Chapter Five
Not long after we were married, Linda called me into the basement to investigate a mysterious peeping sound, which we traced to the base of the chimney.
“There’s something trapped inside,” she said. “It sounds like baby birds.”
Taking advantage of a state-of-the-art soot clean-out system dating back to 1917, I slid out two loose bricks, plunged my hand into darkness, and retrieved what Linda determined was a chimney swift nest with three featherless chicks. Her attempts to feed them canned cat food from a toothpick failed. The tiny things kept their beaks clamped shut except to cry for mom.
Acting the part of favorite auntie, Linda looped wire around the nest, crawled out the upstairs window, and scaled the roof. “Oops,” she said, bracing herself with one arm against the slope to keep from falling. “This is slipperier than I thought it’d be.”
“It’s a metal roof,” I told her as I watched through my fingers. Her hard-soled shoes hadn’t been designed for daredevil climbs. Raising herself on tiptoes, she somehow managed to anchor the nest to the top of the chimney so that it hung down inside. A few minutes after her descent, the mother swooped down to the chicks.
A decade later, I thought back to the chimney swifts as we banged on Peg and Roger Markle’s back door. Linda had volunteered to foster orphaned baby starlings, and I wondered if we were doomed to struggle with another clutch of recalcitrant birds. I needn’t have worried. I shrank back with an audible gasp when Peg flipped open the lid of a pet carrier and I was greeted by shrieking yellow beaks that looked more like a bouquet of carnivorous flowers than eight individual chicks. She demonstrated the feeding technique by filling a syringe with ochre-colored goop, sliding it into the open mouth and down the crop of a gaping bird, pressing the plunger, then moving on to the next starling. She fed them with assembly-line precision as if syringe and crop were as closely associated as a car engine’s piston and cylinder.
“What’s the matter, Bob?” Roger asked with a chuckle when he saw my shock. I had expected the chicks to be charming, passive little creatures rather than raucous food-intake machines.
“Don’t pretend you didn’t just eat,” Peg told the starlings after she had made a few more passes with the syringe. “Your new mom and dad just saw you.”
Peggy and Roger treated us as if we’d been friends for years, even though we had just met them. They were trusting us with their babies, after all, which made us more than casual acquaintances. Peg and Linda were hardly strangers, though. They had spoken several times on the phone after a neighbor of ours had taken an orphaned baby squirrel to Peg. The neighbor had described Peg in such glowing terms that Linda called to ask if we could see her animals. Not only could we see them, but after gauging Linda’s enthusiasm for critters, Peg also decided that Linda might make a good foster parent.
From the stately appearance of the Markle house just north of downtown Grand Rapids, we never would have suspected that it was the home of Wildlife Rehab Center, LLC. But once we had passed through the gate to the backyard, we slid into a parallel universe where the animals were clearly in charge. A squirrel raced down a tree to rest its front paws on my shoe in hopes that I had treats to dispense. A plump blue jay too young to have developed a crest assumed a wing-flapping begging posture next to Linda. Canada geese with hissing pink mouths tested our mettle, but we had pet geese of our own and weren’t intimidated, so they left us alone. Inside the house, we found cages and containers holding songbirds, ducks, baby opossums, and more.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked Peg.
“Legally or illegally?” She grinned. “I got my state license about fifteen years ago. That was for mammals. After that I took classes and passed the test for federal, which allowed me to do birds.”
“It started when I was working on Dick Bennett’s boat,” Roger said, referring to Dr. Richard Bennett, the vet for the John Ball Park Zoo in Grand Rapids. “He was doing wildlife rescue with his assistant, Dr. Durham, and we offered to take care of an adult squirrel that got hit by a car. We named him Davey, after Dr. Durham.”
“If you’d come over you would have seen Dave Durham and Roger, two grown men, sobbing when that squirrel died,” Peg said. “The whole thing just sort of snowballed from there.” She told us that she and Roger plus a couple of volunteers care for fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred animals a year. During peak summer months they may wait until midnight to sit down for dinner before staggering off to bed.
“How often do I feed the babies again?” Linda asked.
“Every two hours. Just during daylight hours,” she said. “Birds aren’t like baby squirrels or opossums, which you need to feed twenty-four hours a day.”
