Chapter Seven
Months had passed since the long-eared owl sighting. And now something else extraordinary was happening. As I stared out the window at our birdbath in disbelief, I tried thinking again about the significance that birds had in my life. But it was difficult to think with Linda laughing at what we were seeing. I couldn’t help laughing, too.
The string of small events that led up to my slack-jawed wonder at the scene outdoors had begun a few days earlier indoors when Linda told me, “Howard isn’t eating.” I wasted no time getting our pet dove to the vet. It hardly seemed possible that Howard had turned seventeen. While he still seemed hale, hearty, and sassy overall, we knew that birds can hide an illness or injury in order to maintain their position in the pecking order. An obviously weak individual might get harassed by other birds who don’t want a laggard threatening the well-being of the flock. Things like this made me glad I wasn’t a bird, or I would have been driven from the neighborhood years ago.
Dr. Richard Bennett, veterinarian for the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, examined Howard and told me that he had a crop infection. “Here’s where it started,” he told me, holding the squirming dove and pointing to pinkish spot on his beak. “It looks as if he’s been bitten by another bird.”
We always let Howard fly around the room with our parakeets before dinner. Mostly he chased the smaller birds, though in recent years he had spent time fending off his little blue-and-white admirer, Harvey, who amused us by trying to mate with him. In his ardor, Harvey must have nipped Howard’s beak.
“The infection is his beak isn’t serious, but it’s caused a crop infection, and that can be reason for concern,” Dr. Bennett said. He told me that unlike a parrot’s or parakeet’s beak, which has no more feeling than a fingernail, a dove’s beak carries a supply of blood. “It’s sensitive to pain, which is probably why he isn’t eating, but it’s very important that he eats. If there are any soft foods that he likes, give him those. And if he won’t take them, you may need to tube-feed him.”
I returned home with an oral antibiotic and a resolve to tempt Howard with all manner of delicacies, because I wanted to avoid force-feeding him at any cost. I’d been down that road years three earlier with our parrot Stanley Sue, and I didn’t want to go there again. It’s one thing squirting food into the crop of a gaping baby bird and quite another trying to get past the clamped beak of an uncooperative adult.
While I was busy rooting around in the refrigerator looking for leftovers, Linda chopped a few strands of cooked spaghetti into rice-size pieces, scattered them across the countertop, and opened the door of Howard’s cage, and within seconds he was stuffing himself. I should have been ecstatic, but I wouldn’t take yes for an answer. “We’re not out of the woods until he’s eating seeds,” I said. Then I proceeded to worry about him every moment of the day, envisioning worst-case scenarios during waking hours and bouncing in and out of sleep throughout the night. Even when I managed to push Howard out of my mind, a nameless dread clung to me like the black cloud over Joe Btfsplk’s head.
The next day was Labor Day. Instead of sitting around the house listening to me complain that the vet’s office was closed and we couldn’t rush Howard in if some obscure emergency materialized, Linda said, “Why don’t we go to Hoffmaster Park? You can look for birds, and I’ll look for stones on the beach.”
Muskegon County’s P. J. Hoffmaster State Park was one of our favorite spots, with its windswept dunes, three miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, and meandering paths through the woods—all great spots for finding different types of birds. As it turned out, we didn’t need to traipse any of these for me to score a species that I’d been trying to see for years.
The white-breasted nuthatch was common in our yard and one of the first birds Linda had taught me to recognize due to its habit of perching on a tree trunk upside-down. I could barely bend over to tie a shoe without feeling woozy, so I appreciated the nuthatch’s head-under-heels equilibrium. Then I learned that the white-breasted had a cousin in Michigan, the smaller, zippier, red-breasted nuthatch, which sports a black racing stripe through the eye and orangish underparts. They’re year-round residents north and west of us, visiting southern and eastern parts of the state in fall and winter but staying away from their pine forest haunts whenever I searched for them.
This highly unusual yellow-rumped warbler had been under my nose in our backyard for weeks when top-gun birder Caleb Putnam noticed it.
