’re only in the UP and the northern part of the state. It’s probably a red-tail.”
“Diving for fish? That wasn’t any kind of hawk.” By the time I made a U-turn, the bird had accelerated away.
I stuck to my guns that it couldn’t be an osprey. One of the first breakthroughs I’d made years ago was learning to use the range maps in my Peterson Field Guide to Birds. The maps told me at a glance if a particular species could likely show up in West Michigan as a breeding, wintering, or migrating bird—or, more important, if it wouldn’t show up here at all. This allowed my thumb to bypass tens of pages at a time and lessened the chances that I might mistake a frigid-weather northern shrike encountered in February for either a highly improbable, temperate-weather northern mockingbird or a downright impossible, mountain-dwelling Clark’s nutcracker, since all three share plumage similarities.
Early in our marriage, Linda and I drove north out of the empty white southern Michigan osprey range map region of the Peterson Field Guide and into the deep pink map region of the Upper Peninsula, where some of these big raptors nest in summer. At Seney National Wildlife Refuge, we watched an osprey grab a fish from a pond with a mighty splash. A ranger told us that as the bird flew off with its catch, it would grip the fish in its talons with the head facing forward, tail backward—demonstrating an innate knowledge of aerodynamic principles. I didn’t imagine that a bird with this many smarts would stray from pink to white and mistakenly end up in Lowell.
“If we’ve got an osprey, then anything can show up anywhere,” I told Linda.
When I posted questions about this bird to my group, Jim Kortge replied. Beginning in 1998, Jim and more than fifty other volunteers had helped relocate osprey chicks from an established population in northern Michigan to former osprey territory in the southern part of the state. The Osprey Reintroduction Project of Southern Michigan was headquartered in Kensington Metropark in Oakland County and sponsored by the Michigan DNR, the Detroit Zoo, and DTE Energy. In addition to reintroducing osprey chicks to Kensington and Stony Creek Metroparks in the southeastern part of the state, the project also established ospreys at Maple River State Game Area north of Lansing—about forty miles away from Lowell as the osprey flies.
“It’s possible that the Lowell osprey may have been a Maple River SGA-released bird or one of its offspring who nested there,” Jim told me. He wondered if the presence of the bird indicated a nearby nest. I said I’d look into it, which was similar to promising that I’d start minting Spanish dubloons, since I had no idea how to proceed.
Linda knew exactly what to do. The next time she was at the Back Alley Bait Shop buying mealworms for her baby birds, she asked the owner about ospreys. He lit up with a smile and said, “Yeah, they’ve got a nest on the old railroad bridge, right out in the middle. You can barely make it out from the Jackson Street Bridge. You’re better off getting a look at it in a boat.”
One reason we would have been better off in a boat was the traffic on the pedestrian-unfriendly bridge. A pick-up truck brushed past so close it made me shiver. Scanning the dark hulk of the retired railroad bridge two football fields away, I had trouble locking my binoculars onto anything nest-like. Then Linda mentioned a bit of trash on top of one of the trestles. It resolved itself into a pile of sticks as I wrestled with the distant, jiggling view. I felt even more vehicularly exposed after I’d retrieved my telescope from the car and attached it to the tripod, whose leg extended toward the traffic lane. I clutched the railing as a van thundered by. The bald-headed fisherman on my right never flinched. He told me he’d been fishing in the same spot for years and didn’t worry about any cars.
“I see her,” Linda said, grabbing my arm. “Look and tell me if that isn’t her head sticking out of the nest.”
Even through the scope, making out the details was a stretch. After a few moments a bird’s head surfaced above the sticks and rippled in the thermal currents. Linda told the fisherman about the osprey. He hunched his shoulders and didn’t want to look. We took turns bending over the scope as the bird faced us in a beautiful profile. “If she can see fish swimming underwater, I’ll bet she sees us,” Linda said. Then a rattletrap truck sent us scrambling to our car. Linda tooted the horn at the fisherman’s back as we passed.
We were so excited about the nest that without pausing to take my jacket off, I ran upstairs as soon as we arrived home and stabbed out an email to Jim Kortge. Jacketless, I read his reply an hour later asking if we could get close enough to discover if the mother had chicks. Out of all possible places for an osprey to nest, the exposed top of a train trestle struck me as a particularly bad choice. Jim said, “Ospreys won’t nest in a tree unless it is a dead snag where there are no leaves. They want to be able to see in all directions so they are not attacked by larger raptors like bald eagles and great horned owls, who will prey on them if given the chance. The railroad trestle is apparently high enough for their liking with good visibility and no large raptor nests in the area.”
