Chapter Two
Living in downtown Grand Rapids, I got tired of people breaking into my car. I could have understood the attraction if I’d owned a Lexus, Caddy, or even a vehicle that still had a rearview mirror. But the thieves weren’t choosy about my crummy Tercel and absconded with such treasures as a stick-on dashboard clock that my father had received with his subscription to Time magazine, a notebook for recording mostly fabricated business mileage, and bright red plastic sunglasses, which I only wore to annoy family members.
As a result of the crime wave, I decided to move out of my neighborhood and buy a house. And because Linda had said yes when I asked her to marry me, I nixed the idea of living in the city or suburbs. I made up my mind to take the plunge and move out into the country, though not as much of a lover’s leap as moving to Linda’s little two-room cabin, which barely gave us room to turn around without smashing into one another. And where would all of the pets live that she was already threatening to bring home? Instead we looked at three houses in the country, all of which happened to be nearly the same shade of blue. The first house had a half-demolished basement wall with some massive, archaic machine lurking behind it. We crossed it off our list. The second house was downwind of a leather tannery. We crossed it off our list while plugging our noses. The third house was too close to a busy road. We loved it and bought it anyway.
The charming little one-hundred-year-old farmhouse a few miles outside of Grand Rapids sat on three and a half wooded acres near a big red barn that yearned to be filled with household junk and poultry. The Grand River puttered past the far side of the property. Just visible through the trees, our one and only neighbor’s house linked us to civilization. We would later discover the added perks of spring flooding and clouds of mosquitoes in the summer.
At a wild bird supplies store I bought a feeder and asked, “What kind of seed do you have that will attract exotic species?”
The clerk sold me black oil sunflower seed and said, “Don’t expect ostriches.”
I was thinking more along the lines of rose-breasted grosbeaks. In hopes of seeing them better if and when they arrived, I bought a thirty-nine-dollar pair of impressively unwieldy binoculars. The packaging boasted “ruby red coated lenses,” and when using them in daylight I was as conspicuous as a police cruiser with its flashers on. I set the binoculars on the dining room table for ready access whenever a bird landed on the feeder. But they wouldn’t focus closer than fifteen feet and were useless for feeder watching unless I retreated into the kitchen and leaned back against the counter.
The feeder hung birdless for several days. Then the diners started to arrive. The yellow-and-black American goldfinches came first. I had no trouble recalling them from Linda’s cabin, but she had to remind me how to distinguish a titmouse from a chickadee or nuthatch. I also had trouble telling two woodpeckers apart unless a big hairy deal of a hairy woodpecker hit the feeder at the same time as a comparatively downsized downy woodpecker. However, the red-bellied woodpecker with its crimson head stripe was as unmistakable as a guy using binoculars with ruby red coated lens.
Next I chalked up the house finch, an otherwise dull streaky brown bird whose breast seemed to have been dipped in raspberry juice. I probably would have been more impressed by the house finch had I known that it didn’t even exist in Michigan when I was growing up. According to author Jim Granlund in Birds of Michigan, the first reported sighting of a house finch in Michigan was in Berrien Springs on February 13, 1972. It had taken the species over thirty years to get here from New York State after breeders released their stock of house finches in 1940 following a government crackdown on illegally kept wild birds. The freed finches multiplied and spread from coast to coast, far expanding their range from their original digs in the southwestern United States.
On the ground beneath the house finch, a male cardinal pecked at fallen seed. He was significantly more spectacularly red than the house finch, but I barely noticed him. I had been seeing cardinals ever since I’d been old enough to look out a window, and I assumed that the species had been here since the Ice Age. But like the house finch, the cardinal was a relative newcomer. In the 1912 edition of his book Michigan Bird Life, Walter Bradford Barrows says, “The Cardinal appears to be a rather rare species [in Michigan], mainly confined to the southern half of the Lower Peninsula.” It wasn’t recorded in Ingham County (where state capital Lansing is located) until 1899. You can barely miss seeing one in Michigan today.
White-throated sparrow “Little Buddy” kept us company through a miserable Michigan winter.
