Chapter Twelve
My excitement over discovering the sedge wren lasted over a week. I flipped through pictures of the bird in books and on the Web. I read accounts of its life, which turned out to be slim, since little is known about the habits of this secretive bird that almost literally flies under the radar. Not a single sedge wren that’s been caught and banded has ever been recaptured. Either the lifespan of the species is abruptly short, or the birds keep a stash of tools on hand for cutting off their leg bands.
At the same time that my sedge wren excitement was peaking, an opposing current pulled with equal vigor and eventually won out. It told me there were far more important things in life—such as making it through a day with all ten toes intact.
Linda’s parrot Dusty was enjoying his morning out-of-cage time playing inside the closet at the bottom of the stairs, indulging in a favorite activity of biting a pair of shoes. He paid no attention to me as I padded stocking-footed down the steps to warm up a cup of coffee. I should have known better than to underestimate such a calculating bird. When I reached the landing he whirled around and launched himself at my feet, forcing me to vault over the back of our L-shaped couch, coffee cup in hand. Having reasserted his status at the top of the pecking order, he turned his attention back to the closet.
Once I’d reached the safety of the kitchen, I thought, If I’m not chasing birds, I’m being chased by them.
When the microwave beeped and I racked my brain to decide what species the beep reminded me of, I brooded about the effect that birding was having on my life. At one time I had imagined that my ability to find and identify birds would add an extra dimension to my personality. But instead of feeling that birding had broadened me, I wondered if I had turned into the rail-thin victim of an obsession. Whenever I stepped outdoors I went on the alert. It didn’t matter whether I rushed out in the rain to retrieve the Grand Rapids Press or idled from the bunny display to the poultry building with Linda at the Kent County Youth Fair in Lowell. I was continually watching, listening, and sending out mental “bird-dar,” distracted from everything else.
I didn’t know whether to be happy or depressed that my coworkers thought of me as the bird guy. I was the person to ask about the “herring,” “wobbler,” or “crackle” they had seen, calling on me to attach a name to some impossible species of undetermined color and indeterminate size “with a perfect white rectangle on its back.” I didn’t feel this made me into David Attenborough. I was more like Wally Cox as Professor P. Caspar Biddle in “The Bird-Watchers” episode of The Beverly Hillbillies, and I fed into the stereotype by falling back on birds as a topic of conversation since I no longer had much to say about anything else.
Maybe I was being too hard on myself, since getting obsessed was the best way to learn about a subject. And talking about birds when I met new people was an improvement over mentioning the fact that I was an author within the first four minutes.
At least I had sense enough to hold back from expounding upon the sedge wren, which proved that I hadn’t completely slipped my moorings. I was simply following the strange path of the heart, and for reasons beyond my control it led me to a local sewage pond.
Caleb Putnam—the Michigan Important Bird Areas program coordinator for Audubon and discoverer of the myrtle warbler x Audubon’s warbler intergrade in my own yard—started an online birding group and invited me to join. Unlike Bruce Bowman’s Ann Arbor−based birders@great-lakes.net, which caters to all levels of birders throughout the state, Caleb’s Kent Listers Google group is more specialized. It’s for Kent County rarities only, and it excludes ho-hum rare birds like sedge wrens that are known to nest in the area. Instead the group focuses on out-of-place vagrants such as a large, long-billed shorebird called a whimbrel, discovered waddling in the grass alongside the runway at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport by Gus van Vliet.
Caleb asked the group members to contribute a list of the birds that each of us “needed” for Kent County. I decided not to contribute, since my list would have included all but a paltry few of the 914 species of wild birds that naturally occur in the United States and Canada. I wasn’t a county lister anyway, but I eagerly followed the reports, since any bird of interest to this elite group would be a to-die-for must-see species located within easy driving distance. Thanks to Caleb, I discovered that I no longer had to trek as far as the Muskegon Wastewater Treatment System to confuse myself with shorebirds. At a sewage pond in my own county I could gape at similar-looking species with barely a hope of telling them apart. It was like a dream come true.