I told Linda, “It’s too bad there’s no way of getting over there.”
“Why can’t we just follow the railroad tracks?”
“And get flattened by the Lowell Cannonball? No way.”
Our friend Gary Dietzel happened to be doing handyman duties behind our barn repairing a poultry pen, and Linda happened to make her way outside to talk with him. He knew about the osprey nest—he’d been one of my birding mentors—and he described how to find the tracks that led to the bridge. “They don’t use them anymore except to hold a few boxcars now and then,” he said. “It’s safe. I walk the neighbor’s dog there.”
An internal compass error brought the penguin-like ancient murrelet from the far north to southern Lake Michigan.
I wanted to get the lay of the land on my own before committing both of us to a full-scale assault on the trestle. Following Gary’s instructions, I pulled into the parking lot overlooking the Lowell dam, followed a chain link fence past an old mill wheel, and warily climbed up onto the track bed, keeping an eye out for locomotives sneaking up behind me. I’d seen too many black-and-white TV shows in my youth in which minor characters came to bad ends on trestles, and I didn’t want to turn into one of them.
The old ties leaked black gobs of creosote, so I had to glance down with each step in addition to glancing around for a runaway caboose. Just as I approached an old granite marker inscribed with a “W” for “whistle” and leaning like an ancient gravestone, a thumping shuddered through the rails. I pivoted 180 degrees and hurried back the way I’d come, hoping to beat megatons of metal to a spot where I could safely scrabble down to ground level without breaking too many limbs.
Back in the parking lot, I spotted a train on the other side of the river headed in the opposite direction on a different set of tracks.
That was too close, I thought.
A few days later I returned with Linda, who would not be dissuaded from checking up on the nest. Pretending to reassure her but actually reassuring myself, I said, “We have a better chance of seeing a penguin than running into a train.” I was so happy to be bolstered by her sunny presence as we trekked along the tracks, I would have whistled, if I knew how to whistle, even without seeing the “whistle” marker. Then as we rounded a curve, the leaning “W” and our way forward were blocked by a line of boxcars.
“Why can’t we go around them?” Linda asked.
“Fried Green Tomatoes,” I explained, but she kept on walking.
The sheer bulk of the railcars gave them an aura of menace. It seemed impossible that things so large could ever move, and once they did, that they could ever stop again. In case they were hell bent on reanimating, I edged as far away as possible, knocking loose gravel down a slope that was getting steeper the closer we came to the trestle. Soon we had even less room to maneuver. A massive turtle next to a boxcar stretched his neck and regarded us with malice. I didn’t know if he was a snapper, but his beak appeared capable of taking a bite out of a two-by-four—or out of a five-foot-ten-inch person’s ankle.
Linda was as cool as the fisherman on the bridge. “Aren’t you a tough guy?” she told the turtle as she searched for a handful of grass. “We’ll find you something to eat on the way back.” I didn’t like the way he fixed his greedy eyes on me when she mentioned eating.
Just as the turtle lost interest, the osprey found us. She emitted a series of keening twitters that might have come from high up in the clouds or from the limb of a dead tree on the opposite bank of the river. Her thin and distant-sounding protests didn’t seem grounded in the untidy heap of braches on top of the flattened “M” of the bridge and may have been intended to distract from her actual location. But there was no mistaking the content. She was giving the alarm. The bird was alarmed, and she was alarming me.
“Is this a smart thing to do?” I asked. “Raptors are pretty ferocious.”
“We’re not going to bother her. We’ll only keep going until we’re able to see if she has babies in her nest.” Mother-bird Linda couldn’t resist another mother’s brood.
But the bridge geometry defeated us when we reached the spot where the dirt ended and the ironwork began. The bird sat on top of the second trestle, which the first trestle blocked. We tried ducking and peering up from different locations, but the girders still blocked us. The solution was to stroll a few yards out onto the bridge for a clear view. It shouldn’t have been a big deal. Then I noticed that the boards under the tracks were spaced widely enough apart to allow breathtaking views of the rushing water below. Under normal circumstances I could avoid these gaps. But if the mother osprey decided to launch herself at me in defense of her youngsters, my foot might fall through one of the openings or I might plunge sideways into the river. So I stayed put.
