Chapter Four
I had come pretty far, considering that when I’d first met Linda I had only seen a woodpecker on Saturday-morning TV, and now I could identify four of them—or five, if you counted Woody. I could also point to any frequent visitor to our feeders and tell you what many of them were, though I might as well have leaped to another continent once I left our yard and ventured into the woods. Most remarkably, I hadn’t given up, even though I was well past the point where I usually lost interest in a pursuit—like the year that I vowed to learn a new word from the dictionary every day and quit after aardwolf. But I still had a long way to go on the road to identifying most common birds. I ran smack dab into a major obstacle on the afternoon when I chased a pet duck through the weeds.
The ducks and geese had been out in the yard for an hour practicing their unique brand of insect control, which included eating every blade of grass down to the topsoil. When they had stuffed themselves so full that I marveled at their ability to still waddle around, I started to shoo them back into their pen. Then I spotted a duck pacing on the wrong side of our rusty backyard fence. She had apparently squeezed herself through a hole that had escaped my latest round of patching.
Fortunately, our ducks were so tubby that they either couldn’t or wouldn’t fly. Unfortunately, they could swim as well as the sleekest mallard, and at the bottom of the hill lay a seasonal pond—and not far beyond the pond stretched the Grand River. So I needed to act fast.
Straddling the fence, I talked sweetly to the pretty, pretty little girl while doing my best to conceal a trout net behind my back. When the net slipped as I hoisted my leg over the wire, she quacked and bolted. I staggered down the hill three steps to get between her and the water and chased her back and forth along the fence line. This agitated the ducks and geese inside the pen, who called out encouragement to their favorite—but I didn’t have time to stop and thank them for their support.
Twice I would have caught her except for her sudden change of direction or the intervention of a clump of garlic mustard between duck and net. I ratcheted down my pursuit once it became clear that she was more interested in rejoining her flock than in making a break for the water. Panting from a few seconds of exertion, I stood and watched as she found the same opening in the wire that she had apparently used as her exit, but she had trouble squirming through it a second time. When she got stuck, I scooped her up in my hands, narrowly missing a sprig of poison ivy that waited for me among the creeping charlie.
I carried her back to the pen, petting her head as I told her what a naughty girl she had been. She complained about her mistreatment when I set her down with the others.
Back inside the house, I told Linda about my adventure, stressing the fact that I had already mended the escape hatch with chicken wire so that she didn’t need to remind me. “How that fat duck ever made it through that little hole is a mystery,” I said.
“Which one of Chloe’s girls was it?” she asked, referring to the khaki Campbell mother who had refused to practice family planning. “Carla, Marla, or Darla?”
“I don’t remember. I don’t think I noticed.”
“Then it must have been either Carla or Marla. You’d remember if it was Darla.” Our two black-and-white ducks looked so much alike, we hadn’t named them as individuals. Together they were Carla and Marla. But their sister, Darla, was our only brown-and-white female. I should have remembered her.
In my mind’s eye I could clearly see a two-toned duck pacing at the top of the hill, yet I had no recollection whatsoever of her color. I had a solid yet at the same time vague sense of her, as if I’d encountered the idea of a duck rather than a duck in feathers and flesh. I had been so consumed with the idea of catching her before she bolted to the pond that my brain had skipped over this obvious physical detail if it had ever recorded it in the first place. It was like trying to sort out one of those dreams where one moment I was folding socks on the front sidewalk with Linda, and the next moment my sister Joan and I were searching the hallways of Catholic Central High School for my locker.
A dazzling male rufous hummingbird like this one took a wide detour south from the Pacific Northwest to end up near Battle Creek, Michigan.
“It must have been Carla or Marla,” I said. “I held her and petted her. I would have noticed if she was brown and white.” I felt embarrassed and unnerved by this gaping hole in my perception. I loved our ducks and spoiled them with macaroni treats and lawn sprinklers to frolic through, so it wasn’t a matter of failing to pay attention to them. “Isn’t it crazy that I don’t know?”
