Chapter Six
When Linda released our last birds of the summer, they didn’t act like our other birds. All five cedar waxwings melted into the woods, never to return for a handout.
“I guess we give the rest of our mealworms to Peg,” she said.
We suddenly understood the true meaning of “empty nest syndrome,” though we had no shortage of demanding birds in our house. After ten years with us, my African grey Timneh parrot, Stanley Sue, had died of a tumor, and her absence left a hole in my life that could only be filled by another African grey. Eighteen-month-old Bella had an easygoing temperament—for a parrot—and she wasn’t particularly noisy—for a parrot. Alongside her whistles and spoken self-assurances that she was a “big gray pretty pretty,” she had perfected a squawk that didn’t bother me. But Linda found it piercing and headache inducing. Discovering that the noise annoyed Linda, Bella made squawking a priority, because driving people crazy is how parrots amuse themselves.
Not even earplugs helped. “The sound goes right through my forehead,” Linda said. So when Linda was in the kitchen/dining room area with the pet birds, if Bella got too noisy we hustled her to a “time out” cage at the other end of the house.
One Saturday morning while in transit through the living room, she launched herself from my hand and flew in circles. White cat Moobie high-tailed it into the bedroom as if pursued by a hawk. Imperious “diluted tabby” Lucy barely deigned to raise her eyes as she groomed herself on her chair. As I scooped her off the floor, a flutter of black and yellow passed the window. From its tiny size and blown-leaf flight as it headed for the woods, I recognized it as a warbler.
After putting Bella in her cage, I grabbed my camera and binoculars. “I’m going out to look for birds,” I hollered. “Be back in a few minutes.”
The screen door slammed behind me as my feet hit the grass. I heard a muffled response from Linda back in the house and kept on moving despite a pang of guilt. I should have asked if she wanted to come along. But I had been waiting for weeks for the warblers to arrive, and one small straggly flock might be all that we got this fall. I didn’t want her to slow me down, which was ironic since one of my original attractions to birding was that it gave us something fun to do together. I had become altogether too serious, and the fun was dribbling away as I started to view the birds as my adversaries.
During the summer I had cut a path through the weeds with a grass whip. Though physical exertion didn’t agree with me, I took satisfaction in laying waste to a swath of vegetation with each swing of an arm. As I scurried along my little avenue, I heard the chick-a-dee-dee-dee call and remembered that my friend Dirk Richardson had once told me that warblers like to hang out with black-capped chickadees, because the chickadees are skillful foragers that lead them to food.
Suddenly the birds were on both sides of me, close but eaten up by trees. I saw only parts and pieces. An olive back. The glint of a yellow breast, dissected by leaves. A black-and-white tail. An eye with a ring around it. Then the fully assembled birds tumbled through the air to the river, chickadees leading the way. One jiggled behind a leaf, teasing, shy about showing himself. I barely breathed, binoculars growing heavy, until the warbler broke out, perching in plain view, but as a silhouette against the sky.
I cursed the trees and all of their leaves. It seemed unwise to curse the sun. So I cursed the birds as they took flight. I cursed the thickets that prevent me from leaving the path. I cursed the world, the cause of my stupidity. And I cursed a bear, any bear. Where was a bear when I needed one to put me out of my misery?
I thought of my sister Joan and my childhood neighbor Terry Gray catching grasshoppers in the vacant lot next door while I hung back terrified of handling the bugs. Terry delighted in grossing me out by showing me his brown-streaked hands. “They spit tobacco on you when you catch them.” This never troubled Linda, who was also a grasshopper grabber. One of her fondest memories of childhood was finding a spotted salamander in the pump house and enjoying the feel of its cold, damp skin when she picked it up. That wouldn’t have been me.
When the long-eared owl like this opened its eyes, it stared right through me with haughty, spooky grandeur.
Even humorous images of animals scared me when I was little, including Howdy Doody Show puppet Flub-a-Dub, a doglike creature with a duck bill and parts from six other creatures. The Flub-a-Dub fear factor paled in comparison to Morrell Gipson’s Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat. This book about a bear who sits on and squashes woodland animals’ homes gave me nightmares as a child and still evoked echoes of dread.