We rolled up to the visitors center at Hoffmaster Park and were about to hit the trail when Linda darted inside the building to use the bathroom. I followed as far as a wall of windows overlooking an artificial pond and immediately spotted a red-breasted nuthatch at the water. Its thereness made me doubt what I was seeing. The reality was somehow both more and less than I had expected, pitting a flesh, blood, and feathers individual against an idea of the bird that I’d envisioned from my field guides. It was more delicate of body than I’d imagined, less like a white-breasted nuthatch and more like a wren in its darting movements. It amazed me merely by existing, and that amazement knocked everything else out of my head—including my worries about Howard.
Linda joined me in time to see the nuthatch just before it shot back into the woods. My amazement lingered, contributing to a feeling of openness and calm as we followed the walkway up a dune, then down again to the beach. I puttered about taking photos of tiny shorebirds called sanderlings as they played tag with waves on the sand. Linda became totally absorbed with her hunt for stones and beach glass, following the shoreline, sanderling-like, until she dwindled to a speck in the distance. For once, I didn’t even check my watch. Hours, days, and maybe even weeks passed before the speck turned back into a person whose pockets were loaded with treasure.
Linda showed me her finds—a Petoskey Stone, a heart-shaped stone, a possible agate, a chip of polished green glass—but I was stuck in bird time with mental eyes still fixed upon the nuthatch, and I kept talking about the nuthatch on the hour-long drive home.
As I stashed my binoculars in the bottom drawer of the dresser, Linda hollered the excellent news that Howard was eating seed. Then she said, “Sweetheart, come quick. What’s this bird that’s splashing around in our birdbath?”
It was the same urgent voice I’d used so many years before when I called her to the window of her cabin to identify my first rose-breasted grosbeak. A red-breasted nuthatch flapped its wings in our birdbath. It stopped to fix me with what I took to be an ironic gaze. Then it flew off.
I wondered how this was possible. What did it mean that I saw a red-breasted nuthatch at home after seeing the first one in my life somewhere else on the same day?
“Maybe he’ll stick around for the winter,” Linda said. But we never saw him again.
Our hopes rose in December when a second red-breasted nuthatch appeared. He left after a couple of days. The only other interesting species to brave the snow was a yellow-rumped warbler who occasionally showed up at the suet feeder. Members of the birding group told me that while the vast majority of yellow-rumps migrate south, a very few may overwinter near rivers in Michigan. I posted a photo and didn’t give the bird another thought for weeks.
I did keep thinking about what birds meant to me. I felt peaceful, totally dialed into the present moment while searching for them, and not nearly as alienated from the world. A flash of wings had sufficient power to derail my internal monologue, but unlike Scott I couldn’t attach a transcendental meaning. The best I could do was to conclude that the significance of birds was that they had become significant in my life. If the reasoning seemed circular, the circularity followed the route of the red-breasted nuthatch species that first appeared fifty miles away and then looped back home for me.
I hadn’t forgotten about my quest for a rare bird. I regularly scanned the bushes for an ostrich or albatross, but opportunities for finding new species seemed to diminish as winter took hold. In early January it heartened me to read a report of a flock of snow buntings that regularly descended upon a farmer’s field near Lansing. The white-winged, white-breasted snow bunting would be a “life bird” for me. Even better, the poster noted that a few Lapland longspurs could be traveling with them, and Mr. Lapland was a fairly rare fellow. In my fervid imagination, other rarities might fall in with them, so I went through my reference books and boned up on northern birds known to visit the comparative sauna of southern Michigan during the winter.
The weather broke a few days later, skyrocketing the temperature up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit by 11:00 a.m. I probably wouldn’t do better than this until spring, by which time the buntings would be a melting memory. So I bundled up, turning my car heater up to the Molten Lava setting. The backseat held a scarf, a ski mask, an extra sweater, and a pair of Linda’s snow pants. I almost had enough raw material to construct a second Bob.
Following the instructions I’d printed out from an email, I piled into a snowdrift near the corner of Desolate Tundra Avenue and Impoverished Farm Road a few miles south of Lansing. In front of me stood a boarded-up house that leaned so far to one side, I expected Buster Keaton to rise from the grave just in time for it to fall on him. Twenty feet from the back door, a television antenna rested its limbs on two short stacks of cinder blocks. Guided by this landmark, I trudged through glittering sun and deepening snow until I reached the designated metal fence.