But I was waiting for a different bird. A few days later it showed up while I was changing the water bottle in the dining room for Linda’s rabbit, Binky. I goggled, ogled, and gasped as a male grosbeak lit upon the feeder. Unlike the chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches that ran hit-and-run seed raids, the grosbeak stayed put, giving me time to study him as he shucked and chewed. His blacks seemed blacker, his whites whiter, and his red bib even more vividly red than the grosbeak I’d seen at Linda’s cabin—probably because I considered this one to be “my” grosbeak. When he stretched his neck forward, his big beak completed the downward curve of his forehead in an elegant, streamlined fashion. Everything about him was beautiful.
What could possibly top this? I asked myself the third time he came around.
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. Within a week I started getting fidgety for the next magnificent species. I paged through the Audubon Field Guide wondering what kind of bird I might reasonably expect, but I had no more of a clue how to use it than I’d had with The Green Book. I hadn’t discovered the hidden-in-plain-sight range maps yet, and as I flipped through the scads of photo pages over and over again, the white pelican was clearly laughing at me. I checked the feeder through the dining room window, willing Mr. Brand-New Pretty Bird to fly in. On my way to and from the car, I scanned the trees and bushes around the house. There had to be something shockingly, excitingly new, but only the usual suspects dropped in. Within a week, my discouragement turned into irritation.
“I can’t believe it,” I told Linda. “We’ve only lived here a month, and we’ve already seen all of the birds.”
I wasn’t incapable of reasoning out the fact that I might discover birds along the river that I wouldn’t find in our immediate yard. Even I wasn’t quite so simple. I knew that the kingfisher I’d seen working the pond behind Linda’s cabin wasn’t about to give up minnows for sun-flower seed and that a mallard wouldn’t install itself in our birdbath. But going out into the woods to search for birds was such an alien and borderline uncomfortable concept that I never even considered doing it. To my mind, birds were animated yard ornaments whose most important function was to beautify the space around our house. I wouldn’t view them differently until I started living with parrots, doves, parakeets, canaries, ducks, geese, and chickens and discovered that each bird had its own unique personality.
Meanwhile, in an adult reprise of the tennis court incident, I swept our thirty-nine-dollar binoculars and Audubon Field Guide off the dining room table and gave up birding all over again. There wasn’t anything to see.
It takes a special kind of person to go to one of the top birding spots in North America and refuse to look at birds. I was that special person. The trip to Ontario had been my idea, but stopping at Point Pelee National Park hadn’t been on the itinerary.
Toronto was our destination. I had enjoyed visiting Toronto ever since my parents took our family there for a vacation during my high school days. After living in our new house a year, I needed a break from the rural grind and talked Linda into going partly by bragging up the Henry Moore sculpture collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Linda had attended Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids and loved museums. When I told her about Toronto’s Chinatown, that clinched the deal.
The trip turned out to be a disaster. Linda had seldom been out of Michigan and had never spent time in a big city. Downtown Toronto’s crowded, closed-in atmosphere and the general lack of wooded ponds made her nervous.
“It’ll be better once we start doing things,” I said with misplaced optimism. “You’ll love taking a streetcar to the art museum.” But the lurching start-stop motion drained the blood from her face as the vehicle dropped off and picked up passengers. “They had a van Gogh show the last time I was in town,” I said to cheer her up once we were back on solid ground. “It might have been a pain getting here, but this place is worth the whole trip.” I was probably right, but we would never know. A wooden sign barricading the entrance informed us that the Art Gallery of Ontario was closed for renovation.
We stayed away from streetcars the next day and took the smooth-running subway to the Royal Ontario Museum. Linda seemed absorbed in the ride, and I congratulated myself for knowing enough about the city to whisk us to our destination by train. Then as we stepped out onto the platform, she sprinted to the nearest trash receptacle and threw up. I didn’t want to jinx our afternoon by mentioning the splendors of natural history in store for us, but the museum might as well have been closed for all of the good we got out of it. Half the population of Canada had turned out. We couldn’t see the huge slabs of dinosaur fossils any better than we could see the tiny Amazonian frogs. After admiring the backs of people’s heads for two hours, we called it quits.
In the morning, we called Toronto quits, too. Linda had been having panic attacks in the middle of the night. She tipped me off by pacing back and forth in our hotel room and repeating the telling phrase, “I’ve got to get out of here.” When I switched on the lights, she told me, “I need to be able to just walk out into a yard.”
“That’s pretty hard when you’re on the ninth floor.”
“That’s the problem. It’s way too claustrophobic.”