Unable to find a bear, I found another warbler on my trudge back toward the house. The drab-on-top, some-yellow-underneath bird zipped across our all-but-dried-up seasonal pond and embedded itself in a bush. I tracked it almost to the edge of the “finger puddles”—two spots that stayed wet all year due to water seepage from an underground spring. I needed to get closer, so I plunked down my foot on a mat of creeping Charlie.
I sank in mud up to the top of my left calf-high boot, pitching forward and catching myself on my right knee. The fall jolted me, but it didn’t trouble me at first. I had avoided landing face down in the water, and my brand-new pair of $350 binoculars were safe. Although I’d lost my bird, I carried a mental image of two other warblers I’d glimpsed, and I’d look them up when I got home.
I tried to stand and couldn’t budge my left boot. With rubber slip-ons it should have been easy to free my stocking foot, but the mud gripped so tightly, I might as well have been wearing lace-ups. I pulled and pulled, and the mud pulled back.
Our house stood at the top of the hill. Through the same leaves that had hidden the warbler, I could see Linda moving around as she put breakfast on the table. I considered screaming, but she would have the radio on, and I had left my cell phone in my dresser. This was justice—my punishment for bolting out into the woods without her. Surely I was panicking, I thought. I only needed to relax, and my foot would slide right out of the boot. No good. Millions of years from now, explorers would puzzle over my fossilized skeleton. On top of my bones they’d find the remains of Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat.
Behind me was a tree. From the tree a branch conveniently hung down to the ground. Raising myself to a wobbly standing position, I swiveled and managed to catch hold of it. With a mighty two-handed heave that nearly pulled my arms out by the roots, I uprooted my foot from the vise of my boot. The boot wouldn’t budge when I yanked at it, forcing me to hobble back to the house on one galosh and one mud-encrusted sock.
“Is that you, sweetie?” Linda asked when I slammed the basement door. No, it’s Long John Silver, I wanted to say. But I thought it best to keep my mishap to myself until I could think of a valiant way to frame it. “Breakfast will be a little late,” she hollered down the stairs. “One of the eggs from the barn was bad, and I have to start all over.”
Putting on a spare pair of galoshes, I grabbed a shovel. With difficulty and a protesting thwack from the mud, I succeeded in prying the boot loose. The underground current must have created a quicksand-like super suction effect, and I was fortunate not to have blundered into the muck with both feet.
Back at home I retrieved my mental photos of the two warblers and ran them through my reference books. I identified one as a Kirtland’s warbler and the other as a Connecticut warbler. This was the same as a strikeout, since the odds against finding a Kirtland’s in our woods were beyond astronomical, and the rare and secretive Connecticut would have skulked through the ground cover instead of flitting from tree to tree. I had mixed up the parts and pieces of several birds and combined them in Flub-a-Dub fashion.
Next time I’d go looking for salamanders instead.
Happy to take a break from misidentifying warblers, I discovered from my online group that the shorebird migration continued in full swing. In addition to the usual look-alike plovers and sandpipers, people were reporting species at Muskegon Wastewater that even a know-nothing like me could pick out of a birdie lineup. I had no intention of returning to that dismal spot, I told myself. If I wanted an exercise in futility in a location hazardous to my health, I could let my boots lead me back to our underground spring. My resolve wasn’t exactly rock solid, though.
“My back isn’t good enough to sit in the car for so long,” Linda said when I asked her to take the fifty-minute drive with me again. “Didn’t you tell me you’d never go back?”
“I just thought you might be interested. I absolutely don’t want to go.”
My friend Bill Holm’s enthusiasm shocked me. “Birding at a wastewater facility? How can I say no?”
I didn’t have any birding friends. I didn’t have many friends, period, and out of desperation I had given Bill a call. “I have to warn you, it’s ugly and stinky.”
“When do we leave?”
“And you can’t really get out and walk around. You pretty much have to do the whole thing from your car.”