In hand and over my shoulder I carried my secret weapon, a compact birding telescope with 20–60X zoom eyepiece fixed to a collapsible tripod that permitted me to pan left and right, up and down, instead of locking me into equatorial arcs like my far heavier and ridiculously cumbersome astronomical rig. Best of all, the new scope let me face what I wanted to look at.
Shivering, I directed my attention toward an ice-encrusted field dotted by weed stubble. A plume of black smoke rose from the Lansing Consolidated Power and Pollution plant. Scanning the frozen wastes with binocs I caught a ripple of brown and white on the ground. Gotta be a bunting, I decided. Switching to the scope, I twiddled with the focus knob to sharpen the view of a Snickers wrapper impaled on a twig.
I had vastly underestimated the vastness of the fields that I needed to survey for the presence of a sparrow-size bird that could easily disappear into any of a few thousand ploughed furrows. I grappled with a surge of optimism when I brushed across an extremely distant flock with my binoculars, but my telescope turned the prospective buntings into a gaggle of Canada geese.
I knew that patience was the key to birding and resolved to stay put no matter how long it took. Surely the bunting flock would be visible soon, swollen as it had to be with the cold weather companions that I’d researched in my field guides. In addition to the Lapland longspur, I expected the pine siskin, common redpoll, hoary redpoll, white-winged crossbill, red crossbill, pine grosbeak, and evening grosbeak. I should have paid attention to habitat. These are finches of northern forests, while buntings and longspurs are ground birds of the tundra. According to Chapman, Lapland longspurs have the habit of “squatting just behind some clod, and, as their colors are nearly matched to the soil, they are not easily observed, nor will they move until you are within a few feet.”
I didn’t move from my spot because there was nothing to move forward toward. As one of the biggest clods in the area, I hoped to attract them if I waited quietly. The temperature had turned pleasant, thanks to the bunting-esque absence of the usual clouds in the Michigan sky. The warm sunlight convinced me to unzip my jacket, relying on a cocoon of body heat to keep me comfortable. The bubble of warmth clung to me like my hopes of still seeing my grail birds until a stiff wind rose up from nowhere and turned the world back into an icebox.
The freezing gusts blasted me broken kite−style back to my Ford Focus. I barely pried the door loose from the grip of winter and with difficulty pulled it shut behind me. As I glanced at the boarded-up farmhouse, I could have sworn it was leaning in the opposite direction now. Driving past an adjacent woodlot and spotting a No Hunting sign tacked to a tree, I fought a moral battle with myself, only deciding not to alter it to read No Buntings for want of a marking pen.
I hadn’t really expected to find the longspurs and other rarities, but I naively never doubted that I’d find the buntings. Chilled not just to the bone but chilled for all time, I wrapped myself in a blanket at home as I checked the birding group, hoping to revive my spirits with accounts of other birds pursued but never seen. Instead I read bunting and longspur reports on the eastern side of the state.
How far would I have to drive to find a decent bird? As it turned out, I wouldn’t have to drive anywhere at all. I received an email a few days later informing me that I might be hosting a very rare bird in my own backyard.
“Do you have more photos of the yellow-rumped warbler that’s visiting your yard?” Caleb Putnam asked me in the email. “The photo you posted seems to be showing a bird with a yellow throat. That would suggest the western Audubon’s subspecies, and there are only two accepted records of Audubon’s warbler in the state.”
I knew Caleb mainly by reputation as one of the top birders in this part of the country and as the Michigan Important Bird Areas program coordinator for Audubon, in charge of identifying and conserving designated sites that provide essential bird habitats. One of these areas is the Muskegon Wastewater Management System, where I once ran into a very helpful Caleb and peered through his scope at a peregrine falcon perched on top of a field irrigation rig. In 2005, he had participated in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s search for the reported but presumed extinct ivory bill woodpecker in eastern Arkansas. So I figured that if he was interested in my bird, it had to be something special.
Torn between excitement at having a rarity on our property and humiliation at failing to recognize it as such, I sent three more photos to Caleb. He confirmed that it looked like an Audubon’s and asked, “Is the bird chaseable?” I said that it might show up numerous times in one day—or it might not appear for several days. To Caleb this meant that the warbler was somewhere in the area. It could be chased and, with a little luck, found.