I thought I’d died and gone to shorebird heaven when I stumbled upon a rare red-necked phalarope in Tawas City.
The only way I had learned to identify warblers was by exposing myself to oodles of them at Magee Marsh, and I hoped that the same method would work with sandpipers and plovers. How hard could it be? The difficulty level flattened me as I flipped through two field guides dedicated to shorebirds. Most spring warblers are starkly different from each other, and putting a name to them is a matter of remembering a few bold field marks. Not so with shorebirds. I struggled to tell a semipalmated sandpiper from a least sandpiper, a greater yellowlegs from a lesser yellowlegs, and almost any juvenile shorebird from the juvenile shorebird alongside it.
When I arrived at the Kent County sewage ponds, I came bolstered by two plans for getting the jump on the birds. Both plans revolved around my new Nikon DSLR camera. Plan one consisted of shooting hundreds of photos through my 70-300mm telephoto zoom lens of every bird nearby and poring over the pics with my field guides later. Plan two consisted of attaching my Nikon, with its 18-55mm non-telephoto zoom lens, to my spotting scope via a special swiveling bracket and shooting hundreds of stunning close-up photos of distant birds through the scope—along with any planets that were visible in the daytime. Then, in the privacy of my home, I’d identify the birds and planets later.
I noticed a couple of hitches in my strategy while trudging up the long and winding asphalt road to the first of two gates at the treatment system. Lugging a telescope, a pair of binoculars, a DSLR camera, and a heavy tripod didn’t harmonize with my chair-sitting lifestyle, and by the time I reached gate two, I was racking my brain for a plan three. Sweaty and borderline shaky, I unlatched the gate, gripping the tripod in front of me with both hands like a butter churn as I approached the pond. Once I had assembled my camera-telescope-tripod rig, it felt as clumsy and unbalanced as I did. No wonder most digiscopers who shoot photos through their spotting scopes use compact point-and-shoot cameras instead of clunky DSLRs.
Despite the trek, I liked the place at once. Not only was it closer than Muskegon Wastewater, but it was also much nicer—more like a park than a sewage treatment area, with expansive grassy areas and no discernible chemical smell. The grazing sheep made me a little nervous, though. As they lumbered slowly in my direction, I recalled a narrow escape from shirt-chewing sheep at a petting zoo in my youth and hoped that these hadn’t acquired a taste for optical equipment.
A pair of shorebirds pecked on the grassy pond perimeter. They looked clear, if tiny, through my binoculars, and under normal circumstances my scope would have revealed a wealth of nearly identical feather details between them. But I was peering into the scope through the viewfinder of my camera, and because my camera adapter bracket had broken its promise of accommodating a DSLR, I could only with trial and error roughly align the telescope eyepiece and camera lens. By then the shorebirds had tired of waiting for their photo opportunity and winged away with complaining peep-peep-peeps.
More birds materialized on the pond edges. Finding them was simply a matter of getting used to seeing them. Smaller and better camouflaged than I’d expected, they were easily concealed by weeds and grasses. None of them sported obviously unique plumage, and I couldn’t tell if I was observing more than one species or the same species over and over again. I eventually started noticing a few sparrow-size sandpipers with them, and they all appeared identical to one another. After shooting bursts of fuzzy, through-a-fishbowl photos with my ill-mated camera and telescope confabulation, I supplemented them with an equal number of distant but clearer pictures of specks with beaks using my camera and underpowered zoom.
Back at home, after studying the photos, I reached some solid conclusions. The large ones were definitely greater yellowlegs. Or lesser yellowlegs. Or solitary sandpipers. Or stilt sandpipers. Or possibly a few of each. I identified the tiny sandpipers sometimes known as “peeps” as least sandpipers, semipalmated sandpipers, or Baird’s sandpipers. None of them was a walrus. I knew that much.