It didn’t strike Linda as unusual. Every year she told me the names of her flowers, and every year I immediately forgot them. I had no trouble with the easily recognizable ones that I’d grown up with: snapdragons, tulips, lilies, daffodils, and roses. But I struggled with geraniums versus begonias, and I couldn’t tell clematis from columbine, zinnias from marigolds, or mums from mum’s-the-word. It wasn’t that I recognized the flower but momentarily misplaced the names. I was a poor observer with an abysmal visual memory, and I blurred together flowers that shared structural similarities—such as having leaves and stems.
I had a similar problem with birds. If a bird flaunted some dramatically obvious difference from every other bird on earth, I might match up that single feature with a picture in a field guide. But if you were to ask me how I recognized an adult male American redstart, I’d reply that it was a black bird with bits of orange on it quite unlike the bits of orange on a red-winged blackbird. However, even today—even after seeing numerous redstarts up close, in books, and on the Internet—I’d probably have to consult a picture to jog my memory that it had two orange patches on each wing and an orange patch on either side of its tail.
It wasn’t as if I walked around in an absentminded fog all of the time—at least not while I was birding. Out in the woods, my senses were in as much of a state of high alert as my sluggish self could muster. Linda could be tromping through the woods beside me, snapping sticks beneath her feet, snuffling, clearing her throat, and describing the terrible ingredients that the chefs were forced to cook with on this week’s episode of Chopped. Then I’d touch her arm and say, “I just heard a red-eyed vireo in the crown of that tall tree on the river.” But while I’d been slowly, steadily getting better at identifying birds by sound, my visual skills didn’t seem to be improving.
To some degree, my brain actively filtered out what it considered to be superfluous visual information, and I had to work to get it back. So when I ran into a sparrow that was festooned with stripes, streaks, and speckles, I would describe out loud what I was seeing in order to make it stick. “Stripe through the eye,” I’d say. “Streaked breast, streaked brown back, faint white bars on wings.” One or two of these features might survive long enough in my head for me to write them down. But usually I had to make do with a smeary sense of pattern and color before both bird and memory flew away.
So the bottom line was that I could put names to maybe three dozen birds, especially if they were cooperative enough to open their beaks and sing on cue. But when I ran into an unfamiliar one that decided to keep its birdie lips zipped, too much subtlety or complexity to its appearance overloaded my simple brain. And so, apparently, did a completely familiar brown-and-white duck versus a black-and-white duck.
My only hope was to discover other identification methods beyond simply what a bird looked like and sounded like, though I doubted that any such methods existed.
Ever since I’d met Linda, she had cajoled me into joining her in what she called “nature walks”—long, rambling hikes through the woods that hadn’t appealed to a city-bred lad like me. Finally, after a decade of marriage, these nature walks became a thing of the past. We went birding instead—which amounted to taking the exact same long, rambling hikes through the woods, except we now carried binoculars. That made all the difference to me. It didn’t change much for Linda, although she enjoyed my newfound enthusiasm for our walks in place of my former grumbling.
One Saturday afternoon, Linda and I traipsed through a meadow at a local nature center where someone we knew had seen a barred owl. I had my ears cocked and ready for its who-cooks-for-you? song when a whoop from Linda spun me around. Her smile was so wide, she could hardly look through her binoculars. I jammed my field glasses into my face and moved directly behind her to get a bead on whatever had captured her attention. I couldn’t locate the source of her delight. If she had found the owl, it was an expert at camouflage.
“Sweetheart, look at this squirrel with his bulging cheeks,” she said. “I can’t tell what he’s eating, can you?”
I briefly reverted to my former grumbling self. I was there to search for birds, not to enjoy nature. A few minutes later, Linda called out again, but this time she said, “I see a bird!” I recognized him immediately from my want-to-see list. He was mostly black with an orange patch on each side, but I wasn’t likely to confuse him with a redstart or a red-winged blackbird. He looked more like a robin sporting an orange-and-white vest. The perky fellow had an air of dignity. He cocked his tail when he saw us but otherwise didn’t act flustered. He seemed politely embarrassed at our mutual surprise over running into one another.
