Chapter Eleven
Just as I had reconciled myself to the fact that finding rare birds would never be a Tarte forte, the celestial bodies shifted just enough for a few minor miracles to occur. The miracles didn’t happen all at once, and the shift caused a bone-jarring bump along the way, as celestial bodies will.
One Saturday morning in May, Linda and I sat on the bed drinking coffee while cats Maynard and Tina vied for a spot at the window. Massive Maynard—a propane tank covered in fur—easily dominated, and as he sniffed in great gulps of air through the screen, I feared that he might deplete the oxygen levels in our woods. Suddenly he stopped inhaling and started whining.
“What do you see, Maynard?” Linda asked.
“He’s always watching the sparrows in the spirea bush,” I said. But he wasn’t staring in that direction. Leaning forward I found myself gazing into the shiny black eye of a blazing yellow prothonotary warbler perched on a twig less than eighteen inches from my nose. I called Linda over with barely coherent gasps that must have disheartened the bird, because he shot off before she made it to the window.
Although nowhere near as out of place as a penguin or Barrow’s goldeneye, the prothon is primarily a creature of wooded southern swamps, not a cat-teasing Michigan window peeper like a chickadee or chipmunk. The species is rare enough in Kent County that when I hopped online to report it to eBird.com—a fantastic reporting tool and interactive database run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and National Audubon Society—the warbler didn’t even show up in the checklist for my location. I had to tick a box for a list of rarities to appear, a process that caused my extremities to tingle.
A few days later a Michigan eBird reviewer emailed me requesting a detailed description of the bird that would rule out my having misidentified another yellow bird for the prothon, such as a yellow warbler, pine warbler, blue-winged warbler, or even a goldfinch. Far from feeling inconvenienced by the query, I almost swooned to think that I had seen a bird worthy of official scrutiny.
My four-second glimpse of the prothonotary warbler that morning instantly changed the emotional tenor of a day that had started off downhill and had been rolling toward a hole. I had awakened at 5:00 a.m. unable to fall completely back to sleep, not worried this time about the fate of an ancient murrelet but gnawed upon by as many as five concerns. None of them on their own possessed enough oomph to disturb my slumber. But frets about cat Frannie’s eye infection, an impending project deadline at work, a leak in the hallway ceiling, old age, and death formed the spokes of a wheel that turned fitfully at first. Then because I didn’t stop the little dynamo right away, it gained enough momentum to jangle my neurons on a morning when I should have been sleeping in.
When I finally emerged from restless partial sleep a couple of hours later, I sat on the edge of the bed with Linda, awash in free-floating dread. But seeing that golden lightbulb of a bird flipped a switch and changed my polarity from negative to positive. It wasn’t just the thrill of seeing the prothon that rerouted my faulty wiring. It was the promise that he carried of more visitors to our woods.
I wanted to fling myself downhill toward the river to search for him. In my bones I felt that other warblers had to be around. But first I had to herd the ducks, geese, and hens out to their pen, change their wading pool and bucket water, fill the feed dishes, dole out veggie treats, and top-dress their predator-proof sleeping room in the barn with fresh straw. It didn’t take long, but I wanted Linda to come with me into the woods, and she had chores inside the house involving parrots, doves, parakeets, cats, and husband. Then we sat down for breakfast. By the time we’d eaten and completed a dozen little tasks, I figured that any stray warblers would have grabbed their own grub and moved on.
A sparse selection of species met us on the path. A song sparrow who had been showing off his repertoire shifted to “chip” calls and dove for cover as we approached. One lone red-winged blackbird flared his epaulets and launched into a stirring conk-la-ree while chickadees flitted about. A few yellow-rumped warblers lingered in the trees, pecking at poison ivy berries they’d missed the previous fall. But the prothonotary warbler was nowhere to be found, and neither were his buddies.
Proving he’s a better birder than I am, our cat Maynard spotted a brilliant yellow prothonotary warbler through the bedroom window.
“We could try Don’s woods,” Linda said. “He gets birds on his path that we don’t get, and I want to walk there anyway.”
Don’s house was just across a gravel driveway from our property, and the bushier habitat pulled in catbirds that turned up their beaks at our more open woods. Twice we’d been buzzed at Don’s by palm warblers hunting insects in the spring, and once and only once we had surprised a blue-winged warbler as it hung upside down from a branch. We’d been delighted to find these, because we usually experienced slim pickings even during the heaviest migration waves elsewhere in the state.