On Sunday morning, he rolled up in his Honda Civic wearing knee-high boots designed for serious slogging and a parka Sir Edmund Hillary would have envied. I soon discovered why he dressed so warmly. After staring at the suet feeder with me for fifteen minutes with no sign of the warbler, he hefted a spotting scope to his shoulder and strode off into the woods. Trying to find the bird away from the house struck me as a fool’s errand. It could be any direction and distance away, including on the other side of the river. Where would he even start to look?
When more than an hour had passed with no sign of Caleb, I started glancing out the window. His vehicle in our driveway indicated that he was still at large. I didn’t imagine that a veteran of trackless Arkansas swamps would lose his way in our narrow patch of woods. But he could have gotten caught in the same groundwater muck that had stolen my boot during warmer weather, or he might have fallen victim to Mr. Bear Squash-You-All-Flat. It was cold enough outside that his absence worried me. A full two hours after I’d last seen him, he finally reappeared, looking every bit as fresh as when he’d arrived.
I was sure that his extended time away indicated bad news. Linda made him a sandwich, and between mouthfuls he told us, “I found the bird about a quarter mile east of here near the river. It was all by itself—there were no other yellow-rumps—but there were titmice, chickadees, creepers, and nuthatches. It was very high in the treetop. And this is a frustratingly quiet bird, so I couldn’t go by the call.”
“How did you even know what it was if it was so high up?” asked Linda.
“I called it down using an iPod and Audubon’s warbler chip notes.” He shook his head as he drank some water. “If it hadn’t been for the iPod and speakers, I wouldn’t have been able to get a respectable look at this bird. I managed to get two photos, but I need much better detail. Most of the time, it looked very plain-faced. But at other times I noticed a very slight suggestion of an outline to the auricular—the ear—that suggested a myrtle and Audubon’s intergrade.”
“A cross between the eastern and western yellow-rumps?”
He nodded as he finished his sandwich and then asked if he might try again later in the week. Before leaving he dropped the little bombshell that he’d also run into a yellow-bellied sapsucker and a common redpoll. In two hours, he had located two species in our woods that I hadn’t managed to find in eighteen years.
This was birding on a different plane, wrapped in subtleties of avian anatomy that I knew zilch about. Caleb wasn’t alone at this level of expertise. Other top-gun birders tried to get diagnostic photos of the yellow-rump. A few days later Caleb waited in the side yard with Adam Byrne, who held the record for seeing the greatest number of bird species in Michigan—a stunning 389 at the time. They caught glimpses of the warbler high in the trees and nothing more. Next, the two men huddled in our basement behind a half-open door staking out the suet feeder, but Linda had to roust them when she dragged out the hose to fill the goose pen wading pools. As a consolation for casting them out into the cold, she warmed them with cups of hot chocolate.
On Sunday Adam joined Caleb again along with area birders Rick Brigham and Curtis Dykstra. Skye Haas, who lives in Marquette, in the Upper Peninsula, detoured to Lowell after visiting his family in Detroit. All received hot chocolate from Linda, and at 2:23 p.m., Caleb, Adam, Curtis, and I were treated to a close encounter with the warbler. We held our breaths as the yellow-rump zoomed into the yard and perched upon a chicken-wire fence just long enough for a photo opportunity. Caleb showed me the smooth trick of holding his point-and-shoot digital camera against the eyepiece of his spotting scope, using a homemade plastic adapter to position the camera perfectly for clear shots of the bird. This was my first encounter with a technique called digiscoping, which proved to be too complicated for fumble-fingered me when I tried it later.
After this appearance, word spread about our unusual warbler, and we never knew when we might look out the window to find strangers looking in at us. Early one morning as the sun barely peeped above the horizon, Linda sprinted out the basement door with a jacket thrown over her nightgown to do her usual wake-up jog around our redbud tree and almost collided with two birders in the gloom.
“They scared me,” Linda told me when I arrived home from work. “I didn’t expect to see anyone there that early.”
Nearly as frightening were the two men and a woman from Kalamazoo who materialized on our front porch to ask if I would take them to the warbler, as if I were keeping it in a cage. When I left them on well-trodden ground across from the suet feeder, they took the news well that the bird had been AWOL for the past three days. Twenty minutes later they traipsed back to the door beaming with their good luck at having seen it.