We didn’t want to return home immediately and put an end to our one and only vacation of the year. So we meandered along two-lane roads searching for rural attractions. When we ran into a string of tobacco-drying barns near Tilsonburg, I checked the map to assure myself that we hadn’t somehow veered too far south and ended up in Tennessee. By the time we got to Leamington, the crop of choice had switched to tomatoes. The clerk at our motel told us that the area was located in a microclimate zone and had the second warmest temperatures in all of Canada. That shocked me, since we weren’t much farther south than Grand Rapids with its notoriously long winters, short growing season, and almost total lack of sunlight.
“Most people come to Leamington because they have business at the Heinz factory or they want to see birds,” the clerk said. We didn’t have pressing tomato-related business, so she gave us directions to Point Pelee, a small national park that’s hosted around 360 bird species over the years—342 more species than I had ever seen.
Linda wanted to go. From years of living in the woods, she loved birds, but not necessarily more than she loved anything in nature, from wildflowers to snapping turtles. If Point Pelee had been a porcupine sanctuary, her enthusiasm wouldn’t have been diminished. I didn’t care one way or the other. But I liked the shape of the park on the map. The peninsula came to a wickedly sharp point, and I wanted to see for myself if it narrowed down to a single grain of sand. Birds approved of the shape, too. Birds often follow geographical features like rivers and coastlines when they migrate, and a peninsula that juts five miles into Lake Erie makes a handy stopping-off point for rest and vittles when crossing the lake.
At the Point Pelee visitors center, I was delighted to discover that we could take a shuttle to “the tip” instead of having to trudge one and a quarter miles out in nature. About a dozen people shared the ride with us. Most were odd ducks wearing army-green vests decked out with colorful patches and either carrying binoculars or clutching tripods with small telescopes. I had never visited a birding hotspot before, and when we stepped off the bus I expected to run into something like the intense activity around our feeder, only on a massive scale. But as Linda and I headed toward the beach and our shuttle-mates lagged behind to squint at the greenery, my slim hopes of finding vast clouds of songbirds evaporated. I decided that the park’s reputation was seriously overrated.
We took the West Beach Footpath to within a tomato’s toss of the absolute tip of the point. The thin spit of land barely wider than a grocery store aisle delighted me until my shoes began getting wet. We turned around and squished back in the direction of the shuttle parking lot, passing birders in twos and threes. They were too focused on their optical devices to respond to Linda’s greetings until a group of five green vests absorbed her as I strode past. I glanced back to see her in animated conversation, which was her usual state of being whenever she ran into strangers.
“They’re seeing warblers, sweetie!” she called to me.
I looked up at the leafy branch that the people were pointing at. Nothing of interest jumped out at me. “We don’t want to miss the shuttle and have to walk all the way,” I said. I was crabby about having to leave Toronto early and felt more like the frustrated tennis player than nine-year-old birding Bob.
“They’ll wait,” said a woman in a dark blue cap. “They won’t drive an empty bus back.”
“Don’t you want to see a black-and-white warbler?” Linda asked, passing me the woman’s binoculars.
I couldn’t refuse without appearing to be the sullen, self-centered spoilsport that I was, so I took the glasses and managed to locate a black-and-white bird skittering up the trunk of a sugar maple. Before I could take two seconds to convince myself it wasn’t a downy woodpecker, it flew away.
“Thanks,” I said in a tone of voice that meant goodbye as I handed the binoculars back to their owner. But Linda didn’t budge.
I took a second look at the maple, shielding my eyes and trying to locate the source of a brief exuberant song. Concentrating on a movement in the leaves, I caught a flash of yellow that vanished instantly. “There’s a magnolia warbler in the low branches and a chestnut-sided up in the canopy,” Linda said, repeating what the Blue Cap had told her. So this is birding, I thought as I strained my eyes to pick out tiny, darting, distant, indistinct shapes. Only a nitpicker could possibly enjoy such an exercise in frustration.
“Do you want to see?” Linda offered me the binoculars.
I shook my head and edged away. Eventually my toe scuffing, wristwatch checking, and theatrical sighing pried her loose from the green vests.
We had the shuttle to ourselves as we rode back to the visitors center. Just inside the entrance was a logbook for recording birds that we had seen. “Nice beach,” I wrote next to my name and address.