Linda chuckled at my cowardice until she discovered the gappy flooring on her own. This wasn’t a bridge that allowed you to pretend it was anything but a skeleton of wood and metal stretched across a void.
She pointed to the riverbank alongside us. “Maybe we could see better from down there a little.”
I held onto a girder and stepped down to a concrete footing, which was as far down the steep incline as I was willing to venture. As I leaned out like the “W” whistle marker, I succeeded in looking the osprey in her yellow eye, and she treated me to a glare so intimidating that I wanted to go back and hug my warm and fuzzy pal the snapping turtle. She stood up and with a hop swooped down on brown-and-white wings the size of police dogs while brandishing the jaws that bite and the claws that catch of the dreaded Jabberwock.
Two thoughts flooded my brain. First, this was far more exciting than chasing a warbler. Second—and far more important—how stupid was I to have put myself in such a precarious position?
I had good reason to be concerned about the osprey. In her book Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur, author and naturalist Sy Montgomery describes in hair-raising detail the ferocity of raptors. She told me recently, “Humans have rightly viewed raptors with caution for two million years. They once hunted and killed our ancestors. In college, I read about the famous fossil hominid, the Taung Child, discovered in 1924 by Raymond Dart, the first australopithicine. The child was rather recently discovered to have been killed not by a leopard, as had been thought, but by a raptor—an ancient relative of the crowned hawk eagle. In Mongolia, to this day, falconers hunt wolves with golden eagles, but must be careful that the eagles don’t hunt near village children. One falconer’s eagle killed his grandson.”
Raptors, like good parents anywhere, will defend their nests with all they’ve got. “A friend of mine knew a guy who was killed this way,” Sy said. “It was sort of a freakish accident, like poor Steve Irwin getting nailed by that stingray in the heart. The guy didn’t realize he was near a goshawk nest, and one of the parents hit him exactly right in the back of the head. He died instantly.”
In Birdology, Sy writes harrowingly about learning the highly dangerous art of falconry. She tells the story of her instructor, Nancy Cowan, who was once attacked by her husband’s new goshawk, right in its mew (or aviary). “Nancy went to feed her, giving the bird her three delicious dead chicks. Everything had gone well until Nancy turned to leave—and felt talons going around her eyeball,” Sy told me, recounting the story. “Her husband forgot to tell her that after feeding the third chick, he always used to fluff the goshawk’s breast feathers. The change in routine was all it took to trigger the attack.”
So what kind of quarter did I expect when I crowded a mother raptor at her nest? Fortunately, instead of flying in my direction, she glided across the river and settled on the limb of a tree, apparently unconcerned about a gnat like me.
As I clambered back up to the railroad bed, Linda emitted an osprey squeal of her own. “Two babies in the nest, and they’re practically as big as the mother.” Standing where I’d been standing a few moments earlier, she had pretzeled herself into a weird bent-down-but-upward-looking posture that gave her a clear view of the nest.
“You’re going to wreck your back,” I said.
“I don’t care. You should see these big fat babies. They remind me of our grackles.” She called to them, “Don’t worry. Your mother’s going to bring you back a fish.”
Up until now, I thought I’d been searching for the nest for Jim Kortge. But Linda’s joy was my reward. It made me wonder why I’d been so obsessed with seeking out rarities when ospreys, baby flickers, or a woodpecker hammering an exit through our barn brought me plenty of thrills.
I had been fascinated with birds for twenty years now and for the last ten had made a serious attempt to learn about them. But I finally seemed to have reached a plateau. I still suffered from poor visual processing that reduced unknowns to a single, usually misperceived feature, and I lacked the mental muscle to store any but the most elementary identification essentials in my head. Another factor was missing, too. I was bereft of the drive that fueled A-level birders, who didn’t simply look for birds when strolling though the woods, as I usually did. Finding them was their life, and they were relentless about the pursuit. When they weren’t traveling long distances in quest of rarities, they were checking and rechecking the same spots close to home, and it didn’t trouble them if they came up empty 90 percent of the time.
Steve Santner is one of the top-gun birders on the listserv who has helped me over the years. During a winter trip to the Muskegon Wastewater System, I’d searched in vain for a reported snowy owl for eighty minutes and was about to head home when I noticed Steve and Darlene Friedman parked on the shoulder of the main facility road. They showed me not just one but six snowies in a field through their scopes.