Each spring after reading listserv reports describing some southeastern Michigan spot as suddenly “dripping with warbler species,” I’d comb our woods without finding even one. I didn’t think that the returning migrants necessarily favored an eastern Great Lakes route, though it was possible. But “birdy” places like Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor are called migrant traps, and these green areas in urban environments attract birds because the surrounding cement, glass, and steel lack the appeal of trees and water. In the less built-up western part of the state where I live, migrating birds have many more green areas in which to pitch their little overnight tents, and for that reason they can be more difficult to find. The odds of a flock screeching to a halt in our patch of woods are almost as great as those of an ancient murrelet tagging along with a prothon.
Still, I couldn’t think of a reason not to give Don’s place a try. The simple act of going out and looking for birds kept my anxiety levels in check. I’d been nettled by nervousness ever since I’d spent a weird week at age seven certain that death loomed imminently, possibly as soon as I had finished watching the Beany and Cecil cartoon on TV. I hadn’t examined the reasons behind that feeling at the time, but from then on some manifestation of nervousness or depression would periodically rise up like Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent and chomp at me for days. As an adult I’d tried pharmaceuticals, mental tricks, and spiritual practices in hopes of keeping my reptile brain at bay. Nothing succeeded. When I went birding, though, I experienced a sense of inner quiet that was missing from other portions of my life.
I can’t pretend that my attentiveness to birds made me one with all of nature. But Linda was naturally thus. As we traipsed along our neighbor’s trail, she kept up a running commentary on things around her. “I bet you a horse that this is wild honeysuckle, though it doesn’t have a honeysuckle scent,” she said as I stood listening for cheeps, chirps, twitters, or snatches of song. “You’d think that there’d be morels here, since it looks like the place in our woods where they’ve been before. Don’s in the nursing home, so he probably wouldn’t mind if we kept any that we found, and maybe there’s some way I could call him if we did.”
When we reached the end of the path, just before it looped back toward Don’s house, Linda noticed stirrings in the bushes. Then, for a few moments, it was as if a tiny piece of Magee Marsh had broken off and grafted itself onto our neighbor’s thicket.
“There’s an ovenbird!” she said, pointing to a chipmunk-colored bird on the ground.
Barrows in Michigan Bird Life writes that the ovenbird “has a habit when moderately disturbed of walking lengthwise along a branch with a deliberate slow step, like a chicken.” I didn’t get a chance to experience this nor to witness the spectacle of an ovenbird midsong. “The bird fairly quivers with the violence of his effort,” Chapman notes in Birds of Eastern North American. “The result seems inadequate; we feel that he is striving for something better.” In fact, I didn’t even have time to wonder if a woven, dome-shaped, oven-like nest might lay nearby, because Linda had already spotted a gray-and-yellow Nashville warbler, which belies its name by refusing to nest anywhere in Tennessee. I almost mistook its leaf-obstructed form for a somewhat similar female common yellowthroat, but the yellowthroat was nearby, too, and unembarrassed by her lack of the Nashville’s bold eye-ring.
These three were attractive, though by no means gorgeous. The “beautiful people” hung out higher in the thicket. Close to one another flitted a magnolia warbler with a brilliant yellow breast and black-striped necklace, a dandified gent in a charcoal gray suit with chestnut-colored cap and cravat known as a bay-breasted warbler, and a northern parula, who packed so much color into a small volume that he defied description. The bluish back and head and blue wings with two white wing bars are easily enough imagined. Paru-lyzingly difficult to do justice to is a band that posits a bluish stripe and a burnt-orange stripe between a yellow throat and a yellow breast. This little patch of complex brilliance almost overwhelms the eye.
We had never before encountered such a concentration of different species outside of Magee Marsh. Linda couldn’t visit Magee any more unless her aching back called a truce for a few days and we had lined up a chiropractor in Ohio to line up her vertebrae. So I was thrilled that she had seen these six warblers with me—which abruptly vanished, as apparitions will. When we rounded the end of the trail, before my ganglia had recovered from the overstimulation, we ran smack dab into a bird who wouldn’t content himself with simply wearing a restful shade of black. He added two splotches of orange to each wing and on the edges of his tail to give our brainstems a start.
“A redstart!” I told Linda. He lingered briefly before zooming away.