Linda only did two or three house-cleaning jobs a week because of worsening back problems, and she could take the carrier with her on the job. I worked away from home each morning and could help with the birds in the afternoon. So this seemed totally doable. I didn’t realize how quickly it would wear us down.
Linda was every bit as heroic with the starlings as she had been with the chimney swifts. Even though their care didn’t demand a death-defying climb up the roof, they did require constant fussing over. One of the fussiest aspects was temperature regulation.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she rifled through a cluttered bedroom shelf.
“Looking for more magazines. The babies are getting too hot.”
I followed her into her study to solve the mystery of how copies of the New Yorker would cool off her birds.
Because the featherless starlings lacked a mother to sit on the nest and keep them warm, Linda followed Peg’s advice and placed a heating pad underneath their carrier. Even with the thermostat set on “low,” too much heat was building up. So she layered magazines and towels between the pad and carrier until the inside temperature felt right.
Feeding the babies was far more work intensive than she had imagined. Two hours feels like a long time if you’re suffering from a migraine or watching network television. But if you’re raising baby starlings, two hours between feedings barely gives you time to catch your breath. I marveled at the stamina of a mother starling, which needs to catch thousands of insects a day for her chicks. Mom hunts for beetles, grasshoppers, crickets, weevils, and worms, while also stealing a few cherries and other cultivated fruits. She may visit the nest as often as twenty times an hour during morning hours when the babies are young. According to Christopher Feare’s book, The Starling, these visits level off to around three hundred a day for chicks ten days old, then decline a bit until the babies hit the ripe old age of fifteen days and leave the nest.
An orphaned Baltimore oriole raised by Linda came back often to eat grapes.
In comparison, we didn’t have it bad, especially since Linda wasn’t forced to forage for bugs. She combined kitten chow, chicken baby food, a few drops of liquid vitamins, and water in a blender, sucked it into a syringe, and squirted it into the youngsters’ mouths as Peg had demonstrated. She had to learn the finer points of feeding on her own, such as only delivering a small shot of the glop at a time. Otherwise, with a shake of the chick’s head, our wall and Linda acquired a spattering of ochre polka dots.
Adult starlings eat up to one-third their body weight each day, and the proportion for the big fat chicks we raised was probably higher. We discovered that most of what went into the birds came out later. Thankfully a degree of hygienic behavior was hard-wired into their tiny brains. When nature called they raised their rear ends up and over their margarine-dish nest and dropped a blob of poop, which held its shape due to a thick coating of mucus. This allowed mama bird to keep the area around the nest clean by neatly scooping up the ovoid dropping in her beak and depositing it elsewhere. We had some success duplicating this feat with deft fingers and a tissue, though it was easier simply to replace the newspapers that we were using by the bale.
In just over a week, the starlings made the startling transformation from digestive tracts with legs to fully feathered beings. Linda moved them from their carrier into a cage and arranged them neatly on a perch for feeding.
“Come and see how good they’re being,” she told me. “I’ve got them all in a row.”
As soon as she poked the syringe through the door, the birds threw themselves at her hand, each vying to be the first one fed. She placed them on the perch a second time, but the lone bird that stayed in place wasn’t any easier to deal with than the bouncers and flappers. He remained still with mouth wide open until her finger pressed the plunger, then he jerked his head and got striped with slurry. I retreated upstairs as she dabbed the squawking bird with a washcloth.
I had been looking forward to the next phase of the starlings’ development, when they would begin eating live food on their own. I hadn’t realized that their parents didn’t simply teach them to hunt but also to recognize insects as food. That was Linda’s job now. Peg had told us that crickets would be an excellent choice, since their movements would attract the hungry birds. She was right. The crickets from the bait shop fascinated the starlings as they hopped around inside the cage and then exited to spread chirping cheer throughout the porch. I threaded adding machine tape in and out of the bars at the bottom of the cage to stop them. But the crickets had all the time in the world to plot their escape under the beaks of the clueless birds and join their liberated compatriots.
“Maybe once they taste a cricket, they’ll get the hint,” Linda said. Overcoming her squeamishness over grabbing a living, legged creature with tweezers, she dropped one into the begging mouth of an adolescent.
“I think he likes it,” she told me. “He isn’t spitting it out.” He didn’t have to. The bird continued gaping as if it hadn’t been fed and the insect jumped out again.