I hadn’t really lost interest in birds. In fact, I found myself becoming increasingly involved with them—though not with the outdoor variety. Our dining room was filling up with birdcages. It started when Linda bought me a ring-necked dove named Howard for our first wedding anniversary. The gift perplexed me at first, but I quickly became attached to the goofy fellow, whose cousins undoubtedly moved gracefully under an open sky, while he hopped and plodded from place-to-place indoors. Chester the canary arrived as a birthday gift, and parakeets Reggie and Rossy soon followed. Living with them not only enhanced our love of all birds but also provided crucial experience that would come in handy a few years later when Linda began raising and releasing orphan songbirds for Wildlife Rehab Center in Grand Rapids.
I had expected pet birds to be colorless characters, but they dazzled us with their extroverted personalities. Chester would flare up in ecstatic song that was ear-splitting up close. He considered the whine of the vacuum cleaner to be a high-decibel challenge from a rival and tried to drown it out. Reggie enjoyed nothing better than lecturing his cage-mate, Rossy, and if she ignored him he would chatter to his toy bell instead. Howard was the clown of the group, flapping noisily in pursuit of the nimble parakeets. When he eventually caught up, he bowed and cooed in a display of supposed dominance. His posturing inexplicably appealed to Reggie. For reasons known only to himself, the little blue budgie had romantic feelings toward the dove and even tried to mate with him.
These things surprised us. But nothing that a pet bird did actually startled us until we bought a bright green “pocket parrot” named Ollie—a stubby-tailed, orange-chinned Brotogeris jugularis parakeet—which a pet shop employee claimed was a peach faced lovebird. We learned later that the store owner had gone to a bird show and left Ollie behind due to his penchant for biting, which he shared with me at the shop when I tried to pick him up. We should have known better than to buy a bird that lacerated my skin mere moments into our relationship, but he immediately apologized with a series of self-deprecating chirps that were as impossible to resist as an ultramarine Volkswagen Beetle.
We had never imagined that any bird was capable of the exuberance that Ollie demonstrated. It bordered on mania. His constant squawking for attention and abrupt mood shifts from cooing baby to leather punch began to wear us down. The last straw came at dinner during his third day with us. The clerk who sold us Ollie told us to feed him “monkey chow” soaked in water, because it contained the protein that he needed. That evening when we presented the concoction to Ollie, he sat on the countertop happily eating alongside us. When he’d had enough, he punctuated the fact by flinging his dish onto the table, dousing us in soggy kibble.
“Do we really want a bird like this?” I asked.
“He’s like a crabby little man in a bird suit,” Linda said.
The next day I took him back to the store. Instead of feeling liberated by the loss of our tormenter, we couldn’t stand the shroud of quiet that had fallen over the house. “I miss him,” I blubbered at breakfast. I shot back to the pet store after work and retrieved him, much to the delight of the store owner, who had probably decided that she was doomed to endlessly selling him and taking him back. We made huge mental adjustments to accommodate him. Hardly a day passed that I didn’t hear Linda yelp as he nailed her with his beak when I wasn’t suffering the same fate myself. But I rarely found myself in a mood so dark that it couldn’t be brightened by his incandescent personality, and we learned to take the better with the biter.
Ollie was constantly torn between reaping the benefits of getting along with us and aggressively installing himself at the top of the household pecking order. He loved oatmeal raisin cookies, but when presented with a morsel, he couldn’t decide whether to take the treat or chomp the hand that fed him. When I was young, my dad had complained about the starlings and grackles that swooped down upon our lawn to peck for insects. I imagined growing up in Central America and having a flock of boisterous orange chins like Ollie descend upon us instead. What if we were caught outdoors without cookies to bribe them with?
If we had lived 150 years earlier, my dad might have griped about the Carolina parakeet. America’s only native parrot bore some similarities to Ollie and may have ranged as far north as southern Michigan. Flocks of them looted farmers’ fields after the parakeets’ beloved swamps had been drained and their favorite forests cleared to create open land for planting crops. Loss of habitat, slaughter by avenging farmers, and a flourishing feather trade for the ladies’ hat industry doomed the bird by the middle of the nineteenth century. The Cincinnati Zoo possessed a mated pair of Carolina parakeets until 1917, when female parakeet Lady Jane died. Remarkably, the idea never seemed to have occurred to zoo officials—or to other individuals and institutions that still owned these birds in the early 1900s—that it might be nice to save the species via a breeding program. Maybe their caretakers had been bitten too often.