A retired biologist who has been chasing birds for over fifty years, Steve is a county lister. His goal is to chalk up as many species as he can in each Michigan county. “Now that I have retired, I think I drive about forty-two thousand miles per year while birding. I have county lists for all eighty-three Michigan counties—and for all sixty-seven Pennsylvania counties as well,” he told me. “I originally started county listing when I lived in Pennsylvania, because I noticed that I tended to go to the same spots at the same time each year. County listing forces me to bird more widely.”
Covering the Lower Peninsula from Mackinaw City to Niles and Muskegon to Port Huron is challenging enough. The difficulty factor increases dramatically when you add the Upper Peninsula, which is larger than New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and five New England states. “It’s about six hundred miles to either Ironwood in Gogebic County or Copper Harbor in Keweenaw County. This is about the same distance as driving to Atlanta, Georgia. It takes me at least a week to reach the western UP. I can’t just spend a whole day driving, so I bird my way there.”
Steve has seen a total of 365 species in Michigan, with 252 of them found in Monroe County, home to Pointe Mouillee State Game Area, a prime wetlands for rarities. “I generally stop birding hard in a county when my total reaches 200,” Steve said. “My poorest county total of 162 in Oscoda County is far ahead of anyone else in the state. I’m trying to reach 200 in every county. I probably won’t live long enough to accomplish this, but I’m still going to try.”
I lacked anything approaching Steve’s level of dedication. The fifty-three-mile trip to Muskegon Wastewater always felt like a continent-crossing haul, and I rarely subjected myself to that ordeal unless bolstered by Bill Holm’s entertaining company. The wisest course for me was to continue soaking up crumbs of knowledge as I enjoyed birds close to home, leaving the pursuit of rarities to folks with more smarts and drive. Trying to compete with A-level birders led to increasing levels of frustration.
One major frustration was having to unlearn things I thought I knew after discovering that my faithful field guide range maps had been untrue. I could understand running into a rufous hummingbird from the Pacific Northwest in Michigan after Allen Chartier explained the bird’s migration strategy. And the presence of ospreys on a railroad bridge in southern Michigan made sense once I’d learned about the Osprey Relocation Project. But when November rolled around and southwest Michigan birder Tim Baerwald announced finding in St. Joseph, Michigan, an Arctic bird from a family that the Peterson Field Guide calls “the northern counterpart of penguins,” I decided that if anything could show up anywhere, finding rare species was an expert’s game for sure.
Any Michigan birder worth his or her weight in binoculars can swoop down on the Florida Keys, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, or other American hotspots to rack up dozen of life-list species that shun the Mitten State. Much more difficult is ferreting out unspeakably scarce birds in one’s own backyard, like Tim with the ancient murrelet. Scarce hardly does justice to this member of the alcid family, whose best-known member is the puffin and which breeds mainly in the rocky islands of Alaska and British Columbia. I searched the Michigan Bird Records Committee database online and found only eight appearances of the ancient murrelet here since the earliest listed date of 1989. Seven of those occurred hundreds of miles north of us on Lake Superior in the UP’s Chippewa County.
I wanted Linda to share this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with me and hoped that her back problems would allow her to go. But the night before the ninety-nine-mile trudge to St. Joseph, near the bottom end of Lake Michigan, she told me, “My hip feels out, and if I sit in a car for a few hours it will get a lot worse.”
I needed to go. Even though I hadn’t yet been held by the ancient murrelet’s glittering eye in person, I’d fallen under its spell. Unlike Steve Santner, I lacked the oomph to drive long distances on my own. I considered inviting Bill Holm, but giving him less than twelve hours notice for a half-day trip didn’t seem respectful.
“Can’t,” said Bill when I reached him on his cell phone. “Did you forget that Marcia and I are in New York City? We haven’t been birding yet, but we did go to Birdland—the jazz club—and some of the musicians were ancient. What’s the call of the ancient murrelet? Does it say, Awwketh?”
“That’s really good. Did you know it’s an auk?”
“No, but it just goes to show the extent of my instinctual comic genius.”