“A rufous towhee,” Linda said. I wholeheartedly agreed.
We could be forgiven for not having the name quite right, since the experts had gone back and forth about what to call the bird. For decades it wore the nondescript mantle “eastern towhee.” Then ornithologists decided that the towhee of the eastern United States and the spotted towhee of the western states were subspecies of the same bird and lumped them both together as the “rufous-sided towhee.” But the lumping didn’t last. Recent hairsplitting split the birds a second time, and the “eastern towhee” fluttered back as a separate species.
For most Michiganders, the towhee is a go-out-and-look-for bird, but this wasn’t always the case. In the 1912 edition of Michigan Bird Life, Walter Bradford Barrows says, “It is one of the commonest of roadside birds and one can hardly drive a mile along a country road anywhere in the Lower Peninsula without seeing several.” In those days it was popularly known as the “chewink.” In Birds of Eastern North America, Frank M. Chapman explains why. “He greets all passers with a brisk, inquiring chewink, towhee, and if you pause to reply, with a fluff-fluff of his short, rounded wings he flies to a nearby limb the better to inspect you.”
Our bird retreated to the back of a winterberry bush, but we still had a clear view as he peered at us through the leaves. A chewink of joy rose up inside me, and I felt doubly gladdened when an outdoorsy couple with oscillating walking sticks appeared on the path. Holding my face in an open, excited expression, I unlooped the binoculars from my neck, preparing to share our find. The two quickened their pace and chugged past us. The snub offended me. Who wouldn’t want to stop and see the object of a fellow hiker’s scrutiny? Then it struck me like the bang of a red-headed woodpecker’s beak. I had turned into the very same binoculars-toting bore that I had avoided years earlier at Point Pelee. Far from shaming me for past behavior, this realization puffed me up with pride. I’d never been mistaken for a knowledgeable nerd before.
It would have suited me if all birds were as easy to identify as the towhee with its big blocks of bold color. But as we followed the path along a creek, my least favorite bird to attach a name to appeared on the opposite side of a small pond—some kind of sparrow with indecipherable stripes and streaks.
“A song sparrow, I suppose.”
“He doesn’t act like a song sparrow,” Linda said. If this had been a movie, the camera would have zoomed in on her face to a portentous swell of violins. She had said a mouthful, though the significance didn’t sink in right away.
Instead of diving for cover at our approach as a song sparrow would have done, he ignored us altogether. Like a little sentry, he marched along the edge of the pond, weaving in and out of grasses and climbing over weeds. He flew off, only to return to his starting point and begin his patrol all over again. He was either hunting for insects or had ants in his pants. He never stopped moving, and he flicked his wings as he walked.
Back at home I sat on the bed trying to flip through my birding books as our black cat Agnes repeatedly thrust her head into my hand demanding to be petted. The first thing I did was study the range maps, which I had never paid much attention to until now. These immediately let me chuck out the rufous winged sparrow, rufous crowned sparrow, Bachman’s sparrow, and a number of other sparrows that summer far west and/or south of Michigan. That narrowed things down a bit. I couldn’t remember much about the plumage of the sparrow we had seen, but the lack of a confusing jumble of stripes on his face and the absence of streaks on his breast led me to a chipping sparrow. But something about the chipping sparrow didn’t feel right.
The range maps and the descriptions for, of all things, the seaside sparrow gave me my next hint. As the name pointed out, the seaside sparrow is a sparrow of coastal areas. So not only geographical region but also habitat plays a huge role in identification, I realized. My field guides insisted that chipping sparrows stick to dry areas, so that probably wouldn’t be our bird. Then I pondered what Linda had said about how the bird had acted. According to the experts, the swamp sparrow—which resembles a chipping sparrow—engages in just that kind of energetic obsessive-compulsive foraging behavior on the edges of marshes and ponds that we had witnessed.
I shut my books and petted Agnes. Thanks to Linda’s observation, I had actually identified a bird by taking geography, habitat, and behavior into account, just like an actual birder would. Sometimes I amazed myself.