Complicating the feeding process, the starlings had tired of confinement, and at least one managed to shoot past her whenever she opened the cage door. “Can you help me get him?” she called upstairs. I didn’t even have to ask where the bird had landed. As if drawn by a magnet, the starlings loved to hurl themselves into an inaccessible corner behind the exercise bike, which also appealed to our thriving expat cricket colony.
At Peg’s urging, Linda switched to mealworms. “The babies are finally eating on their own,” she told me. “Half of the worms I gave them are gone already.”
She found the missing worms when she pulled up the topmost layer of newspaper. The starlings watched fascinated as the exposed worms wriggled their way to the edges of the cage to slide under the paper again, but they weren’t tempted to peck at them. Because the worms weren’t as agile as the crickets, Linda had an easier time snagging one with tweezers and keeping it down the hatch of a gaping bird. Once the first starling formed a favorable opinion of this new food, others followed suit. The next step was getting the birds to grab a worm from the tweezers—then from a jar lid that she held in front of their beaks, and finally from a lid on the floor of the cage.
After the birds were eating on their own, Linda released them in the yard. Four returned for handouts for several days, swooping down on us when we stepped outside. “Don’t even go out there without the slurry,” she advised. “I had one of them on each shoulder and another one on my head.”
With a little help from me, Linda had spent almost a month on just this single batch of birds, and we wondered how Peg and Roger mustered the enthusiasm to care for hundreds of birds at a time, summer after summer. It also made us appreciate the struggles that both parent birds and chicks go through to survive. And Linda surprised me by immediately volunteering to take on a second batch.
Our bushy, wooded property didn’t provide the ideal habitat for starlings. They prefer foraging on the ground in large open areas. Starlings did visit us occasionally, and the juveniles we’d raised lingered contentedly until literally moving on to greener pastures. Their tenure got me thinking about out-of-place birds in general and the rufous hummingbird in particular. If a nonbirder could come up with a stunning species in her backyard, a wannabe birder like myself ought to be able to discover something, too.
I combed our woods for rarities, but whenever I found a bird singing an unfamiliar song, it turned out to be the familiar tufted titmouse performing yet another variation of its two-tone repertoire. Hoards of mosquitoes further discouraged me, so I took my search beyond our property to greener, less buggy pastures, ponds, and forests. While training my binoculars upon an uninhabited bush, trying to turn a striped leaf into a prairie warbler, the idea of my quest first revealed itself to me. Despite the odds against it happening, I vowed to find a “good bird” on my own, a rarity that other birders would want to see. And I would keep looking no matter how long it took, even if it meant interrupting a game of bingo to peer out through the slatted blinds at the old folks home.
Much to my surprise, within a month I seemed to have already found my bird.
It was September, and a huge migration was under way. Shorebirds that nested in the Arctic were leaving their breeding grounds for the long flight to their wintering digs on the bottom of the globe.
Some of the birds put pedal-to-the-metal on the trip. Bar-tailed godwits nesting in western Alaska flew over seven thousand miles to warm their tail feathers on New Zealand beaches. According to the National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America, the godwits are believed to make the trip nonstop. But the certified nonstop flight record belongs to a small shorebird called a red knot, which flew five thousand miles in six days and six nights to reach Southern Brazil from North Carolina. The International Wader Study Group—consisting of researchers from the United States, Canada, Argentina, Britain, and Australia—confirmed this by attaching a geo-location device to the bird and reporting about it in the organization’s 2010 bulletin.
One of the prime spots in the state for seeing some of these endurance travelers turned out to be in West Michigan at a site that in its own way was every bit as exotic as Nayanquing Point. The Muskegon Wastewater Treatment System attracted plovers, sandpipers, and all kinds of aquatic birds to a pair of 850-acre “sewage lagoons” that were actually cleaner than many small inland lakes.
I prepared for a visit by flipping through my field guides, which devoted page after page to shorebirds that looked discouragingly alike with their brown-on-top-and-pale-underneath plumage. The sandpipers had spindle-like beaks. The plovers had stubby ones, including the ball field−loving killdeer. Those were the only differences I could see until the whimbrel, godwits, and curlews caught my attention. They helpfully sported monstrous beaks that were nearly as long as their bodies. My plan was to keep an eye out for them or for any other bird that seemed wildly out of place. Posts on the mailing list reported numerous rarities, so Linda and I made the fifty-mile jaunt to the Muskegon Wastewater facility, anticipating vast flocks of mud-probing waders that were sure to contain at least a couple of penguins.