One afternoon as I was putting groceries away, for the very first time Ollie caught a glimpse of a new package of his beloved cookies. Even though they were stacked sideways in rows and he could only see the edges though the printed wrapper, he recognized them and paced back and forth on his perch making chuck-chuck “I want” sounds. This small feat impressed me. And it made me wonder if Howard didn’t also possess more smarts than I had given him credit for. That evening as he was perched on the lamp above the dining room table, I told him, “Howard, time to go back.” I didn’t so much as even glance in the direction of his cage. He flew inside without hesitation. I never looked at mourning doves or pigeons the same way after that.
It took a deep-thinking African grey parrot to change my attitude about birds. Stanley Sue came to us as a male named Stanley from a nurse who was moving out of state. When a DNA test revealed Stanley’s true gender, I borrowed the “Sue” from Linda’s middle name.
Stanley Sue amazed us by being as shy as Ollie was bold. Adding a new perch to her cage meant first placing it on a table so that she could get used to seeing such a scary object without panicking. Then we put it unobtrusively at the bottom of her cage. Over a couple of weeks, we raised it slowly to the level of her other perch. Even then, she refused to set foot on it for months, climbing the bars to move around it instead.
She disappointed me in the beginning because she didn’t talk as promised. But she was an expert at mimicking sounds, and this talent gave us a window into her impressive brain. Not only could she do a perfect imitation of our squeaky oven door, but she would do so as soon as Linda’s fingers touched the handle—demonstrating that she associated the sound with the appropriate object. She went much further by producing the squeak when I grabbed the knob of the basement door. I thought she had made a mistake at first. Then I realized that she had correctly transferred the concept of “the thing that opens” from oven door to full-size door.
She also understood expressions of affection directed toward other creatures, including my wife. As Linda sat on my lap after dinner, we laughed as Stanley Sue made smacking sounds. “I can kiss my sweetie if I want to,” I told her. A few days later, she repeated the imitation as I cuddled our little black bunny, Rollo. That was impressive enough, but later she mocked me with the kissing noise as I bent over Rollo’s cage and said to him, “You’re such a cutie-wootie.”
More than any of our pets, Stanley Sue eroded my long-held feeling of separateness from birds and my diminution of them as “one-note” beings. When she sat on the arm of the dining room chair, I’d pet her head and get lost in whichever golden eye she turned toward me. She even changed my view of our pet ducks, whom I had considered to be the simpletons of the avian world. But they proved me wrong. Each evening, I would go out to their pen behind the barn, slosh the water out of their two wading pools with a push broom, and then shoo them inside for table scrap treats. After watching me a few times, they waited until I emptied the second pool, then filed inside on their own to await their cooked veggies. They had been watching, learning from my behavior, and remembering the pattern from night to night.
Like all of our pets, the ducks had mastered the intricacies of living captive lives. Wild birds faced much greater challenges. In the blink of an eye and the flicker of a wing, they had to make decisions that could determine whether they made it to their next meal or became somebody’s meal. Far from depending solely on hard-wired instinct, as I’d assumed, they used their wits as much as people did to make it through a day.
Observing our birds also keyed me in on a simple yet far-reaching truth that would eventually help me identify wild birds. Behavior often provided a vital clue for determining the species of a bird. Under poor lighting conditions, the best way to tell a hermit thrush from a wood thrush is the hermit thrush’s habit of pumping its tail up and down when perched. When searching a mudflat for food, a least sandpiper prefers to keep its feet dry while a similar-looking semi-palmated sandpiper will happily slosh around in the water. Different species acted differently. And I had the differences between finger-puncturing Ollie and retiring Stanley Sue to thank for helping to drive this point home.
As engaging as our pet birds were, it took an outdoor bird to cheer us up during a nasty winter. Linda shocked me with the news that the small flock of birds hanging out in our spirea bush and seemingly impervious to the blasting cold were American tree sparrows. I was unable to tell them apart from any other streaky-backed “little brown job” and couldn’t figure out how she had worked the trick. “They’re the only sparrow we get with a black smudge like that on the chest, and they don’t come except during winter,” she said. Her expertise dumbfounded me, and when she explained that she had found the bird in the Audubon guide while living at her cabin, my admiration multiplied.