The amazing thing was that it had taken me so long to grasp the fact that birds that liked to hang out in fetid swamps wouldn’t feel at home in undulating grasses. Another basic concept had yet to dawn on me. The when of seeing birds was every bit as important as the where—and when it came to making personal appearances, many birds were on stricter schedules than Thomas Pynchon. We learned this the hard way after driving 150 miles to see an attention-grabbing species that only nested in a few spots in Michigan. The most reliable place to find the bird was Saginaw Bay.
In past years we had traveled far from home to experience such splendors as a house shaped like a shoe in Hallam, Pennsylvania, Colonel Harland Sanders’s first restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, and a teapot museum in Trenton, Tennessee. But decades of cleaning houses for a living had taken a toll on Linda’s back, and she couldn’t sit for hours in a car now. Saginaw Bay still lay in reach.
Originally our primary destination had been the German-style village of Frankenmuth, which has acquired such power as a tourist attraction that it’s a politically independent entity in Frankenmuth Township—sort of like Vatican City is to Italy. I wondered if we needed a passport. As I researched other places to visit in the area, I discovered Nayanquing Point State Wildlife Area with its fourteen hundred acres of coastal Lake Huron marshes and the largest colony of yellow-headed blackbirds in Michigan. Once I showed Linda a photo of this heart-stoppingly beautiful bird, it pushed Frankenmuth’s gingerbread Bavarian architecture into the background.
In western states, where yellow-headed blackbirds outnumber red-winged blackbirds, residents yawn at the spectacle of a coal-black bird that’s shockingly yellow from the neck up—just as Vatican City villagers inoculate themselves to St. Peter’s. But this half-grackle, half-canary was a spectacle we had to see. Despite its scarcity in Michigan, my online sources assured me how easy the species was to find at Nayanquing Point. Just zero in on the distinctive song—which sounded to me like a red-winged blackbird coughing up a hairball—and you’ve got your bird.
We were long overdue for a vacation. Linda’s parrot Dusty had perfected the art of prying his metal food dish loose from the clamp and throwing it to the floor—scattering seeds as far as the refrigerator. My parrot Stanley Sue had taken to scolding me with loud bell ringing if I made too much noise crinkling a package of tortilla chips when she was trying to sleep. So we revised our novella-length list of instructions, made arrangements with our faithful pet sitter, Jamie, and hit the road. Although fleeing from our birds at home to hunt for another bird across the state amounted to a unique form of masochism, we couldn’t resist.
Pumped up by what I had read online, I expected to see the yellow-headed blackbird within minutes of arriving at Nayanquing Point. But we couldn’t see much of anything. An impenetrable wall of cattails blocked a throng of singers as we hiked around a pond of unknowable size and shape. I couldn’t depend on my ears to locate the blackbird, either. If you had plunked us down in the middle of a rainforest in Borneo, we wouldn’t have been more astonished by the incredible musical din. From time to time a red-winged blackbird flitted to the top of a cattail and added its conk-la-ree to the noise level. But most of the song makers stayed hidden.
As we hobbled on, frying beneath a rare emergence of the Michigan sun, we caught a peek through the foliage at a black chicken-like bird with a bulbous red beak. Floating among the reeds, it clucked fearfully and paddled away. Mad avian laughter answered, though we could barely hear it above an understory of chatter resembling a cross between bubbly whistles and a finger drawn along the teeth of a plastic pocket comb. We had no idea that these were marsh wrens staking out their territory or that the common gallinule’s clucks had been answered by a cackling American coot.
One of the few birds that wasn’t busy singing dogged our steps. Linda recognized the black-and-white eastern kingbird by the white band on the end of its tail. He flew to a bush ahead of us, waited until we had almost caught up, then flew to the next bush, warily eyeing us the whole while. I checked to see if he was wearing a tiny earphone, but he didn’t seem to be a member of a coordinated security team.