Bill insisted on driving. When he picked me up, he overflowed with merriment at the idea of what we were doing. Most shorebird enthusiasts use high-powered spotting scopes to identify the skittish birds at a distance. Bill laughed until his face turned red when I lugged out my Celestron astronomical telescope with its six-inch diameter tube and counterweighted tripod and dumped the assembly in the backseat.
“At least you’ll be the first to log the constellation Cygnus,” he said.
As we merged onto I-96 and he nudged his Volvo “Turbo” to ninety mph, I interrupted his chortling to read a list of reported birds that I wanted to see. “Black-bellied plover, American golden-plover, Wilson’s phalarope, those are all pretty easy to identify.”
“Let’s do what all the other liars do and just pretend we saw them.”
I was shocked. “Don’t you want to actually see some birds? That’s why we’re going.”
“I would consider it a bonus, yes. But I doubt that any of the birds you mentioned are there. I doubt that most of those birds even exist.”
Bill was briefly speechless when we tooled up the incline to the dike system and he saw the first of two lake-size lagoons. We watched through binoculars as an employee in a rowboat took water samples several hundred feet offshore. “Has anyone else reported the Ty-D-Bol man?” he asked.
Not far from us a trio of birders took turns peering through a spotting scope at a shorebird perched on the end of an outflow pipe. “Want to see what they’re looking at?”
“And leave the car?”
I strolled over and introduced myself, instantly forgetting everyone except Scott Manly, whose name I knew from the online group. Not only was Scott an excellent birder, but he was also the pastor of three churches in nearby Ionia. After getting a telescopic view of a nonbreeding plumage dunlin—which might as well have been a Stalin for all I knew about it—I told Bill that our best bet for seeing birds was to putter around in search of other birders. So we scanned the dike roads with binoculars and found what appeared to be a sizable crowd on the south side of the east lagoon.
As we got closer the black-coated birders turned into fence-sitting turkey vultures at the foot of an immense landfill. The number of crows and starlings scavenging along the fence line defied calculation. But on top of a steep hill, a bulldozer teetered and tottered, and in its wake the most gulls I’d ever seen in my life shrieked and fought each other for first dibs at the trash being dozed. Just as I was about to remark that we had arrived at a little corner of hell, Bill braked hard and asked, “Is there any way we can get closer to that?” He leaped out the door and snapped at least fifty photos of the seething flock.
“That’s pretty smart,” I said when he slid back in. “You can study your pictures later to find out if there are any rare gulls mixed in with the ring-bills.”
He looked at me as if I were insane. “It’s not a picture of the gulls. It’s a picture of the guy in the bulldozer.” After we had wrung the last dribble of charm from the setting, we drove along the east side of the lagoon, scattering birds ahead of us. “You did see all of those people by the cement thingies when we first came in,” Bill said.
“No. They must have found something. We should go back there.”
“Hang on.” He increased our speed, raising a cloud of dust that could be seen in Ohio.
“I didn’t tell you, but we’re supposed to have a permit to be here. So we might not want to go so fast.”
He jammed on the brakes, pitching my telescope against the backs of our seats. “It would make a nice shortcut if we could get to that road down there,” he said.
“Unfortunately we’re going the wrong way, and there isn’t room to turn around.”
“Watch me.” I kept my eyes on the floor as he nosed his front tires to the edge of the drop-off, throwing his car into reverse when a wheel started to slide down. “Attaboy, Turbo.” A backward thrust bottomed us out with a thump that should have taken out his exhaust system. “Almost got it!” he cried as he spun the wheel and skidded us forward. Gravel pinged against the undercarriage like buckshot. I gripped the seatbelt, wondering if I should lunge for the door handle if we went over. After two more jolts, we somehow avoided a plummet and zipped back to connect with the parallel road.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been with Bill that he had expressed a desire to do anything. He was always perfectly happy/annoyed to do whatever I did. But as we approached the main service drive he asked, “Where was the area that smelled so bad that you and Linda couldn’t stand it? That’s what I want to see.” When I described it, he said, “Yes, the cement thingies. That’s where those people were.”