Huddled with the tree sparrows was another obvious sparrow that stood out from any others I’d seen because of his white throat—an obvious tip-off to his identity. The pudgy little fellow also sported a white racing stripe just above the eye along with a bright little dab of yellow just above his beak on the stripe.
“That’s one of the birds on our clock,” Linda said—the clock my friend Bill Holm had given us as a housewarming gift. Instead of chiming the hour, it belted out the song of whichever bird the hour hand pointed to. “It’s a white-throated sparrow.”
“Only six hours, thirty-seven minutes until we find out what it sounds like.”
Through howling winds and blowing snow, under gloomy skies, and in subzero temperatures, our sparrow—dubbed Little Buddy by Linda—made like the legendary mailman and never shirked his duty, and his duty seemed to be to bring us joy. More active than the tree sparrows, possibly because he should have high-tailed it a few hundred miles south with the other white-throated sparrows, he delighted us by unexpectedly popping up all over the yard.
“I saw Little Buddy twice this morning!” Linda told me when I came home from work. “Once in a bush next to the barn and once on the brush pile behind the fence.”
My response to this good news was to sulk. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of days. When I eventually found him scratching in the snow underneath the bird feeder, I actually became motivated to undertake the small amount of labor required to scrape the patch down to the ground and sprinkle it with sunflower seeds. The cardinals, blue jays, tufted titmice, and other winter birds enjoyed the dining spot so much that from that day on shoveling the snow beneath the feeder took priority over keeping the walkways clear.
Near the end of February, we heard a song that contrasted with the music-box tinkling of the tree sparrows. It attempted to carry a melody but fell short of pulling it off. “Didn’t that sound sort of like our clock?”
Linda shushed me. Whispering as if Little Buddy might be able to hear, she said, “It’s you-know-who, and he can’t seem to get the tune quite right.”
The lilting song of the white-throated sparrow is represented in field guides as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” or “Oh, Canada, Canada, Canada.” Little Buddy’s Sam Peabody had turned too old to carry a tune, and his ode to Canada never made it to the border. He practiced his song from the spirea, but he never seemed to come up with the right notes. Appropriately, he kept the volume low.
“Maybe he got left behind by his flock because he never learned the whole song,” Linda suggested, wincing as he wandered perilously off-key before truncating his effort. “Is there some way we could let him hear the clock?”
When March arrived and his hormones began their seasonal surge, he suddenly found his voice. He saluted Canada with a voice worthy of Gordon Lightfoot and made any member of the Peabody family within hearing distance proud. We stopped seeing him in mid-April. He presumably headed north to his breeding grounds, though he may have traveled east to the Carnegie Hall audience that he now deserved. We missed the cheer he’d brought us—though another peak experience with birds quickly approached.
On Saturday, May 17, 1997, after eight happy years of marriage and zero years of birding, Linda and I blundered into one of the largest concentrations of migrating warblers in the country. It changed my life.
Less life changing was our intended destination: the Toledo Museum of Art. As we rolled into the parking lot at 3:15 p.m. on Friday, I discovered that that the facility had conspired with the Art Gallery of Ontario and decided to shut its doors at 4:00 pm. Freeway construction snarls had delayed our entrance into the city by over an hour—so, no masterpieces for us.
“Why don’t we go to Cleveland and see the zoo tomorrow?” Linda suggested after I had finished banging my fists against the steering wheel.
I was all for leaving Toledo, if we could. Since we wanted to get within shooting distance of the animals before May 17, 1998, we ditched the interstate and crawled east on State Route 2. I worried that I was suffering from traffic fatigue when we hit the countryside and I spotted a huge white bird perched on the roof of a tidy gray cottage. Linda pointed out two more of them standing motionless in a ditch on the side of the road. “They’re egrets,” she said. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”
Although I rarely knew what day of the week it was, I vividly recalled an episode of the television series Lassie called “The Egret” that I hadn’t seen since I was five years old in 1958. While out with the Audubon Junior Bird Club, Timmy finds an American egret (now known as the great egret) and reports it to his birdwatcher teacher. The appropriately named Mr. Bins (slang for binoculars) doubts him. “There hasn’t been an egret seen in these parts for over twenty years,” he says. Lassie eventually exonerates Timmy by leading them to the bird.