The path narrowed as it took us deeper into the wet. The cattails on our left grew denser as the brush on our right pressed in. Bright yellow balls of fluff with thin red streaks on their breasts sang from each thicket—unless ghosts that cried witchity-witchity had claimed it first. Wearing a sooty toupee, a professorial gray catbird lectured us with whistles and squeaks about the folly of vacationing without a machete. I jumped up on my toes to see where we were going and where we had been.
“Nayanquing sure lives up to its name,” Linda said. “It’s as exotic as it sounds.”
We hadn’t a clue how to pronounce Nayanquing and wrapped our tongues around it differently every time. I decided it meant “loud marsh birds you’ll never see.” Before leaving on our trip, I should have had brains enough to learn the songs of a few other likely suspects so that we wouldn’t feel so disappointed if Mr. Yellow-Head turned out to be a no-show. I also hadn’t bothered to investigate what his fellow wetland residents might look like.
“Is that a marsh wren or a sedge wren?” Linda asked when a bird hopped across the path.
“How do you know it’s one or the other?”
“It was on the papers you printed out, and the tail stuck up like a wren.”
I didn’t see it. To ease my claustrophobia, I’d been staring at the sky. Gull-like birds that I assumed were terns cocked an eye at the ground as they sailed overhead. A lone gull rowed the air with short, stiff wing strokes. Scratchy-voiced swallows too quick for the retina zoomed and looped, while a pterodactyl disguised as a great blue heron croaked its displeasure at our intrusion.
When the trail took a bend, the cattails all at once opened up to a silver-surfaced pond. I scanned the edges with binoculars, confident I’d locate the blackbird, whose blazing head would surely leap right out of the background. But my spirits fell as I noticed how easily mallards with flashy green heads and red-winged blackbirds with orange shoulder patches melted into the complicated interface of weeds and water. I thought back to a few days earlier when we had traced the song of a scarlet tanager to a tree across the street from our house and had been mystified that we still couldn’t find it. Scale was everything, and it only took a couple of leaves to smother the glory of one of the most brightly colored birds in the hemisphere.
“So much for the easily found yellow-headed blackbird,” I said.
Linda put her arm around me. “We’re still in a really beautiful place, and we’re away from all of the animals.”
“We should drop off the parrots here.”
A swan with four chubby babies idled past us as we hugged. I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather cling to in the jungle heat than Linda. But the heat was beginning to get to us, and we decided to turn around.
Our friendly neighborhood eastern kingbird escorted us part of the way back. Then a second kingbird buzzed in to take his place, making sure that we didn’t try anything funny as we headed for the parking lot. Not for nothing is this bold character a member of what’s called the “tyrant flycatcher” family. In Key to North American Birds, Elliott Coues singles out the kingbird for its “irritability, pugnacity, intrepidity, and its inveterate enmity to Crows, Hawks, and Owls, which it does not hesitate to attack, either in defense of its nest or just to show its spunk; but in its turn it is attacked and sometimes worsened by the Hummingbird.”
I was nowhere near as formidable as a hummingbird. I was wilting, and I jabbed the air conditioner when we got back inside the car.
It made no sense to me that we had visited Nayanquing Point at the height of summer when it teemed with birds, yet we hadn’t managed to find its most famous resident. I searched the Web and discovered a posting about Nayanquing from an Ann Arbor−based birding listserv group. The idea of people emailing their sightings as they happened intrigued me. It meant that I could jump in the car, drive clear across the state, and narrowly miss seeing a bird that had flitted around in plain view hours earlier. I cursed the fates that denied West Michigan a similar email group and joined the Ann Arbor list anyway, though I didn’t expect to get much out of it.
I read the first few batches of sightings with mild curiosity. Then as the observations continued to flow, a larger picture gradually came into focus. I’d been wondering where the orioles, grosbeaks, and finches had gone that had filled the woods with songs until recently. A poster noted that these birds were still around but they had become quieter and less visible because they had finished courting and claiming territory for nesting.