I made an encore visit to the sewage ponds the following week, determined to puzzle out the identity of at least one species. Accomplishing that, I could establish how another species differed and then move on to the next. No magic happened as I stood in roughly the same spot as before and peered through binoculars, telescope, and camera. I hadn’t felt this clueless since my morel-hunting trip to Newaygo State Park with Linda an astonishing twenty years earlier. It seemed unfathomable that I had learned so little in two decades. I needed a mentor.
Right on cue, Caleb strode through the gate with his scope and tripod balanced on his shoulder as if the rig were no heavier than a pool cue. He was taller than I remembered—more weathered and tree-like owing to a job that demanded he subject himself to long hours of sunlight, rain, snow, cold, heat, humidity, mosquitoes, chiggers, ticks, biting flies, and ice pellets in marshes, dunes, grasslands, forests, and sewage ponds.
“Seeing anything interesting?” he asked.
“Lots of birds. But I don’t know what any of them are. I can’t tell a solitary from a yellowlegs.” I described my plan of photographing them for detailed analysis later.
In one fluid motion he whisked his spotting scope from his shoulder, extended and locked the tripod legs, popped the cover off the lens, adjusted the height to a comfortable viewing angle, and showed me a bird at dead-center in his eyepiece. “Let me walk you through it,” he said. “That’s a solitary sandpiper, and you might in some circumstances confuse it with a yellowlegs. Its back is darker. And notice the eye-ring? A solitary is noticeably smaller than a yellowlegs and usually by itself instead of in a group. Now let’s see what else we can find.”
As easily as folding up an umbrella, he collapsed his tripod and returned it to his shoulder while I struggled to get mine to fold. Giving up, I lifted it as it was, holding it beside me and trudging slowly to avoid tripping over the legs. As we approached the solitary, the bird flew off with a peet-weet-weet whistle, which Caleb imitated. When we came upon a couple of tiny “peeps” he told me, “Okay, there are only a couple of possibilities right now. The timing isn’t right for a Baird’s, so that basically leaves semipalmated and least. A semipalm wouldn’t have yellowish or greenish legs. Its legs are dark, so these are leasts.” He grinned at the kreet, kreet flight call as the sandpipers bailed on us. “Definitely leasts.”
Before my visits to the sewage ponds, the farthest I’d ever lugged my scope and tripod assembly was ten feet from the trunk of my car and back. I struggled to keep up with Caleb. Instead of following the perimeter of the pond, he took a few strides up an embankment and stopped. “The trick here is to pop your head up without flushing any birds in the grassy areas.” Just over the embankment lay a flooded field—then another embankment and another flooded field. I hadn’t realized that this large area even existed. “What I’m hoping for is a ruff. I know that may sound crazy, but the habitat is exactly right. It may take me ten or fifteen years, but I’m confident I’ll eventually find one.”
It only sounded crazy because I’d never even heard of this Eurasian wader, which according to the Michigan Bird Records Committee has only been recorded in Michigan a mere fifty-four times since 1959, and usually in lakeshore counties. Caleb’s hopes for a Kent County ruff didn’t cause me to suddenly think of him as any optimist, however. I already knew he was one from his attempt to teach me shorebirds.
He showed me a bird through his scope. “Hear that chu-chu-chu? That’s a lesser yellowlegs. The bill is about the same length as the depth of the head. A greater yellowlegs has a thicker bill that’s one-and-a-half times as deep as its head, and it’s slightly upturned, though you can’t always see that.”
With a clatter of wings, mixed flocks of birds lifted off the ground as we walked along the embankment. If the species were difficult for me to identify on the ground, I had no chance of parsing them while they were in motion and silhouetted against the sky. Even starlings, mourning doves, and killdeer turned into birds of mystery in the flapping chaos. Caleb had no trouble calling them out like an expert shooter taking down skeet.
“One spotted sandpiper, 6 solitaries, 9 leasts, 1 semipalm, probably 160 killdeer, 40 ring-billed gulls, 3 barn swallows, 200 starlings, 40 mallards—Canada geese, 10, 20, 30 . . . 150, I’d say, and a couple of mourning doves.”