While enveloped in my rerun reverie, I obeyed Linda’s instructions and followed the car ahead of us into Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. Linda’s back had tightened up from sitting in the car—a consequence of years of hard work as a professional housecleaner—and she needed to take a walk. I studied the map after we had parked. In one of life’s little ironies we were almost directly across Lake Erie from Point Pelee. As we followed a path along the wooded wetlands, I was less impressed by the egrets and great blue herons that popped up than by the morel mushrooms Linda plucked from the trailside. On our way back, she ran into a park ranger who told us that a migrating Kirtland’s warbler had been found next door at Magee Marsh.
I was glad we were headed for Cleveland. Looking for the warbler sounded boring.
I knew that Kirtland’s warblers were rare, but that was all I knew about them. To start with, I had no idea that their numbers were so small. Only about twelve hundred singing males existed in the entire world back in 1997. “Kirtland’s warblers are persnickety creatures,” Bill Rapai told me recently. And he should know, because he wrote the amazing book The Kirtland’s Warbler: The Story of a Bird’s Fight against Extinction and the People Who Saved It. “Because they nest on the ground, they want sandy soil that will drain water quickly. They also want to build their nests under the overlapping branches of young jack pine trees to give them protection from predators.” No other tree will do. The warblers insist upon jack pines.
Bill told me that even though jack pines grow all across North America, the crucial combination of jack pines and sandy soil is limited to a small area ranging across Ontario, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Even more limited is the number of jack pines between seven and twenty years old. The warblers turn up their beaks at older or younger trees. “That shortage of habitat means that the population of the Kirtland’s warbler will always be small,” he said.
To provide these conditions in Michigan, where most of the breeding birds hang out, the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) manages nesting grounds though fire, clear-cutting, replanting, and reseeding. But the warblers have another big problem—brown-headed cowbird neighbors who don’t bother building nests of their own. They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. A baby cowbird, which dwarfs a Kirtland’s tot, will hog the food and shove the little ones out of the nest. To restore a sense of fairness to the jack pines, the DNR sets up traps to catch the meddlers—thus preventing the warbler from going the way of the Carolina parakeet.
The first person to identify the threat to the Kirtland’s warbler from the cowbird was amateur ornithologist Nathan Leopold. In October 1923, at the tender age of twenty, he presented an important paper to the American Ornithological Union on the subject. Less than a year later he would achieve a different type of fame. He became one of the most infamous murderers of the twentieth century. His name would be irrevocably linked to Richard Loeb’s in one of the infamous American crimes of the twentieth century, the “Leopold and Loeb” thrill killing of fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. It is horribly ironic that the man whose insights helped save the Kirtland’s warbler from extinction cared so deeply about birds but so little about human life.
In appearance alone, the Kirtland’s warbler is irresistible with its blue-gray, black-streaked face, back, and wings illuminated by a yellow throat, breast, and belly. Still, it’s squarely in the middle of the warbler pack in terms of razzle-dazzle, competing with birds that sport color palettes fiery enough to make the gaudiest Mardi Gras costume seem drab. Their bold looks are as fleeting as they are arresting. The chance to see a large assortment of warblers in their full spring glory is limited to a few weeks—and you may only have a window of several days to overload your senses with over thirty species of a national total of fifty-four passing through places like Magee Marsh. Those few days enveloped by kaleidoscopic beauty and song are the moments that many birders live for throughout the rest of the year.
The following afternoon, after I’d worn down my shoes at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I tried to telepathically block Linda from thinking about chasing warblers. In case my psychic powers failed, I popped in a cassette of an old Jack Benny radio show and yucked it up with exaggerated gusto as we puttered west on State Route 2. But Linda had been watching for the Magee Marsh Wildlife Area sign, and to the accompaniment of groans from the driver’s seat she told me to hang a right.
“You like boardwalks,” she insisted.
“I’ve done enough walking today.”
“My back is bothering me. I have to get out and walk somewhere, and we might as well do it where there might be birds.”
We drove down a ribbon of two-lane road flanked by impressive wetlands. Magee Marsh and Ottawa National Wildlife Area—along with Crane Creek State Park, which somehow slots in with the other two—preserve a small chunk of the old Great Black Swamp. In its heyday the swamp impeded human movement in an area approximately 120 miles long and 40 miles wide. Then in 1859, the federal government told the lumber industry to go ahead and drain the whole thing. Only a few patches of the Great Black Swamp remain, primarily in protected areas.