The place was different than we expected. “Where are we supposed to walk?” I asked as we drove along narrow dikes, squinting through a wall of weeds at the concrete-strewn pond edges below us. “There’s nothing like a shore to walk along to see shorebirds.”
“Slow down, I think there’s something down there,” Linda said. A half-dozen peeping birds flew off in a panic at the crunch of our tires on the gravel. The few that remained took it on the wing as soon as I raised my binoculars.
“There’s got to be somewhere to walk,” I said. “I can’t see anything from the car.”
Near the entrance to the treatment ponds we found a paved dike wide enough to stash our car and to wander along without the birds seeing us immediately. Except that there weren’t any birds. On one side of us stood walled storage cells filled with water whipped into a froth by roaring machines. On the other side, a vast lagoon was peppered with dots that tried to resolve themselves into distant ducks when I squinted through binoculars.
“That smell is making my eyes water,” Linda said.
The chemical stench grew more piercing at the west end, where we discovered a cell that had been drained. Dozens of shorebirds wandered the puddles pecking at the mud. Concealed behind the wall, we could have gotten decent looks at them, but the smell became overpowering and pushed us back to our car. We wondered how the birds put up with it and why they didn’t choose a deserted stretch of Lake Michigan beach instead.
Just as we started to drive away, Linda pointed out a large bird with a gray body and white-striped black head on the edge of the east lagoon. It allowed us leisurely looks as it preened. It wasn’t a shorebird. It was something even better.
“A northern goshawk,” I said. “They’re really rare this far south.”
“Are you sure that’s what it is?”
Raptors can be notoriously difficult to identify because they have so many plumage variations depending on age, time of year, and other factors. The Sibley Guide to Birds devotes a two-page spread to the red-tailed hawk showing twenty-three color variations for this common bird. But I didn’t make my identification lightly even though I had barely glanced at Sibley. I was piggybacking on an expert who had reported the Wastewater goshawk to our birding group a day earlier.
I couldn’t claim the bird as our own since someone else had posted it first. But later that week on my way to work, I saw a raptor zip over the parking lot of a Meijer hypermarket and identified it to birders@great-lakes.net as a northern goshawk based on my poorly firing memory cells. I waited excitedly for the reaction to this “good bird.” Polite silence ensued. Three days later near the same spot, I saw a raptor perched on a utility line and in the morning glare fancied that I’d seen the white rump patch diagnostic of a northern harrier. I reported my find and couldn’t have been prouder of myself. Then I received an email gently informing me that harriers almost never perch up high and that the habitat was totally wrong for a bird that for decades had been know as a marsh hawk.
My two “good birds” were figments of bad observing, and I decided to take a few months off from posting until my skills improved. The northern harrier gaffe got me thinking about the degree to which light affected what I was seeing. Under certain conditions, the most familiar species could turn into an unknown. I noticed this particularly with crows in flight. If sunlight reflected off oily feathers at just the right angle, their wings might appear to be white. Ruminating on this, I sent the following message to the listserv on April 1.
“Have you every gotten tricked by a crow when you’re trying to make a species identification? Today I was walking down a trail when I spotted a crow, who told me, ‘There’s a Kirtland’s warbler in the field down by the river.’ He was lying. It was actually a yellow-rumped warbler.”
Thus I ushered in my new self-appointed role as clown of the birding group.
When spring rolled around Peg asked us if we would be willing to raise more birds. We hadn’t needed a permit for the starlings. Like house sparrows and pigeons, starlings are considered introduced species and therefore aren’t protected by the DNR, even though all three species have been here long enough to have earned their citizenship.
Pigeons came to our shores first. Colonists with a taste for squab brought the bird officially known as the rock pigeon to America at the turn of the seventeenth century. Considering the ratio of pigeons to Puritans today, the birds got the better deal.
House sparrows arrived next, released in New York City in 1851 by bird enthusiasts who wanted to populate Central Park with all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. According to the National Geographic Reference Atlas to the Birds of North America, more house sparrows were introduced in San Francisco in 1871 and in Salt Lake City in 1873. By 1900 they had spread across the entire continental United States. I’m relieved that Shakespeare didn’t write about the cassowary.