The birds wheeled in a vast circle, touching back down behind us as we arrowed down the embankment toward the first pond. Caleb had seen something in the distance and was bringing it closer with his focus knob while I dithered with the telescoping legs of my tripod, which had slipped and failed to hold my telescope upright.
“It’s a dowitcher,” he said. “Short-billed juvenile.” Quicker than a sleight-of-hand trick, he attached his point-and-shoot camera to the eyepiece and blasted off a burst of photos. “This is a very good bird for Kent County. In fact, I need to call a friend of mine right now and tell him to get over here. I hate to bother him, because he’s babysitting and supposed to be making dinner, but he’s definitely going to want to see this. I’ll buy them all a pizza later.”
I felt modestly encouraged when I studied the short-billed dowitcher through my scope. It didn’t look like anything else, with the exception of the long-billed dowitcher, which is so similar that long- and short-billed dowitchers were considered to be a single species until 1950. I figured I’d recognize the bird if I ran into it again. It was larger and plumper and had a significantly longer bill than most other shorebirds I would find.
In fact, the following June, I shocked myself by discovering twelve short-billed dowitchers at the sewage pond. I managed to shoot decent photos of four of them and deliriously submitted my report to the Kent County Listers group.
At the present moment, though, I thought Caleb was merely expressing his usual optimism when he shook my hand before striding off and said, “It’s nice to have an extra set of eyes here.” He might have been referring to the sheep.
In my year of the dozen dowitchers, Bill Holm and I made our third annual May visit to Magee Marsh for the Biggest Week in American Birding event. Pulling into the park drive from State Road 2, we witnessed an unusual phenomenon.
“Why’s everybody leaving?” I asked.
“The Mayor of the Boardwalk has arrived.”
“And his birder-hating friend.”
Unlike on previous visits, no one stopped a car in the middle of the road to peer at a very important bird, backing up traffic in both directions. And for the first time ever, we managed to park in one of the coveted spaces directly opposite the portable toilets.
“Maybe there’s a monsoon on the way.”
“Somebody tweeted a report of a yellow-spotted cuckoo thrush at Metzger Marsh, and the birders believed it,” Bill said.
“That was you?”
We had in fact been keeping tabs on #thebiggestweek postings on Twitter for breaking reports, but these had become vanishingly few. Once we hit the boardwalk, we understood why. Not just the birders had gone AWOL. So had the birds. Instead of being greeted by a multilayered symphony of song, we found ourselves enveloped by the Cone of Silence.
As he bustled past us, a man in a Cape May Bird Observatory cap paused to grumble, “This is the worst spring migration in twenty years.”
“What happened?” Bill asked.
“I heard that the unseasonably cold weather in April is to blame. Instead of laying over in their usual spots, the birds are overshooting them and continuing north.”
We had no idea if this was true, but we definitely found slim pickings in the warbler department. People were snapping photos of yellow warblers, which usually wouldn’t have merited a glance. A far from uncommon Nashville warbler drew a crowd as it vacuumed up bugs from leaves. Even the lowly house wren earned attention. Further down the boardwalk, we gravitated toward a bubble of spectators, only to discover that they had been catapulted into delirium by a turtle.
The lack of warblers had an unexpected upside, which Bill brought to my attention. “Have you noticed how nice everybody is? The people who stayed behind are all in a good mood and grateful to be seeing anything at all. The birders are actually laughing and having a great time. They’re not sour and serious like the typical Biggest Week crowd.”
I immediately started searching the underbrush for a Connecticut warbler or another rarity. With Bill suddenly extolling the virtues of birders, anything seemed possible.
Improbabilities multiplied in August when I hit Tawas City on Lake Huron hoping to shore up my miserable shorebird identification skills. I had limped west from the Saginaw area after taking the Wildlife Drive auto tour at Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, wounded from having failed to identify wader after wader that populated the numerous ponds. They all looked like solitary sandpipers/greater/lesser yellowlegs to me, indicating that I hadn’t processed Caleb’s crash course from the previous year.