I still hadn’t seen any notable birds so far other than the dunlin. But the best and worst parts of the morning speedily approached as Bill cruised past the administration building and took us back up the ramp to the lagoon where we had started. Scott and the other two birders had left, and I didn’t see anyone at what I’d learned were called the Rapid Infiltration Basins, where Linda and I had met our Waterloo. We’d found shorebirds there a few weeks ago, so I decided it was worth another look.
“There’s no room to park down there,” I said. “We’ll have to park here and walk.” I unbuckled my seatbelt. Bill didn’t slow down.
“Turbo will make room. You don’t want to carry the Hubble Telescope all that way.”
The gulls that lined the concrete wall in front of churning water must have been used to vehicles. Only a few lazily flapped away as we slid by them into a turnoff. “I don’t think we’re supposed to park here,” I said, but he was already out of the car and pointing at shorebirds below us.
After making a quick scan with binoculars, I lugged the Celestron out of the back seat. It was the first time I’d tried it as a spotting scope, and it fought me quite literally at every turn. The equatorial mount was designed for following the celestial arcs of stars and planets and not for up-down, right-left navigation. The optics presented another problem. Everything is upside down through an astronomical telescope. Lunar and planetary maps are printed that way for observers. So to view birds right side up I had to turn my back toward what I wanted to see while bending down over the scope. It was clumsy, but the image of a black-bellied plover was razor sharp.
Lucky for me, the bird was in breeding plumage and easy to distinguish from typical brown-on-top, white-underneath shorebirds thanks to its brown, black, and white-on-top, black-underneath coloration—and a crisp white dividing line between upper and lower parts. Nearby a similarly shaped bird stood around looking for something to do. I checked my field guide to verify that the white-speckled-brown-on-top, brown-speckled-white-underneath little beauty was a previously reported juvenile American golden-plover.
“Sure enough,” said Bill without much caring what he was assenting to.
Both plovers nest so far up in the Arctic they have to fly south to visit Santa. They show up in Michigan each year on the way to or from the bottom of the globe. To catch a glimpse of them you have to pick just the right moment to be in just the right marsh, flooded field, or wastewater management cell. They’re so striking that if either landed on your head, you’d take it as a sign from heaven. Not all admirers appreciated them for their physical beauty alone. Barrows in Michigan Bird Life says of the American golden-plover, “They are always good eating, and especially in autumn when they have fed for a few weeks on seeds, berries, and insects, at a distance from salt water.”
Hearing footsteps on the gravel, I pretended to be so preoccupied with my viewing that I hadn’t heard footsteps on the gravel.
“Seeing any good birds?” a man in a multipocketed jacket asked. Fifty feet away, a dusty SUV idled with its passenger door open.
“Black-bellied plover and American golden-plover,” I said proudly, peering backward through my Celestron. I stepped aside and gestured that he was free to look.
He gave my fat-tube telescope a bug-eyed stare and with a quick up-down flick of his binoculars said, “You are correct. Black-bellied plover and American golden-plover.” He pointedly rhymed “plover” with “hover,” and not with “over,” as I had done. He motioned the driver of the SUV over. “I’ve got a couple of nice plovers here.”
We had been dismissed because of my mispronunciation and stargazer scope, and Bill wasn’t having it. Reaching into Turbo’s trunk, he fished out an empty Smirnoff’s bottle, held it in the air, and said, “If you want to see even more ploovers, you should try our special bird-attracting fluid.” He pretended to take a swig and offered the bottle to them.
Multipocket shook his head. He said to his driver, “I think Jim has the Wilson’s phalarope at the south end of the center dike.”
“I’m not surprised,” Bill told him as they walked away. “This special bird-attracting fluid has been known to pull in the floop-de-dope.”
So much for my introduction to the flesh-and-blood birder community. I only hoped that none of these guys was one of my virtual buddies. For all of ten seconds, I was furious at Bill. Then I found myself laughing so hard I could barely stagger back to his car. Unlike the rest of us, he knew how to have fun birding. And as we followed the SUV at a discreet distance, piggy-backing on their observations, he spotted a pair of birds on his own that turned out to be horned grebes. I had never seen one before.