With this final warbler, we must have used up our quota of birds. As we headed back, not only didn’t we discover any more warblers, but the song sparrow, red-winged blackbird, and chickadees had also abandoned the place. The woods still felt alive as we jabbered about our discovery, pausing only when Linda pointed out a painted turtle sunning itself on a log, a cluster of wild violets, or a conical crayfish mound.
As we talked, it struck me how differently we thought about the warblers. While I appreciated the eye-popping plumage, I was equally astounded that we had blundered into exactly the right place at exactly the right time, finding them in our homegrown version of a migrant trap—a micro-habitat of a thicket surrounded by less desirable bushes and trees. Linda was all about the beauty of the birds and didn’t care how or why they had arrived. She considered their appearance to be a “gift from God,” and that was that.
Tromping up the basement stairs, I remembered the Christmas card with the snow-covered log cabin on the front. She loved the card so much that it remained on top of her dresser long after winter had passed. I hadn’t paid much attention to the card when it arrived. I’d opened it, glanced at the sender’s name, and tossed it into a pile. But the illustration had struck a chord with Linda, who had seen more deeply into the rustic scene than I could. She had an eye for appreciating color, form, and art that I envied.
My obliviousness to things unrelated to birds hit home a moment later when I walked into the bedroom and noted that not just one but many Christmas cards poked out among her knickknacks. Her dresser was awash with them, and they’d been there for months unseen by preoccupied, self-centered me. One jolly portrait of a snowman peeked out from behind a framed photo of a church window at such a precarious angle, I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t fallen over. Seized by a spasm of fussiness, I set it upright, which caused it to disappear behind the picture. No other vacant slot existed among her animal and angel figurines, so I stashed it in a drawer, figuring she wouldn’t notice its absence.
When she sat down on the bed to change her shoes, she asked, “What happened? Where did my card with the snowman go?”
“I just thought you might want to switch over to a warm-weather theme.”
She tucked the card back into its spot. “Are you kidding? I look at that picture and enjoy it every day.”
Oh, how I wished I had her eye. My birding life—and my whole life—would have been so much richer.
I remained happy with my ears. They led us to another meaningful encounter with unusual birds close to home, though I almost missed it due to an even-worse-than-usual mood as I sat at my computer.
“Sweetie, there’s a bird singing, and it doesn’t sound like anything I’ve heard before,” Linda told me from the stairs.
“You’ve said that before,” I grumbled. “It’s probably just a goldfinch or a titmouse.”
“It has a really unusual song. Come outside and listen.”
I should have welcomed the interruption, but I banged and harrumphed all the way down to the basement. I’d been writing a book called Kitty Cornered about our six cats, and a chapter spotlighting whiny Maynard wasn’t coming together exactly as whiny Bob liked.
“You’d better wear your boots,” Linda said. “It’s wet after all that rain.”
Fortunately for me she shot through the door and missed my ungentlemanly response. Zipping up my jacket as I walked, I hit my head on the bird feeder and felt my sock slipping down my ankle. By the time I reached Linda behind the barn, the ducks and geese were making such a racket, I couldn’t have heard a helicopter landing. “I knew this would happen,” Linda said when the quacks and honks died down. “Whenever I call you to hear a bird, it’s gone by the time we come out.”
Just as I was about to pivot on my heel and go back to staring blankly at chapter 10, a thin and distant sound stopped me. “C’mon,” I said. Dodging puddles, we hurried up the neighbor’s driveway toward the squeaking-hinge song. “That’s the weirdest red-winged blackbird I’ve ever heard.” I told her. “Or is it a grackle?” Frogs splashed into the pond as our shadows struck them. We rounded the corner past Don’s house and followed the inner path, because the riverbank part of the loop was underwater after the recent flooding.
My crankiness dissolved. It belonged to a different world. As we drew close to the singer, I felt as if his song had plunged me into one of those dreams where a familiar place had been altered just enough to make it unrecognizable. We had floated off to a swampy sliver of primeval forest, a shadowy tangle of trees and overgrown bushes interrupted by a single line of utility poles. His call hadn’t struck me as beautiful until I heard the repeated, short, shrill phrase as a kind of incantation. Then an unexpected musicality crept in, like a maestro coaxing Mozart out of a handsaw.
I found the singer on a branch in a wet thicket, head craned toward the sky as the creaking song flowed through him. About the size of a red-winged blackbird, black all over, he stood silhouetted against the glare. I caught his yellow eye, which looked right through me. All that mattered was the grip of the song that held him and held us and held our bubble of the woods. Jumping to a higher branch, he flared his tail without missing a beat. In the performance of a lifetime, he sang the history of his people. He crunched numbers, and he named names. He bent the air like a bow, twanging, rasping, squeaking his whole reason for existence, and I felt small beneath him.