I made a disappointing stop at Nayanquing Point Wildlife Center en route to Tawas City, finding it both too wet and not wet enough to harbor shorebirds. The lagoon at the end of Tower Beach Road was too deep, while the surrounding fields were dried up. Adding insult to injury, every single flashy male yellow-headed blackbird had apparently streamed out of Nayanquing upon learning I was on my way.
Arriving at Tawas City around 4:00 p.m., I decided to wait until the next morning to misidentify shorebirds at Tawas Point State Park. I checked into the North Star Motel, tumbled into a short but deep nap, and then sauntered out to the pool area to admire a statue of a polar bear wearing an Uncle Sam hat and vest. The North Star Motel was my kind of place. The abnormally tall bear reminded me to investigate a children’s slide shaped like a huge gull that I had seen less than a mile away on US-23. Reasoning that exotic gulls might fly in to worship the slide as a god, I made the short drive to Gateway Park.
A young mother pushed her child on a swing as I shot photos of four ring-billed gulls camping out in the shadow of the slide. Walking through weeds down to the beach, I found foraging peeps, which I knew to be least sandpipers by their greenish legs, and—miracle of miracles—I got close enough to a couple of birds to be able to confidently call them lesser yellowlegs with a chu-chu.
Then I died and went to shorebird heaven, as I assume all birders eventually will. A few feet from shore, a tiny white bird with a black-and-brown streaked back, sooty black cap, and black smudge behind the eye rode the lapping waves. Although only about the size of a sparrow, he appeared as much at ease in vast Lake Huron as the fattest walleye as he swam and spun, dipping his beak for food. The paleness, the delicacy, the elegance, and the downright cuteness knifed through my heart. A chorus of angels could have been belting out “Ode to Joy” overhead, and I wouldn’t have heard a thing. My bird bliss overwhelmed me.
Even though I had never seen a juvenile red-necked phalarope before, I recognized him from having paged forward, backward, and sideways through the shorebird section of my field guides. If I had been in doubt, I could have almost bent down and picked him up. He seemed more concerned about maintaining his bearings in the surf than paying attention to a gawky, gawking hominid—assuming he knew what I was. Red-necked phalaropes nest far north in the Arctic where they aren’t likely to come into contact with humans or birders and may genially allow a close approach during migration. They spend their winters in the Southern Hemisphere, as I have longed to do, and visit Michigan infrequently enough that the bird is considered a rarity.
I watched and watched and watched and watched and watched and watched and watched him swim until we were the only two creatures that existed in the world—except for the least sandpipers that paced back and forth in front of the phalarope’s small stretch of beach and the yellowlegs, whose spindly legs and beaks demanded attention. Only for the thousandth time I wondered how, with so many other places where the phalarope and I might have been, we ended up here, together, at this particular time and place, out of all the gin joints in the world.
Nervous with excitement, I took a break and decompressed at the North Star Motel for about an hour. My head cleared as I sank into the chair next to the bed. Using my iPod I reported the bird to Mich-listers@envirolink.org, a statewide Michigan mailing list for rarities, in hopes that someone else would get a chance to see him.
After I felt calmer I returned to Gateway Park to spend a few more minutes with the swimmer/spinner. I photographed a medium-size gull, the sandpipers and yellowlegs, a miniature version of a killdeer that turned out to be a semipalmated plover, and the phalarope. I hated leaving him behind. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I could just make out a white dot riding the surf. I bade him and an amazing day farewell, heading to Big Boy for a Slim Jim® sandwich, an order of French fries, coleslaw, and a Coke.
The next morning I experienced an unexpected feeling of relief when I couldn’t find him. The responsibility of being the sole witness to a bird of such delicate beauty would have weighed too heavily on me two days in a row. At Tawas Point State Park, while walking the Sandy Hook Trail, I ran into a woman with a scope who kindly pointed out least, stilt, semipalmated, pectoral, spotted, and Baird’s sandpipers, plus a trio of American golden-plovers. Another birder joined us as she was showing me a black tern.