Although I’d been dimly aware that something called migration took place, I had no idea what a complex and orderly cycle it was. One species or another seemed to be on the move all year. Turkey vultures and sandhill cranes began returning to Michigan from warmer climes in the dreary winter depths of February, while American tree sparrows and juncoes showed up in late fall and stayed until early spring, preferring our deep freeze to the Arctic blast farther north. Even the spring migration was broken down into waves of birds, with red-winged blackbirds trickling back during the first part of March, some swallows, thrushes, and sparrows showing up in April, and the bulk of the warblers, vireos, and flycatchers popping in during May.
I didn’t learn all of this from the listserv right away. But when I posted a question about the yellow-headed blackbird, I found out that we hadn’t seen the bird at Nayanquing Point because the males had already begun leaving the breeding grounds in July. Linda and I had arrived a couple of weeks too late.
By sticking with the group, I began to learn which birds were winging through southern Michigan. And I would also have the chance to publicly embarrass myself on numerous occasions.
I was lucky to have found an online group whose members included several of the top birders in the state and professional ornithologists. Unlike other listservs that are tailored to experts in search of the rarest of rare species, birders@great-lakes.net welcomes people of all levels of accomplishment, and uninformed beginners of my ilk receive patient answers to the densest questions. Although the group officially describes itself as “a local/regional email list for discussing bird sightings in Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, and southeast Michigan,” I soon discovered it to be a congenial spot for conversing about sightings almost anywhere in the state.
At the center of the generous attitude and high level of civility is the affable and organizationally masterful Bruce Bowman, who has served as list administrator since 2000. Bruce is a retired research scientist from the University of Michigan working in the field of automotive safety. His academic background is physics, mathematics, and engineering. Bruce’s website, www-personal.umich.edu/~bbowman/birds/index.html, is awash with scads of crucial information and resources for birding in Michigan.
One of the emails from Bruce’s group reported that a rufous hummingbird was visiting a backyard feeder in Leroy Township. This was just outside of Battle Creek, where Linda’s mom lived. It made no sense to me, since the range maps in my field guides showed only the ruby-throated hummingbird in the eastern United States—and the rufous hummingbird called the Pacific Northwest home. I was skeptical of finding any bird so far out of place. But we were visiting Linda’s mom the following weekend, so we decided to loop over to Leroy and repeat our yellow-headed blackbird defeat.
It didn’t feel like a Saturday on which anything out of the ordinary could happen. It felt like any other Saturday. We grabbed a couple of subs and ate them in the little town of Nashville on the way to Battle Creek so that Linda’s mom wouldn’t have to make us lunch. Keeping an eye out for the telltale pine trees, I still managed to overshoot her driveway. Then we took her to the bank and the supermarket. Back at her house we sat in the breezeway and ate confetti cake with pink icing and a rock-hard slab of ice cream from the garage freezer. Everything was exactly as usual.
“Don’t run any water if you don’t have to,” her mom told us. This stricture had been in effect ever since her well pump had started running rough a year earlier.
“Didn’t you finally get a new pump last week?” I asked.
“I don’t want to take any chances with the well running dry,” she said.
We played two games of Uno, stashed three bags of produce from her garden in our trunk, hugged her goodbye, and headed past Binder Park Zoo toward Leroy Township.
Magee Marsh and Nayanquing Point had been wild places that throbbed with the possibility of encountering rare birds, quite unlike a tidy ranch-style home with a bicycle leaning against the porch. None of the other houses on the street looked capable of concealing a rufous hummingbird, either. “Shouldn’t there be a bunch of people here?” I asked Linda as our front tire bumped the curb.
“You’d think so to see such a rare bird.”
We walked into a backyard sheltered by trees and a massive lilac. On a table next to the door lay a spiral-bound notebook. Nothing will happen in this ho-hum place, I thought. A nectar feeder hugged shadows near the house. A second feeder dangling from a shepherd’s hook was identical to ours—way too ordinary to attract an exotic species. I flipped through the notebook. “Saw the bird four times,” Steve from Jackson had written that morning. It was already ancient history, like reading Henry Stanley’s dispatches from the Congo. Nothing was happening now. Near the feeder a metal sunflower sculpture basked in the attention as our eyes swept the yard.