The music remapped my neural pathways. It slid open the screen door to my heart, and though I remained totally focused on the bird, I thought of Linda and everything she had done for me. Instead of working at a job all day, I simply worked mornings, spending part of each afternoon writing books by fits and starts. Other women wouldn’t have approved, considering the financial hit we’d taken. But she accepted the path I’d chosen, never complaining about this or any of my other quirks. She loved me with all of the power that the bird poured into his song, and I loved her just as much—though in a twanging, rasping, squeaking, complaining sort of way.
As the single-phrase symphony continued, Linda nudged me. I looked down among broken twigs and last year’s dead leaves, where a dull brown bird skulked, acting cool to the ardor of her mate. Then, when the male dropped to the ground, she changed places with him, flying up to a branch and continuing his song with the same level of conviction. If I hadn’t seen the change in performers, I never would have known that a different vocalist had taken over. It was as profound a declaration of devotion as I had ever witnessed, and I had seen bunnies in love.
We stayed and listened for a while. The mood dissolved when a crew team from a local high school rowed by with blaring bullhorns. The commotion didn’t bother the birds, but it sent us trudging home.
“What were those?” Linda asked.
“Rusty blackbirds. I’ve never seen them before, or should I say I’ve never noticed them. This was the first time I’ve heard them singing, so I probably always assumed they were grackles or red-winged blackbirds and never gave them a second glance.”
“You never noticed them?” I might as well have said that I hadn’t tasted the arugula lettuce from her garden in my salad or that I’d walked past her dresser without taking note of a new Christmas card.
“I’ll definitely be looking for them now.”
To birders, rusties are noteworthy but by no means rare. Flocks move through our state each spring on the way to their nesting grounds in New England and Canada. I decided to report it to the birding group but gave up after two attempts. I had no idea how to describe our experience. Usually the flashy appearance of a bird dazzled me. But not even the most brilliant warbler seemed as beautiful as the plain black male with the irresistible voice. Eventually it dawned on me why the encounter had seemed so unusual. For years I had been observing birds from the outside. But in this case we had wandered inside their world, witnessing a ritualized encounter between a pair that was packed with such deep meaning, we had felt its power.
It had been one of the most profound encounters with wild birds that I’d ever experienced, and I was glad that I could share the moment with Linda—just as we had shared my fateful first rose-breasted grosbeak so many years earlier. If she had known what a lunatic that grosbeak would turn me into, she might have distracted me with a woodchuck instead.
I didn’t think any interaction with a wild bird could have a greater impact than our close brush with the rusties. They had made me deliriously happy for a stretch of minutes, more joyful than if I had scored a rare species—and that would happen sooner than I could have guessed. But first an enormous bird set his sights on me, scaring me even worse than the osprey had. It happened as I drove Linda home from the chiropractor.
Linda went to her regular back cracker at least three times a week and to a different doc when she needed a Saturday adjustment. The frequent visits kept her pain level manageable, but she still couldn’t do activities that involved extended sitting. This kept us from eating at restaurants, going to the movies, or attending bullfights. Standing in one place was also a no-no. Walking around helped her feel better, which made birding an excellent activity for both of us.
As we rode back from Dr. Scott Robinson’s office, Linda lay in her usual position in the backseat on a bed of pillows, feet propped against the side window, toes aligned with well-established scuffmarks on the glass. “Where do you want to go walking?” she asked.
“I just found out about a park in Ada we’ve never gone to before, Roselle Park. It’s an eBird ‘Birding Hotspot,’ if you want to check it out.”
Less than one half-mile away from home, a large bird cannonballed toward us out of the brush. For one brief moment that stretched into a decade, I stared into the eye of a wild turkey before it whomped the car. I swerved into the opposing lane, heading for an SUV that had fortunately been close enough to witness our collision with the turkey yet far enough away to slow down for me to cut back into our own lane. I waved my thanks as we passed, and then I swung into our driveway jolted by the disaster that we had narrowly averted. If the bird had struck the car a second or two earlier, he would have crashed through the windshield and plopped upon my lap like our great big fat cat, Maynard, but with a greater detriment to my health.
As we rolled to a stop, Linda wanted to know, “Is the turkey okay?”