Slamming down the phone, I decided to make the effort to see the bird on my own and even scrambled to the store for an eggs-and-sausage “breakfast in a bowl” so that Linda wouldn’t have to get up early to feed me. But when the clock beeped at 6:30 a.m., I lay in bed wracked by an escalation of my usual free-floating anxiety. According to my GPS, Tiscornia Park was a one-hour, forty-one-minute drive, plus I had to add fifteen minutes for a rest stop and for “Gypsy” to purposely lead me astray. Was this long trip worth taking? No one had found the murrelet on Friday, and I would feel foolish if I wasted a Saturday on a bird that had already flown when I could be spending my time in far more productive ways, such as staying under the covers.
I’d slept in the upstairs bedroom so as not to wake Linda, but as I adjusted my head on the pillow I heard her bumping around in the kitchen. “You sure picked a beautiful day for a drive,” she said when I slunk into the room. “A high of fifty with sunshine.”
“I’m not going,” I told her. “My nerves are really bad.”
“You always feel worse in the morning, and you’ll be sorry if you stay home and then read emails from people who saw your bird.”
My bird. Certainly not mine, but mine to see. And even if the murrelet never surfaced, birders had reported other rarities blown in by the same crazy winds that had delivered this flighted version of a penguin. So after spooning out the last morsels of egg product and a sausage-like substance from my breakfast bowl, I kissed Linda and hit the road.
If I had known what an odd experience awaited me, I never would have hesitated.
I wasn’t encouraged about my chances of seeing the bird when I pulled into Tiscornia Park. Two stony-faced men were stowing their gear in the back of an SUV. I didn’t need to ask, but I asked anyway. “Any luck with the ancient murrelet?”
“No one’s seen it today,” said Puffy Blue Parka. “We’ve been here two hours.”
“But if you need a little gull, you can’t miss it,” Fishing Hat told me.
I could miss it. I had no idea what the little gull species looked like. I thanked them and left my spotting scope in the trunk. I didn’t want to lug twenty-five pounds of scope and tripod four hundred yards down the pier when birders showing off their $3,900 Swarovski rigs would be happy to share a peek if the murrelet appeared. Otherwise, my binoculars gave me a better shot at tracking a swooping, wheeling gull, which I hoped more knowledgeable brains would identify for me.
I passed another disappointed soul and a few fishermen as I trekked along the cement. After ducking around a small lighthouse I ran into thirty or so birders scanning sky and water from the end of the pier. Before I could pop the caps off my binoculars, a guy in a headband gestured toward a compact flock of Bonaparte’s gulls. Wearing nonbreeding plumage, the gulls had accessorized their gray-and-white duds with a dark smudge over the ear in place of summer’s black hood. “We’ve got a little gull,” the guy said. “He seems to have decided to stick around for a while.”
Nodding sagely, I put the bins on the flock, then admitted defeat. “Which one?”
“He looks like the Boneys, but see how the underwing is darker?”
I concentrated, but even as I followed the little gull, I could barely tell him apart from the Bonaparte’s gulls—though he was appropriately slightly littler.
Glancing at my watch, I resolved to give the murrelet an hour and not a minute more. Anything less seemed unreasonable after the drive. Anything more would challenge my ability to entertain myself on a slab of cement surrounded by water on three sides. To pass the time I asked a man with an enormous knapsack, “Would you say that the ancient murrelet is one of the rarest birds to ever come to Michigan?”
Without lowering his binoculars he said, “I wouldn’t know. I live in Indiana.”
I watched the little gull for another few minutes, finally clicking to his completely white-edged wings, compared to the Boneys with their black-edged wings. Whenever my concentration waned, I lost those distinctions along with the bird. Then I flinched away from the flock when a voice shouted, “I’ve got the murrelet!”
A great rustling of synthetic fiber jackets and a scuffling of feet took place. I hadn’t noticed much conversation, but in the abrupt gasped silence that followed the announcement, I recognized a broken congeniality replaced by cries of “Where? Where?” A mood of tension contrasted with the dull gray rolling water that concealed the bird.
“Don’t panic!” called the voice. “Everyone will get a chance to see it,” as if the voice controlled the murrelet’s movements, or as if it belonged to a cane-wielding carnival barker, or as if it had read desperation into a shove of tripods toward the edge of the platform. Remarkably, the voice had a calming effect. We collectively handed it our trust.