A Canada goose crossed the road in front of us with a dozen youngsters in tow. Herons, egrets, and mallards flapped placidly by. We passed a few vehicles that huddled in stubby turn-offs, and the visitors center displayed a healthy number of cars. But after our road swung left at the beach, I was surprised by the packed parking lot. It wasn’t swimming weather by any means. “Maybe there’s a flea market,” I said.
As soon as we hit the marsh boardwalk, I understood why it had drawn a crowd. It was as if we had entered a botanical garden brimming with captive butterflies—but these were brilliantly colored birds fluttering at an arm’s length away. I had never seen anything like it before. I had never even dreamed anything like it. One moment I had been standing on asphalt, sunlight blinding me off the mirror of an SUV. The next moment I was immersed in a lost world of birds, closed in, buzzing with song, alive with leaves and boughs spun and bounced by wild beauty in constant motion.
I had to duck when a crazy cross between a goldfinch and a chickadee tried to part my hair. “Chestnut-sided warbler,” said a woman’s voice. A brown-backed bird with a spotted white breast and outrageously striped head popped up onto the railing, dropped down onto the boards, hopped into the undergrowth, and disappeared. “Ovenbird,” said a man whose camera-laden companion was already nudging him to look somewhere else.
The whole woods seemed to be moving through and past us. A branch bent low as a blue-headed vireo snagged a caterpillar. A lemon-yellow bird showed off red stripes on his breast. A deeper yellow bird flicked blue-gray wings and probed a log with a needle beak. The boardwalk wound on and on, snaking and looping for almost a mile, though we only followed it as far as the ninth or tenth group of birders pressed against the railings and clustered around a hotspot. I followed the goggle-eyed stare of a woman in a green windbreaker to a black-backed bird with yellow breast and black side stripes. I began to feel drunk on dazzle, like I’d just chugged a six-pack of rose-breasted grosbeaks.
“She says it’s a magnolia warbler,” Linda said.
“I wish we had birds like that in our yard,” I told the Windbreaker.
“Where do you live?”
“In West Michigan. On a river.”
“Trees and bushes? Then you probably have them.”
We edged past a man whose monster telescope, camera, and tripod rig hogged the walkway. As he zeroed in on what looked to me like a red-winged blackbird with orange patches on the wings and tail, he shook his head. “I’ve got enough American redstart photos. If you want to see something, there’s a Kirtland’s warbler on the beach.”
Searching for a single tiny warbler on a half-mile stretch of beach struck me as the ultimate exercise in futility. I harped upon that theme as I followed Linda across the parking lot. “Needle in a haystack” received an obligatory mention. But as we stepped onto the sand, we had no doubt whatsoever as to the whereabouts of the bird. It hopped and rested, rested and hopped in the approximate center of a thirty-foot-diameter circle formed by slack-jawed birders. I ventured close enough to take a couple of photos. It wasn’t much of a challenge, because at one point the warbler skittered between the legs of an observer and then flew back to continue pecking at the ground.
I had no notion at the time how rare this sighting was. Years later, Kirtland’s Warbler author Bill Rapai told me, “Since the species was discovered in 1851, there have been only a few hundred recorded sightings of Kirtland’s warblers outside of northern lower Michigan. If a birder finds a Kirtland’s warbler between Michigan and its winter home in the Bahamas, it’s the equivalent of winning the PowerBall lottery.”
A man in the circle of birders understood the significance and told his son, “You have now joined an elite group of birders.”
I didn’t feel elite, but I did feel excited and unusually optimistic about the world.
On our way back to the car, I heard a familiar song coming from the bushes. “Little Buddy!” Linda said.
“Not just one. There’s another Sam Peabody with him. And they’re both singing on key.”
“Maybe he brought a friend with him.”
I didn’t know much about birds, but I was reasonably confident that northern Ohio had its own complement of white-throated sparrows without needing to steal our winter friend. I caught a glimpse of a chubby striped head as the bird dropped to the ground and then immediately jumped back up into the foliage as if he were on springs. I didn’t get another look before he and the other little cannonball shot away, but it had been enough. Even though I’d been awed by the razzamatazz of the warblers, renewing my acquaintance with one of Little Buddy’s cousins sealed the deal.
For the second time in my life, I had been bitten by the birding bug. Only our little green parrot, Ollie, could have bitten me harder.