I shook my head. “He’s dead. I saw him in the rear view mirror lying on the shoulder.”
As I hauled myself out of the driver’s seat to survey the damage to Linda’s Scion XB—a boxy car we called “the bread truck”—I winced in pain and clutched my side. At the moment of impact, I had tensed and jerked my torso slightly but sharply enough to cause a muscle cramp. The Scion had suffered a similar malady. The turkey had dented the passenger-side door. It had also broken off the mirror.
We felt terrible about what had happened. We’d once had turkeys as pets. A man had raised thirty-six of them in his garage and then released them into the woods under the illusion that a heavy, lumbering domesticated breed could survive as well as wild birds. After we found the four survivors of his Darwinian experiment wandering in the road, Linda tracked down the owner and received permission to take them home and spoil them. Each evening as “the judges” perched on stanchions in our barn, Linda went from bird to bird with an apple for them to peck. She switched to cut-up apples in a bowl after reporting that a turkey had conveyed its desire for chopped fruit via a penetrating stare.
Linda insisted that we check to make sure that the turkey had died instantly. If he was grievously injured, we’d have to find a way to put him out of his misery. One of our many vets had a practice just up the street, and he could euthanize him. I drove slowly, funereally, dreading what we would find. But when we rounded the curve, the only sign of Mr. Turkey was a single black feather on the gravel. Hitting Linda’s car had apparently been the equivalent of a songbird banging into a window and winging off uninjured a couple of minutes later. He’d survived the accident with flying colors.
“You’ll have to file a claim with the insurance company,” I said. “And we may have to pay a deductible.”
“I don’t care about that. What matters is that the turkey is okay.”
On Monday I discovered that Linda had as much of a rapport with insurance agents as she had with birds. “I talked to State Farm, and they kept me on the phone for more than twenty minutes. They asked so many questions, it threw off my whole morning.”
“Wow, why did it take so long?”
“They wanted to know every little detail. The lady I talked to was real nice, though. She sounded young, maybe in her thirties, and she and her husband lived in Seattle and were going to move into a new house the next day, which she loved, because for the first time she was finally going to be able to have a garden. I asked her about Vachon Island, where Bette MacDonald lived, but she had never heard of her or The Egg and I and mentioned two other islands near Seattle. She said she didn’t watch much television, but she did occasionally get to see American Pickers and seemed interested when I told her about Building Wild and Down East Dickering.”
That explained the twenty minutes. Any insurance adjuster I’d ever met only spoke officialese, but Linda’s chatting talents were formidable. Back when her spine behaved better, we had taken a second trip to Point Pelee National Park in Ontario. After dinner, she’d suggested that we stroll through the neighborhood behind our motel. Although the street was only two blocks long, covering that short distance ate up an hour as she struck up one conversation after another with residents who happened to be outdoors. Those encounters pleased her as much as our birding earlier in the day, and they became the standard by which she judged all other urban walks.
We postponed our trip to Roselle Park until the following Saturday, since it didn’t seem like a good idea to drive around with her outside mirror dangling by its control cable. In a way, the unfortunate collision with the turkey turned out to be a stroke of luck. If it hadn’t have been for the one-week delay, we might not have ended up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time for me to make the most significant discovery in my entire insignificant birding career.
I had discovered Roselle Park thanks to an app for my iPod called Birds-Eye. Unlike other birding software that essentially consists of eBook versions of field guides with bird songs added, BirdsEye lists the bird species currently being reported in my area—or anywhere in the country. It draws its information from eBird.org, an unbelievably powerful online tool that shows “birding hotspots” worldwide—allowing you to click on a location and see a full roster of reported birds. You can also search hotspots, counties, and other areas by date. eBird will also generate bar charts for species occurrences according to any time frame that you choose: days, months, or even years. It links these charts to maps, allowing you to select a bird you want to see and determine when and where is the best place to find it in a given area. More interactive features are being added all the time, and as increasing numbers of birders report their sightings to eBird, it becomes increasingly valuable as a bird finding tool.
Using BirdsEye I noticed that several warbler species had been reported at Roselle Park. “How could there be a park this good for birds right under our noses, and we’ve never heard of it before?” I asked Linda.