Just before he left the property, he slammed Turbo to a halt and showed me a large brown raptor on the ground in a grassy field. Paging through my field guides, we both agreed that it could be nothing other than a golden eagle.
“We found a really good bird,” I said. “And we don’t even have snooty attitudes.”
“We do have my special bird-attracting fluid.”
“I know. But a golden eagle!”
Like a bowling ball rolled down the hill of a city street, this misidentification would have unexpected consequences.
I should have learned from my previous claims of having seen a “parking lot” northern goshawk and northern harrier. But after failing to find another all-brown raptor in my field guides, I felt sure enough about my find to write up my sighting and hit the send button. Even though the golden eagle is a western bird, a few make their way east, and I had read reports of them showing up at Muskegon Wastewater in previous years.
Almost immediately I received a congratulatory email from Scott Manly, who asked me where I’d found the bird. I described the place, and he wrote back that he had seen a rough-legged hawk with “dark morph” brown plumage variation at that same spot, and could this have been the bird I’d seen?
I dug in my heels. “No, it was definitely a golden eagle,” I wrote. “It looked exactly like the pictures in my field guides.”
Scott mentioned details about the plumage and the beak structure of the bird he’d seen and wondered if he could email me a photo that he had taken. I knew when I was licked, and after kicking several trees and hollering at our ducks, I sent an announcement to the group that I’d been wrong again. It had been a rough-legged hawk. “Sorry for yet another erroneous report.”
“You can’t be expected to know what that eagle looks like when you’ve never even seen it,” Linda said—which didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.
It was childish. It was petty. It was egocentric. But from then on I cringed whenever I saw a posting from Scott. The good pastor had gotten the goods on me. Someday I’d even the score, although I didn’t know how. Months would pass before I got my chance.
Identifying warblers became much easier when October rolled around. There was only one species in our woods, the late-to-migrate yellow-rumped warbler. The “butter-butts” were so plentiful, they outnumbered our goldfinches and chickadees put together.
They bustled through the woods, cartwheeling through the crowns of trees and looping out to snag a bug in flight. They kept tabs on one another with sharp tchep call notes—and by flashing the big yellow rump patch above their tail. The males were easy to identify with their streaked sooty upperparts, streaked sides, and yellow patches on the sides, head, and rump. The females and juveniles were duller, but the yellow rump gave them away. We watched as they stuffed themselves on clusters of bright yellow berries.
“I don’t know what kind of tree has berries like that,” Linda said. She tried to grab a handful to take home, but she couldn’t reach them. This turned out to be a good thing.
I posted a photo of a yellow-rump gorging himself and asked if anyone in the birding group could identify the tree.
“Those are poison ivy berries,” Allen Chartier emailed me.
“They’re not growing on the ground,” I replied. “They’re dangling from tree limbs.”
Allen said that if I took a closer look I’d find woody-stemmed poison ivy plants climbing up the trees and spreading out to mimic branches. I thanked him for the information and thanked heaven that Linda wasn’t two feet taller. As far as birding disasters went, poison ivy berries in the hand would have trumped a boot in the mud.
The yellow-rump is one warbler that warbler chasers may not be pleased to see. So many come through in the spring, they can be a distraction that causes birders to miss the less common species traveling with them. It’s a different story in the fall, however. They are one of the last warblers to migrate, long after most of the choice species have come and gone, so they aren’t such troublemakers. And unlike other autumn warblers that stay only hours as they pass through an area, yellow-rumps can linger for weeks as long as they can find something to eat. And we had a bumper crop of poison ivy.
They cheered us on our daily walk through our woods. We found as many as three dozen working the trees along 150 feet of riverfront. They were constantly in motion. It took patience to catch more than a glimpse of them, due to finely tuned instincts that sent them catapulting off a branch a nanosecond before we found them with binoculars. When they zipped from tree to tree, it didn’t look like they were flying under their own power. It looked like they were being blasted by the wind. But I had no doubt about their motor control when it came to foraging. Within two weeks they had stripped the trees of berries, and their numbers dwindled.