The voice belonged to expert birder and self-described “hawk watcher” Jeff Schultz, who had driven almost twice as far as I had from the southeastern part of the state. Under normal conditions, one birder could describe a specific spot to another by saying, “Look at the skinny maple that’s in line with the utility pole on the hill. Go up to the third branch on the right. That’s where the Clark’s nutcracker is perched.” Those kinds of landmarks didn’t exist on the featureless plane of Lake Michigan—at least none that I could perceive. Jeff proved the superiority of his observational skills, however. “See where the patch of dark water ends and the light patch begins? Look straight out at the dividing line, at twelve o’clock from where I’m standing, about two hundred feet out. He’s underwater, but watch for him when he surfaces.”
Once the murrelet reappeared from the inky depths, Jeff pinpointed the location even better. ”See the Bonaparte’s gulls on the water and behind them the little pod of northern pintails? He’s right in the middle between those two groups.”
Following Jeff’s directions, I lit upon a black-and-white, penguin-like bird so small that the slightest swell of a wave concealed its body as effectively as a mountain would have. There, not there—on, then off—he blinked in and out of view, bobbing like a cork. A mallard paddling lazily alongside the pier was a fierce warrior compared to this stubby, ten-inch-long bird as crazily out of place in Michigan as the names auk, alcid, and ancient murrelet. The foolishness or audacity that had brought him here to fend for himself all by himself rattled me. I thought of Julio Cortázar’s short story, “Axolotl,” about a visitor to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris who sees axolotls in an aquarium and empathizes so completely with the little salamanders that after several visits he becomes one of them.
The longer I held my binoculars on him, the sharper the sensation grew of being cast adrift in a foreign land—pretty much how I usually felt about life. I associated this thought with the murrelet, though, and I lost the edge of my wonder at seeing the bird as my identification with him strengthened. I’m not really ancient, I longed to tell the birders. The white plume on my black head during breeding season isn’t a patch of gray hairs. Saving me from surrendering to a reverie about the sweet taste of krill, the voice rang out again.
“Black scoters coming in at two o’clock.” Five bulky totally black ducks flew in perfect single file just above the water before landing a hundred feet past the murrelet. Someone else spotted a red-necked grebe flapping past the pier and achieving splashdown near the scoters. An escalating sense of strangeness deepened. I had never been in a place like this with nowhere to walk except to retreat to land, no new territory to explore, yet characters slightly removed from a Dr. Seuss book kept appearing. For a moment the world of birds revolved around me.
With an excited shout, Jeff conjured up another rarity, which he identified as a juvenile parasitic jaeger. Although birders were pleased by the arrival of this crisply patterned brown-and-white member of the skua family with an Arctic latitude address, the birds were not. When I’d studied its pictures in my field guides, this seabird had struck me as a kind of oversized gull. But in attitude it was closer to a raptor. It could just as easily been named “piratical” jaeger due to its dastardly means of appropriating food. I watched as it harassed a Boney until the harried gull regurgitated food from its crop, which the jaeger scarfed up as soon as it hit the water. Then it sought out another bird to bother.
Although no one had witnessed its departure, the murrelet—which had slowly been floating further from the pier—was suddenly nowhere in sight. The black scoters had also evaporated. I hung around another fifteen minutes, but the murrelet failed to reappear, and no new birds materialized, either.
I kept waiting for the voice to conjure up another rarity, but it had apparently lost its mojo.
I arrived home in the midafternoon bubbling over with so much excitement, I had trouble falling asleep that night. Retreating to the upstairs bedroom, I sat up reading for a while, flipping through field guides and staring at range maps for jaegers, scoters, alcids, and the little gull. I should have lulled myself listening to jazz instead. Eventually I fell into shallow sleep, neither sinking deeper nor surfacing until shallow dreams of the murrelet alone, adrift, and hungry jolted me awake around 3:00 a.m.
Until we started getting up close and personal with orphan baby birds, I had never thought about wild birds having unique personalities like our cats, bunnies, and parrots. I seldom glanced at a bird now without making a guess about its temperament—and I obsessed about the ones that seem to be in trouble. I worried that the ancient murrelet wouldn’t survive.
This wasn’t the farthest excursion by the species. On May 27, 1990, astonished British birders found one in breeding plumage paddling around the waters of Jenny’s Cove on Devon County’s Lundy Island, over forty-five hundred miles by a ruler-straight route from the bird’s usual haunts. According to R. J. Campey in the Annual Report of the Lundy Field Society, 1990, the murrelet stayed nearly a month, only to return to the island on April 14 of the following year. It had been seeing leaving Lundy with razorbills and other auk species and had apparently spent the winter with them.