As it turned out, Roselle Park had only been around since 2007. The 240-acre nature preserve encompassed fields, wetlands, prairies, forests, and river frontage that had formerly been owned by the Ada Beef Company. Two tall silos made the entrance easy to find. A girl wearing a bike helmet and two boys in shorts spider-crawled up climbing rocks set into the base of the silos. The park map showed an unusual arrangement of trails that mainly hugged the boundaries and kept the interior untouched, allowing plenty of undisturbed habitat for birds. I grew pessimistic when we started walking, though. The ultra-smooth, hard-surfaced paths drew bicyclists like a magnet.
“On your left,” called a member of a wheeled family. A teen on a skateboard also whisked by us, then a woman on roller blades. Dog walkers, joggers, and a girl with a pet pig on a leash overtook us when we stopped to scan the cattails. Song sparrows and red-winged blackbirds were abundant, but I fretted that the rolling human traffic would keep other species at a distance.
A comical sound close by brightened our prospects. It called to mind a cartoon in which a dog, eager to rocket off after a cat, windmills his legs until his paws finally achieve traction and shoot him skidding forward. In a rare moment of understatement, Barrows describes the song as “a high-voiced rolling whinny,” which hardly does justice to the strangeness.
“A sora!” I said.
“Are you sure that was even a bird?”
Using the BirdTunes app, I played the song on my iPod for her. Only yards away but hidden in the weeds, the sora answered. Rails comprise a family of highly secretive birds that are more often seen than heard, due to their cryptic coloration and shy demeanor. The expression “skinny as a rail” suits them to a tee. Their narrowness helps them slip through dense vegetation as they hunt for food and practice their secret yoga. Our skinny sora must have been facing us, because we couldn’t find a sign of him no matter how closely we scrutinized the undergrowth, and he refused to treat us to his special-effects song again. Knowing he could stand in one place longer than Linda, we let him go about his ghostly rail business as we continued ambling toward the river.
I tuned out a throng of kids on bikes by homing in on a warbling vireo too high up in a tree to see and common yellow-throats calling witchity-witchity from deep inside a clump of willows. It was the park of hidden birds except for the red-winged blackbirds dropping down into the cattails or rising briefly above them across an expanse so wide that the marching ants on the other side turned out to be more cyclists.
I appreciated the beautiful park’s potential for future birds as much as for the birds we were finding. We climbed a tower overlooking a wetland that was currently devoid of wet. “I’ll bet in early spring when all of this is flooded, yellowlegs would show up,” I said. Catbirds sang from bushes on the riverbank. “Imagine this spot during migration. It’s probably jumping with warblers.” The sun-flecked river seemed conducive to hosting exclusive species of ducks that would shun our almost identical stretch of water a few miles away. Not that long ago, I had learned that anything could show up anywhere, and Roselle struck me as being more anywhere than lots of other places we had visited.
Midway along the river path, we made a forty-five-degree turn and headed back on the diagonal path. I was imagining something exotic such as a yellow-headed blackbird materializing in a puff of smoke, when a tick-tick-buzz like an old rotary telephone rang my chimes. A sedge wren. It hadn’t appeared on the BirdsEye list of reported species, so I had actually stumbled onto a bird termed “a rare and local migrant and breeder” by the Birds of Michigan field guide. The US Fish and Wildlife Service considers it a US migratory species of concern and has tagged the bird with endangered, threatened, or special-concern status in nine states. Fortunately the sedge wren’s situation in Michigan isn’t so dire, and I could rejoice at having heard it, even if I didn’t hold out much hope of eyeballing the hide-and-go-seek singer—at least not until Linda saved the day.
“I see him!” she said. “Look on those weeds over there. He has one foot on one stalk and the other little foot on the other, and now he’s singing!”
With some effort, I followed Linda’s wagging finger and the tick-tick-buzz until I managed to separate his brown, white, and buffy yellow body from the weeds. The trademarked upraised wren tail clinched it.
“I can’t believe we actually found a sedge wren,” I told her when we had finished gawking and listening. “Without you, I never would have seen it.”
Back at home, I took a few deep breaths, checked my punctuation and grammar, rechecked my punctuation and grammar, and then reported the sighting to the birding group. Within minutes I received three congratulatory messages—three more than I had ever received before—and I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
“What year was it when we saw that grosbeak at your cabin?”
“I don’t know, maybe 1987,” Linda said.
It had only taken twenty-some years of on-again, off-again interest for me to learn to find and identify birds, including the last decade in which I had applied myself to the hobby with unusual vigor. Finally I had made the grade, graduating from a C-plus-level birder to an indisputably solid B-minus.
Goal reached, I could now slack off.