Late one October afternoon in the slanted rays of a low sun we watched bees, wasps, and hoverflies gathering pollen from clumps of wild asters. In the shallow river water, whirligig beetles resembling animated sunflower seeds bumped into one another, going nowhere. Collisions were so frequent that we dubbed them the “excuse-me” bugs. The insects were our only companions now—the warblers had moved on.
“All of the other birds are back at the house,” Linda said. She was right. Thanks to the titmice and finches there were so many seed hulls under our feeders, I had to break out the snow shovel to scoop them up. I should have used a different shovel, because its appearance was all the prompting it took to bring on the first snow. The woods seemed even quieter now, though countless tracks told us there was no shortage of animal life.
We met a hearty soul paddling a kayak. When Linda asked if he had been seeing any birds, he didn’t act surprised by the question. “If you like ducks, winter is the time to see them on the river. You’ve got your mergansers, you’ve got your golden-eyes, you’ve got other ducks you don’t get in the summer.”
“Ducks in the winter?” she asked as the kayaker floated away. We could hardly believe it and vowed to keep taking our walks no matter how bad the weather got.
Winter chuckled at our vow. Heavy snow soon buried our path. A sudden thaw revealed its edges. Then a refreeze turned everything to ice. After that I confined my skating and falling to the immediate yard, content from a safety point of view to do my birding through the dining room picture window. We had several dozen American tree sparrows—which we identified by the smudgy spot on their otherwise clear breast—and a few dark-eyed juncos scratching the ground like hens. Nothing noteworthy showed up until the afternoon in January when the phone was ringing as I walked into the house.
“Sweetie, is that you?” Linda said. I wanted to ask whom she expected to find in our dining room, but I didn’t bring that up because she sounded excited. “Your cell phone was turned off, so I’ve been calling and calling and calling to tell you that right now at this very moment I’m standing on Washington Street next to the cemetery looking at a long-eared owl. If you hurry, you can see it, too.”
My initial response was panic. I was here—the owl was there. What if I didn’t get from here to there in time? My second response was to wonder if this could even be true. “How did you find a long-eared owl?”
“Brian Drake called about an hour ago and said that he was out walking his dog and saw some bluebirds making a big fat fuss and going after something, so he looked to see what it was, and he found a long-eared owl in the tree, and it’s still sitting there.”
We barely knew Brian and Pat Drake except by their reputation as accomplished local birders, and it surprised me that he had phoned us about the owl. But I had left a message on their answering machine the previous summer about the Pinckney Road birds, so he was probably returning the favor. Well, a long-eared owl was a big hooting deal, easily worth Darlene’s Henslow’s sparrow, sedge wren, and bobolinks combined. I’d only seen one owl in my life, the barred owl that haunted our yard on summer nights asking anyone in earshot, “Who cooks for you?”—a question that had to have mystical significance, since owls were too busy being folkloric entities to waste their time on trivial matters.
I put on the winter jacket, boots, hat, scarf, and gloves that I had peeled off moments earlier and jumped into the car with camera and binoculars. A mere seven minutes of drive time separated me from Linda, but I cringed as each swipe of the wipers across the windshield suggested the beats of the owl’s wings as it left its roost, never to be seen by me—or by anyone else.
As birds go, the long-eared owl isn’t unusually secretive. Some sparrows and marsh birds are far more reclusive. But this owl is scarce in Michigan, and just by nature of being an owl, the long-ear is difficult to find during the night hours when it’s active. In the daytime it retreats to a hiding place inside thick foliage. When approached, the owl flattens and stretches its body to blend into a tree with such success that after I skidded to a halt and trudged through the snow to meet Linda, for the longest time I had no idea what she was pointing at.
“Right up there, under those branches, close to the trunk.”
“I don’t see a thing. Are you sure it didn’t fly away?”
“I’m looking right at it,” she told me. “You have to look up under those front branches that are in the way.”