We don’t merely know the year when the European starling was unleashed upon America. We also know the name of the man who unleashed it. Eugene Schieffelin was chairman of the American Acclimatization Society, an organization that followed the misguided notion of making immigrants from Europe feel at home by importing European plants and animals. In 1891 Schieffelin released a flock of starlings in Central Park, and they flourished. “These birds are resident throughout the year, and, as they have already endured our most severe winters, we may doubtless regard this species as thoroughly naturalized,” notes Frank M. Chapman in Birds of Eastern North America in 1895. By 1930, Eugene’s starlings had spread across the eastern United States, and by the 1960s they were California Dreamin’ with the rest of us.
Although Linda and I were willing to scatter additional starlings across the landscape, Peg had different plans and obtained the paperwork for us to raise and release protected species. The two baby robins she gave us turned out to be so well mannered compared to the starlings, I checked their wings to make sure that they were birds. Instead of throwing themselves around the cage screaming for food, they perched demurely, managing an occasional amiable chirp to remind us that it might be mealtime. When we unlatched the door to feed them, they kept beaks closed until the syringe was an inch away. Then they snapped open their mouths, flicking their wings and twittering engagingly as they ate.
The robins had come to us fully feathered and looked a lot like a smaller version of an adult, exaggerated upright posture and all. The main difference was a cream-colored, black-speckled breast instead of an adult’s trademark brick red. We considered the kids to be every bit as attractive as the grown-ups.
Like the starlings, the birds needed convincing to switch from slurry to mealworms. Their placid demeanor made it less challenging for Linda to toss a worm into their mouths. After a few fumbles they got the hang of live food and hopped down to the floor of the cage to help themselves. They still considered themselves dependent upon Mom, which presented an unexpected problem once Linda released them into our yard.
“Sweetheart, I can’t get the babies to come down from the hackberry tree,” she told me. I had been cleaning parrot cages in the dining room and had witnessed the robins’ stubbornness through the window.
“They’ll come down when they’re hungry, won’t they?”
“They’re hungry now. But they don’t understand that I can’t fly up to feed them. I put their dish of mealworms on the ground, but they don’t seem to see it.” She went back outside and started calling, “Babies! Babies!”
I ran down to the basement and stuck my head out the door. “That won’t help. They don’t know that word.”
But it did help. Like starlings, robins are ground feeders, and Linda’s urging gave them extra encouragement to swoop down onto the lawn for the syringe. She placed their mealworm dish where they had landed, and within a few days the mealworms became their main food. After they had emptied the dish, they would flip it upside down. We weren’t sure whether this was clumsiness or a signal that they required a refill. As they became more independent, their attitude toward us changed. Though they still wanted squirts from the syringe, they exhibited a “come hither, go away” attitude, suddenly unhappy that the procedure involved a human hand. They would stay at arm’s length on the grass or embed themselves deep inside our spirea bush.
“I can’t reach you,” Linda complained as she tried to keep her balance while leaning into the branches.
Soon they were dining exclusively on mealworms and flitting off at our approach. This rejection stung us a little, but we were thrilled at how well they were doing on their own. From time to time we’d see them pecking the dirt in Linda’s vegetable garden or sprinting through a patch of groundcover and then pausing to listen for insects. Attendance at the mealworm bowl tapered off—and then the birds disappeared. They either retreated into woods or, following the lead of the starlings, left us in search of more luxurious lawns.
It had been a model orphan bird release, progressing smoothly from dependence to self-sufficiency. We missed them terribly.
Not every release went so well. After the robins, Peg gave us two Baltimore orioles and two common grackles. The orioles acted even more laid back than the robins. One of them was so indifferent at mealtime that Linda was upset but not surprised when she found it dead in its margarine tub. People brought birds to Wildlife Rehab Center for a variety of reasons. A whole nest of babies might arrive if mama house sparrow had the bad manners to raise a family under the tarp of a sailboat. Or kitty might have grabbed and dropped a blue jay. The orioles had come in with lots of other youngsters after a storm had ripped through the area and knocked them out of their nests.
“They might survive a day or two and everything seems fine, but they can have an internal injury,” Peg told Linda. “That’s probably what happened with your baby.”
When raising wild birds we tried not to fall in love with them, because we had to let them go—and for their own well-being, we didn’t want them to bond too closely with us, either. It was difficult to hold back from a little one like our oriole. He had no siblings to lean on and looked to us for everything—yet he was so undemanding the robins seemed like divas in comparison. No bird gave us less trouble switching diets. When it came time for a fruit-eating bird to begin eating fruit, he readily accepted diced blueberries and grapes. Soon he was scarfing them up on his own, though I couldn’t resist letting him nibble from my fingers.