Moments later, a burnished copper shape buzzed out from the lilac, tilted to greet a blazing glint of sunlight, sip, sip, sipped from the feeder, sip, sip, sipped again, turned to show us an orange throat, and then zoomed back to the lilac. It came back as a bee in gilded armor, once more as a bubble of molten glass, and finally as a ball lighting with a beak. We drank in long, close looks at the magnificent little guy with metallic red-brown upper parts, dark wings, and that fiery iridescent throat that only winked on like a neon sign when it caught the sun at the right angle.
“Saw the bird four times,” I wrote in the notebook. I wanted to add, “Still no yellow-headed blackbird,” but the comment seemed petty under the circumstances.
“I hope that bird’s okay,” Linda said as we left the neighborhood. “I hope he isn’t lost and gets stranded here this winter.”
I assured her that he wouldn’t. I didn’t know if I was telling the truth.
The idea of this gorgeous little bird stranded thousands of miles from home nagged me, so I emailed Allen Chartier, who had posted the Leroy Township sighting to the online group. I didn’t know Allen from Adam at the time, but he turned out to be the author of A Birder’s Guide to Michigan with Jerry Ziarno and also a nationally known hummingbird expert who wrote the introduction to the National Geographic Field Guide to Birds: Michigan.
Rufous hummingbirds are amazing flyers. They breed in the Pacific Northwest north to southern Alaska and then make the long flight all the way to southern Mexico every winter. Instead of migrating directly south, they jog east and move southbound along the Rocky Mountains. “A few thousand of them—a tiny percentage of the population—deviate even a bit farther east to end up spending the winter along the Gulf Coast,” Allen told me. “Even smaller numbers make an even more easterly track, with the result that there are records of rufous hummingbirds from every eastern state.”
So the birds that visit Michigan aren’t lost. They’re playing out a strategy that’s only now becoming apparent to hummingbird researchers like Allen.
“What appears is happening, though we have no solid proof yet, is that they have a two-stage wintering strategy with two winter homes,” Allen said. “This has been noted in the Deep South where most of the banding studies have been done, where birds arrive in August or September and spend until Christmas or New Year’s at one site. Then they seem to move to a second site where they remain until March, when they begin their long migration back to the Pacific Northwest.”
I asked Allen why the birds would bother with the two-stage migration instead of doing it all in one fell swoop. “It is my hypothesis—not even close to being proven—that these birds stop at the first site to complete a molt, up to a point when it is ‘suspended,’ and then they molt the last bit—their outer primary feathers—before they move northwest in March.” Banding studies by Allen and other ornithologists have proven that birds that have lingered into late December during single-digit daytime Fahrenheit temperatures have returned in subsequent years, “solidifying the reputation of the rufous hummingbird as a very hardy species.”
Exactly the kind of little bugger that could kick an eastern kingbird’s butt.
My close encounter with the rufous had energized me more than any bird I’d seen since the rose-breasted grosbeak. It made up for my failure to find the scratchy-voiced yellow-head, and I didn’t have to slog through a marsh under the broiling sun to find it. This was practically drive-up birding. But I still loved the yellow-head for leading me to experts like Bruce and Allen and their mindboggling depth of knowledge.
All of this new information about birds was a good news/bad news thing. The good news was that habitat, behavior, species migration dates, and thousand-mile detours all played major roles in birding, so that finding birds wasn’t just a matter of blundering into them. The bad news was that habitat, behavior, species migration dates, and thousand-mile detours all played major roles in birding, and with so much to absorb, I was better off just hoping to blunder into birds.
Awash in a flash flood of complexity, I was like Carla/Marla/Darla standing at the top of the hill in view of the great waters beyond and choosing the familiar comfort of ye olde plastic wading pool instead. Not that respite awaited me inside our own four walls. Linda had embarked upon a project that brought wild birds closer than ever. She was busy raising orphaned baby birds for a local rehab center. If I’d known how much trouble they would be, I might have tried to talk her out of it. Not that I ever managed to talk her out of anything.