I shook my head. How frustrating to be within twenty feet of an owl and not be able to see it. “I see a bunch of green, I see branches, I see the trunk, and that’s all I’m able to see.” I was getting whiny. Linda grabbed me by the shoulders, walked me two paces forward, tipped my head back, and waved a finger toward an unremarkable brown shape that I had taken for a strip of bark. “Good grief,” I said. “It’s an owl.” The rabbit-like “ear tufts” (which are really only feathers) gave it away. Then I noticed the orange face. The bird opened its eyes and stared right through me with haughty grandeur spooky enough to embarrass me as a gawking intruder. It seemed impossibly tall and wraith-like. Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion calls it “a Great Horned Owl drawn by El Greco.”
The owl had embedded itself so deeply in the branches, my autofocus camera wouldn’t focus. Only by contorting my body was I able to get a few clear shots. I watched the bird for a while, but it wasn’t doing anything, and soon the thrill of observation gave way to discomfort at the January cold. I followed Linda home, and as I took off my jacket the curious notion hit me that I should call Scott Manly about the owl. Brian Drake had reached out to us out of the blue, and I felt that I should reach out to Scott. It would be my way of evening up the score—which had never meant getting back at him for my embarrassment over the golden eagle gaffe. It meant making up for my querulous emails disputing his ability to identify a rough-legged hawk.
“I’m definitely interested,” he told me. “The long-eared owl has been my nemesis bird.” I took this as an indication that Scott shared my view of birds as adversaries, but then he explained that “nemesis bird” is a term for a species that a birder repeatedly tries and repeatedly fails to find.
After spending the next thirty minutes congratulating myself for doing a good turn, I decided that it wouldn’t be so good after all if Scott couldn’t locate the bird, even though I had given him precise directions right down to the address of the house across the street. Linda hadn’t seen the owl until Brian Drake had come outside and pointed it out, and I had been helpless until Linda played puppeteer with me. Suiting up one more time against the elements, I arrived back on Washington Street to see Scott wandering through the cemetery a block away from Mr. Long Ears.
Scott was thrilled to finally get to see the owl. But it wasn’t until I received an email from him later that I realized this sighting had more significance than simply crossing a species off his “nemesis bird” list and adding it to his “life list” of observed species.
“I drove to Belding this morning to make sure some handbills were processed by the post office for some upcoming religious meetings I was conducting on science and faith,” he wrote. “A bit anxious about that venture, I had been praying about it on my drive, and casually requested of the Lord some token of His presence—like an owl, because owls have always had special significance to me. So when you called, I couldn’t believe it and wasted no time getting to Lowell to check it out.”
I asked Scott what owls meant to him, and he said, “Owls pop up in profound moments in my life. I was driving to church one snowy Sabbath morning, having had quite a time wrestling in prayer with no apparent answer. To be honest, I was really struggling. And as we drove to Portland, I again thought, ‘I really could use a hug from God right now, like an owl or something.’ A minute or two later, I looked up through the windshield at a largish bird in the branches right over the road, and to my utter astonishment, it was a barred owl!”
Scott struck me as the epitome of a “scientific” birder who knew when and where to look for species, keenly tuned into time of year, habitat, and bird behavior. But obviously he brought a whole lot more than a bean-counting approach to his passion. It was all part of a grander context that had deep connections with his life and beliefs.
Even the smallest bird is large enough to hold the biggest notion of what it is about. I admired the austerity of the sandpipers and plovers that breed in the most barren and remote Arctic places only to fly thousands of miles south to winter at the bottom of the globe. As penance for shunning humanity, they forage along the way in wastewater treatment ponds, maintaining dignity as I ogle them and mispronounce their names. And the yellow-rumped warblers deserve praise for making lemonade out of life’s poison fruits.
But owls occupy a far more portentous position. They turn our concept of what a bird is upside-down. They aren’t fragile, puny, or timid, and unlike other raptors, they aren’t night blind. They embrace the darkness in a death-defying, three-dimensional manner that seems to laugh at the idea of mortality. The fiercest wolf or jaguar that stalks and kills at night still clings desperately to the earth with its toes, while the owl risks its life each time that it leaves the safety of a roost and flings itself into the void. What must daytime with its garish cartoon contrasts look like to such a master of subtlety?