We considered all of the birds to be “Linda’s birds,” because she was the primary caregiver. But I was too attached to this oriole to think of him as hers. “I knew you were busy with the laundry, so I fed the little guy for you,” I’d tell her. Or, “I needed to use up the last two grapes, so I gave him his food a little early.”
After we released him, he didn’t stray far. He spent hours in the hackberry tree just outside the basement door or in the spruce just west of the house. His plumage matched his sunny personality and made him easy to spot. Unlike a boldly patterned, blazing orange-and-black adult male Baltimore oriole, he wore muted shades of gold with an olive-colored back and dark wings. He was particularly hard to miss when he flew in for food and perched sedately upon our wooden gate. I’d leave diced fruit for him on the pickets but couldn’t help myself from strolling out to hand feed him a few bites.
Seeing him frequently relieved me at first. But he seemed so dependent upon us that after a while I started to worry. “I hope he’s able to live outside on his own,” I told Linda.
“He’ll have to learn. We can’t keep him as a pet.”
“Oh, no, definitely not,” I said, though part of me wished that we could. “He’s got to figure things out for himself. Otherwise I don’t know what we’ll do.”
One day after work I saw him around one o’clock and again two hours later. At six o’clock as I headed out to the barn to shoo in the ducks, geese, and hens, I noticed that the last bits of fruit I’d put on the fence hadn’t been touched. Taking a cue from Linda, I wandered through the yard and then the woods calling, “Baby!” But the only response I received was a scolding from a blue jay. I made another search the following afternoon, but I never saw him again.
It just went that way with some birds. They would arrive like clockwork day after day and then abruptly stop coming instead of tapering off. Had they ventured too far and gotten lost? Had they been grabbed by a predator? Occasionally a missing bird returned a day later, but not our oriole. We hoped that his instinct for independence had suddenly kicked in, and he’d gone off to succeed on his own.
A pair of orphaned grackles cheered us up. It didn’t bother Linda that they were as demanding as starlings. With their bright red mouths and begging croak, their clownish aspects won her over. One bird was larger than the other, and during feedings he had the habit of opening his beak and begging from the smaller bird. Lazier than his brother, he was less inclined to learn to perch, preferring to stay in his margarine dish even after he had outgrown it.
Because of his sedentary nature, large size, and enormous appetite, Linda dubbed him Jabba the Hutt, after the Star Wars character. “He’s too lazy to swallow a worm,” she said. “His brother will eat them. But when I put one in his mouth with the tweezers, he stays there with his mouth wide open and his brother grabs it. So he begs from his brother, but his brother gets food from him.”
He must have finally found satisfaction in the live food that surpassed the pleasure of idleness, because Linda got Jabba to snatch a dangling mealworm from the tweezers and later to pluck them from a bowl. He seemed well on his way to self-sufficiency until she released both birds.
“He’s back to only eating from the syringe,” she told me. “He lands on the gate right where the oriole used to go, and he begs for slurry.”
“I thought he was eating mealworms off the ground.”
“He started to. But now he only comes for worms when his brother is with him, and instead of eating the worms, he opens his mouth and begs. The other grackle gets every single worm.”
Later in the week Linda urgently called me into the backyard. “Something’s wrong with Jabba. He’s only standing on one leg, and he’s been doing it all day.”
Sure enough, I found Jabba perched on the back gate with one foot clutching a picket and the other leg folded against his body. He ate from the syringe as if nothing was wrong. I closed my hands around him and picked up the protesting bird. Linda carefully flexed the leg and checked the bones but couldn’t find anything wrong.
Jabba stayed away most of the day after that, afraid that the terrible medical procedure would be repeated. When he returned after dinner, he continued to stand on one leg. But the next day Linda greeted me in the driveway with the good news that he had turned into a two-legged bird again. We never knew what had happened. But being handled had instilled a reluctance to venture too close, because he avoided the gate now and ate mealworms from the ground instead.
The following spring, the usual sprinkling of grackles appeared in our woods. Most of them kept to the woods except for a virile-looking male with a sleek black body and iridescent blue head who didn’t fly far when we stepped outside to see him.