The Tiscornia ancient murrelet had no related species to join up with. No one to teach him what food to catch in southern Lake Michigan and no one to guide him to an Atlantic wintering site where he could find other auks.
I wasn’t the only birder for feel concern for him, of course. In “Chasing the Ancient Murrelet,” from his chapbook The Ancient Murrelet, Michigan poet and associate editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review Keith Taylor writes about the bird, which
bobs in these choppy
irregular fresh water swells,
diving, often, after crustaceans
that haven’t lived here
for a geologic epoch,
but taking what minnows it can find
to keep hunger off
until it dies, here, in a place
it doesn’t belong, where it can’t find
the right food or mate,
but where I find it, following
clear directions on the internet
Our moments of pleasure seeing wildly out-of-place birds like this are often purchased at great expense. Something has to go dreadfully wrong for a bird to go astray by thousands of miles. It might become separated from its flock and blown off course by a storm—or have its judgment impaired by illness or injury. Under the best conditions, a lost bird might take on a few additional burdens in unfamiliar territory. But the bird could end up in mortal danger if it landed in a habitat incapable of sustaining the species. This was probably the case with the murrelet. Under those circumstances, I decided I’d much rather see a plump and healthy blue jay than the most spectacular rarity.
Not all Alaskan vagrants found themselves in such dire straits. On a cold March day, Caleb Putnam and Curtis Dykstra spotted a Barrow’s goldeneye on the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids. They discovered it with three hundred common goldeneyes, ducks so similar to the Barrow’s you had to look closely to pick out the crescent-shaped (not oval) blaze on the black face and the white spots on the wings.
The Barrow’s hadn’t shot as far off course as the murrelet. While most of them winter in the Pacific Northwest, some choose the Atlantic coastline instead. Unlike auks, which are exclusively sea and ocean birds, the Barrow’s nests on inland lakes. So it was at home diving for food on a Michigan river, where it also enjoyed the security of a flock.
Though the murrelet’s location had been out of reach for Linda with her back problems, a mere twenty-five-minute drive separated us from the Barrow’s goldeneye—or would have if I hadn’t gotten pulled over by the cops for turning left at a red light on Ann Street NE. While the officer was hard at work humiliating me, from her bed of pillows in the backseat, Linda described the exotic duck in so much excited detail that he retreated without giving me a ticket.
“The next time you’re in an unfamiliar part of town, be more careful what you’re doing,” he said, and it seemed best not to mention to him that I had grown up in this part of town.
As we headed for the river I took care to avoid left turns until we swung into a parking lot just east of the Leonard Street Bridge. I scanned the water south toward the Sixth Street Bridge. It took a few moments for the reality to sink in that the glinting white-and-black specks in my binoculars were ducks. The river was wider than I thought and goldeneyes significantly smaller. Then I located a few more directly opposite us—Caleb’s flock of hundreds must have dispersed—and among them swam the Barrow’s. He was farther from where I stood than the murrelet had been, but I’d gotten worse looks at rare birds before. I could see him well enough to distinguish him from the others.
“There he is,” I told Linda. “See that tree all by itself on the other side of the river, and the male and female goldeneyes in front of it? Look for a lone duck to their left. That’s the Barrow’s goldeneye.”
She didn’t exhibit her usual enthusiasm. “I’m not seeing him very well.”
“He’s not exactly on top of us. But he’s a Barrow’s goldeneye, and that’s a very rare duck for Kent County. We’ll probably never see another.”
The duck complicated viewing by diving and disappearing for several seconds at a time. Just when he started moving in our direction and it seemed like we’d get a decent look, the other goldeneyes flew off. After a brief hesitation, he tagged along.
Linda remained quiet when we climbed back into the car, not at all chatty like she had been on the way down. I mentioned again what an extraordinary bird we’d seen. “A very few might spend the winter on the Great Lakes, but they just don’t come into Grand Rapids.” I also reminded her how far the duck had come, but she still seemed unimpressed. “Aren’t you glad you got a chance to see him?”
“I thought I was going to get a better look,” she said. “I prefer to see them close up.”
For all of my talk of having an intimate experience with birds, when it came right down to it—and despite all my protests—I was probably still a lister at heart. And now I could chalk up a brand duck, which I never, ever, under any circumstances could have ever found on my own. I just didn’t have the right birding stuff.