“Did either of you see the red-necked phalarope?” he asked.
“Not today, but I saw him yesterday,” I said. “Where was he?”
“On the beach south of town. I was an hour away in Gladwin, but when I read the post I rushed over and he was still there around eight o’clock. He flew off before I left.”
I couldn’t resist telling him that I was the person who had reported the bird. He thanked me and shook my hand. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
I sorted through my photos when I got home. I plastered my Facebook page with the better ones and was about to add what I figured was a shot of a juvenile Bonaparte’s gull, but the bill shape didn’t seem right. I posted it to the Facebook Bird ID Group of the World and instead of getting an immediate ID, an expert directed my attention to the eye-ring that didn’t completely ring the eye. Using this and other hints, he guided me to identify it as a juvenile Franklin’s gull.
I emailed the photo to Caleb, and he concurred. “Wow, juvenile Franklin’s Gull! Excellent find, Bob, quite rare . . . I’ve found this species in Michigan only two or three times. Congrats!”
I had to pinch myself. After I submitted my Gateway Park report to eBird, Caleb forwarded an email from Joe Soehnel, administrator of the Saginaw Bay Area Birding and Birding Trail website (saginawbaybirding.org). Joe asked Caleb, “Could you give me Bob Tarte’s email address? I’d like to get his permission for the Franklin’s Gull pic and to see if he got one of the Red-necked Phalarope from the other day. He’s cashing in pretty well up there.”
I had written a music column for the Los Angeles−based magazine The Beat for twenty years. One of my three books about our pets had become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. But nothing had ever made me prouder than seeing my bird photos on the cover page of the Saginaw Bay Area Birding website. For the briefest of fleeting moments, I had somehow managed to achieve a narrow sliver of greatness as a birder.
One final thing needed doing. With my new six-hundred-dollar pair of binoculars and fifty-some years of life experience, including twenty-some years devoted to some degree of birding, I returned to Aberdeen Park to search for birds behind the tennis courts—just as I had done back in 1962 when I was nine years old. I figured I’d cash in pretty well, just like in Tawas City.
Less impressive than what had changed—new fences around the tennis courts and fences removed from the playground across the street—was how much had stayed the same. The tennis court nets, which had probably last been replaced in the 1980s, appeared as bedraggled as the originals had looked to me as a child. I expected to find the twenty-first-century equivalent of a pseudo surfer dude aggressively slamming balls against the backboard, but the backboard had disappeared. In its place stood a brown metal utility building, which had already deteriorated enough to assume an air of antiquity.
The area behind the tennis courts had seemed like a small wilderness to me as a kid. It had changed more than any other part of the park. Someone had yanked out the wiry bushes and scrubby trees and leveled the undulating slope to ruler-flat blandness. It just about broke my heart. Standing behind the east end of the courts, I could see all the way to the west end as if staring down an alley. As I trudged along the path, I couldn’t find a trace of human passage—not a single footprint or a Kit-Kat wrapper livened up the space. No one apparently used the path as a shortcut anymore or played behind the fence. Why would they, when not a single stick of scenery survived to fire up the imagination? It had all been fed into a wood chipper.
Keeping my ears peeled for birds, I heard a tut-tut call from somebody’s backyard, a few sharp chirps, and finally a complaining squawk, and none of that came from me. So much for my impressive birding skills.
After I hauled myself back into the car, I glanced around hoping to find some small way in which the park had changed for the better compared to my memories from childhood. I only saw signs of aging and diminishment. Then, from a tree on the turnaround, the exuberant tootling of a house finch erupted—a bird that hadn’t existed in Michigan when I was growing up. Cheered, I fished out a scrap of paper from my glove compartment and tallied up my report: “American robin. Blue jay. House sparrow. House finch.” Not much of a list, but it was still four more species than I’d found as a nine-year-old. Take that, Terry Gray and Joan.
Now I could now head home and comb my hair like a surfer if I wanted to. As long as Linda gave the okay, of course.