“I’ll bet that’s Jabba,” Linda said, and I couldn’t argue with her.
While we were busy raising the robins, I nearly fell off my chair when I read a post from Darlene Friedman to the online birding group. She had driven clear across the state to find a couple of rare species on Pinckney Road. I took it as a personal humiliation that someone who lived 117 miles away had found these rarities a mere 7 miles from our house. Then I faced the fact that I probably would have missed them even if they’d been flitting around in clear view across the street from us.
Darlene is a southeastern Michigan veterinarian who has loved birds since she was a child, though she didn’t start birding until she attended college in central Illinois. A passionate bird photographer, she came up with a novel way to help her get pictures. She birds by ear, by car. She picks out what looks like a promising road in her DeLorme Michigan Atlas & Gazeteer and then drives along that road with her windows open and ears on the alert for telltale songs. “It’s a good way to cover lots of ground,” Darlene told me. “I’ve seen birds in seventy-eight of Michigan’s eighty-three counties.”
One of Darlene’s birding excursions led her to Pinckney Road in Ionia County, just east of Lowell, where Linda and I live. Cruising down this rural road she heard a Henslow’s sparrow and a sedge wren singing in a field. Finding either of these rare and secretive birds would make me seriously giddy. Finding both would do a nitrous oxide number on my naturally depressed demeanor. So after getting detailed directions from Darlene, I hustled Linda out to the car.
Since Darlene had located the birds by ear, I listened to the appropriate recordings before we left but was treated to a completely different ditty as we pulled up alongside a mailbox across from an empty house. To a tinkling, rollicking song that one of my field guide compared to a broken music box, we watched a bird that appeared to be flying upside-down burst out from the grass and settle in a tree.
“Is that a bobolink?” Linda asked. Darlene had mentioned bobolinks, too, so I knew that Linda was right.
Songbirds that are more than one color tend to be darker on top and lighter underneath. This makes birds on the ground less visible to hawks and other predators who view them from above, while perched or flying birds seen from below are less visible against the sky. The male bobolink hadn’t read the memo, though. It’s the only American songbird that’s solid black underneath and mostly white on top, and the upside-down plumage gives it a weird look in flight.
I’d never seen a bobolink before and was drinking it in through binoculars when I heard a clicking, buzzy sound that took me back several decades—dialing the number 1–1-7 with my ear pressed against the receiver of an old-fashioned rotary telephone.
“I’m hearing a sedge wren.”
“I see it!” Linda said. “Straight ahead standing on top of that weed, singing.” On top of two weeds, to be exact, straddling them in classic sedge wren style, though he dropped back into the underbrush before I could focus on him. As Linda wandered off to get a better look at the bobolink, I continued scanning the field, hoping to see Darlene’s Henslow’s sparrow. A minute or two later, I had my bird. With some fumbling I managed to grab my brand-new Canon Powershot, zoom into the smudge perched upon a stick, and click off five photos before the bird grew camera shy.
Back home I couldn’t wait to post the photo on my birding group’s photo-sharing site. The previous year’s northern goshawk and northern harrier gaffes still heaped hot coals of embarrassment upon me, even if everyone else would have long forgotten them. Though Darlene had discovered the Pinckney Road birds, reporting that they remained for other birders to see would help restore my standing, I decided. Contributing to my redemption was a credible photo of this hard-to-find bird. It was blurry. It was grainy. It was poorly lit. But, by God, it was my own photo of a Henslow’s sparrow.
Only it wasn’t.
Allen Chartier broke the news in an email—informing me that I had just posted a nice photo of a sedge wren. If there’s one thing that birders hate, it’s publicly making a misidentification, and I had gone three in a row. Bruce Bowman tried smoothing things over for me by posting his hopelessly blurred picture of an ovenbird, which he joked was the worst photo ever taken of a sedge wren. Other members chimed in with anecdotes about their own wrong calls. It didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel like the poster child for feeble-brained birders.
I’ll never learn, I told myself, but I had actually learned a lot by watching Linda raise the baby birds. Although little of it had to do with identifying species without humiliation, I could recognize a begging starling, grackle, robin, or Baltimore oriole when I heard them in the woods. And to add a much-needed jolt of levity to my altogether too serious search for that one good bird, I soon enlisted the help of my friend Bill Holm, a nonbirder who had his own peculiar reasons for assisting me.