For a scientist’s explanation of how an owl works its nighttime magic, I asked wildlife biologist and owl expert Stacey O’Brien, author of the New York Times bestseller Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl.
“Owls have excellent vision at night, but that is not what they use as their main tool for spotting and homing in on prey,” Stacey told me. “Their entire physiology is set up for them to hunt using their sense of hearing, which is so sophisticated that it’s almost beyond our ability to comprehend. The large area that our brains devote to visual processing is instead devoted to auditory processing in the owl. Literally, there are layers of neurons specific to processing different frequencies of sound. They have an auditory map of the world in their brains in the same way that we have a visual map of our world.”
According to Stacey, when an owl is hunting and senses prey, as he homes in on it, he always keeps his face pointed directly at his target. “His face is like a satellite dish—perfectly set up to gather auditory data accurately and feed it to his beautifully adapted brain to create an elegant 3D sound picture of the exact location of his prey.” The facial disk that collects this auditory data is so meticulously set up with each feather funneling the sound so precisely that if a small chunk of facial feathers goes missing, “the owl will over- or understrike the prey, missing it altogether. It’s an astonishingly elegant system and stunningly accurate,” she said.
An owl’s ears aren’t symmetrical like ours. One ear is placed low on his head and is angled upward. The other is high on his head and angled downward. This odd arrangement gives the owl an auditory advantage. “When we hear a sound, we have to turn our head to triangulate it because we hear it across only one plane, but owls don’t have to do that extra step.” Stacey told me that an owl can navigate a thick forest without flying into branches and twigs because not only can he see them with his excellent night vision, but he can also hear the way the air flows around them. “It’s as good as a very clear image would be to us,” she said.
In addition to studying owls in the lab and in the wild, Stacey had the privilege of adopting an injured barn owl named Wesley who was unable to be released to the wild. “When I was living in close quarters with Wesley, he often responded to what I thought was nothing. But whenever I investigated, I would find that there was something, such as a bug crawling along the ground or behind a wall. He was hearing the tiny footsteps!” Shortly after moving into a new apartment, Wesley heard the running water in the bathroom just once, drew an auditory map in his brain, and used it to fly directly to the room and land on the sink.
“He was constantly challenging my sense of how we know where something is or what it is,” Stacey said. “It’s hard to conceptualize how completely visual we are until we come across a creature who uses an entirely different sense as his main source of information.”
While Stacey wowed me with the science of owl abilities, Scott made me think about the meaning of birds. He made me realize that in my teeth-gritting efforts to become a birder, I risked losing the sense of wonder that had once wrapped me around the little toe of a rose-breasted grosbeak. I had gone from gazing awestruck at the wildness of a pair of red-headed woodpeckers to wondering if it would be cheating to report the owl as my own find—I was the first member of the group to find it, after all—instead of enjoying a gorgeous owl for its own sake. Linda didn’t keep a species list, and her delight in seeing her fourth, fifth, and sixth eastern towhee was every bit as profound as her first. Then there was Bill Holm, who just wanted to have fun. He had the right idea with his bottle of special bird-attracting fluid. The spirit of the thing was what really counted.
I could do better than trying to make birding into a contest pitting me against the birds and against other birders. But I didn’t have to mend my ways immediately. Nobody but Linda, Brian Drake, and I knew that Brian had found the long-eared owl, and neither Brian nor Linda subscribed to the birding group. After wrestling with my conscience, I decided to grab some glory and report the owl to birders@great-lakes.net after all—giving Brian Drake full credit for the discovery, of course.
Although I hadn’t moved an inch closer to finding my own “good bird,” I took heart that even in winter one was nearby waiting to be seen. In fact, it was even closer than I suspected. Within a year, my dreams of a finding a rarity in my very own backyard would come to pass, but with a bittersweet twist.