I felt lucky, too, to be hosting such a noteworthy bird—but less lucky when Caleb emailed me later that he couldn’t verify it as the third record of an Audubon’s warbler in Michigan. “My final decision is that I don’t know what the bird is,” he said. “My best guess is that it is probably within range for a pure Audubon’s warbler, but that’s only a guess. All of the field marks seem to add up, except the presence of a slight supercilium behind the eye, which could indicate that the bird is an introgressed Audubon’s x myrtle warbler. So I didn’t submit it to the MBRC [Michigan Bird Records Committee] for that reason.” No amount of nagging or tears from me would change his mind. The faintest hint of an “eyebrow” kept the bird—and me—out of the record books.
Whether it was actually a pure Audubon’s warbler or merely a 99.999 percent Audubon’s, I had still succeeded in finding a “good bird.” Unfortunately, finding took a backseat to identifying, and in the end this was Caleb’s bird, not mine. I reported it as such to the birding group and girded my loins for an avalanche of replies. The post received less interest than I expected. It didn’t receive a single response. The warbler wasn’t a rare species, but a rare subspecies or subspecies intergrade, and few birders who kept life lists pursued anything so esoteric. Still, this seemed pretty exciting to me. And it hadn’t taken a trip to Hoffmaster Park to bring the warbler to our yard.
The Audubon’s warbler may have been a fluke, but, reliably if irregularly, an occurrence known as an irruption takes place every few winters, and it has nothing to do with my sensitive skin. Due to a shortage of native seeds, fruits, and—in the case of owls—small mammals, bird species that normally spend the frigid months in the far north venture south in search of eats. Overpopulation might drive them southward, too. Except for my miscalculation with the no-show Lansing snow bunting flock, I had never expected to have the chance to see crossbills, redpolls, and pine siskins. But these “winter finches” were suddenly showing up not only in southern Michigan but also as far south as Virginia, Kentucky, and Kansas.
The crossbill is unique among birds in having a simultaneous overbite and underbite. The weirdly shaped beak somehow gives it expertise in extracting seeds from pinecones. Having gone through life suffering from an inability to use the simplest tool, I envied the crossbill and started scanning conifers for the bird whenever I was unfortunate enough to find myself outdoors in freezing temperatures. Report after report of crossbills in southeastern Michigan cropped up in the birding group, but they either consisted of brief, one-time appearances or demanded long hikes through the snow.
Then birding group member Dave Sing starting posting about a mixed group of crossbills, redpolls, and pine siskins that hung out in his side yard in the artsy little city of Chelsea. Side-yard birding was only one step removed from birding from the car. So I contacted Bill Holm, who agreed to drive.
“But you have to buy me lunch at some crummy Chinese buffet,” he said.
As well loved for his insights about meteorology as for his detailed reports of birds, Dave was my go-to guy when I had questions about groundwater seepage, tree fungus, ice-crystal precipitation, and other natural phenomena. He didn’t hesitate to give two people he had never met permission to tromp around his yard while he and his wife, Cheri, were away at work. “We have two large outdoor cats, a black Maine coon named Perry and Voltaire, a huge fluffy Norwegian forest cat, that are very gregarious and may join you,” he told me. “They have little interest in the birds. Rabbits, voles, and mice are their forte.”
Not being one of those people who drive to the ends of the earth to see a bird, I felt daunted by the 210-mile round-trip distance to Chelsea. Bill pooh-poohed it, though. He and his wife, Marcia, had just returned from Cuba, where they had been handing out donated medical supplies to hospitals for a Grand Rapids−based relief organization. As we shot down the highway into blowing snow, Bill described some of the shockingly bad conditions in the country. “They have ration cards for basic needs, and it’s getting so awful there, the government just removed soap,” he said. “And Cubans only make like eight dollars a month. It’s a good thing I’d been coming to your house for years. It sort of helped prepare me.”
“Since you’re Mr. Intrepid, this should appeal to you.” I quoted Dave Sing’s email. “If you don’t find crossbills near the house and you guys are adventurous, walk down the hill past the spruces and there will be a deer-worn path down the hill angling north.”
“Down the hill. I don’t know. I may be slow if we have to do any walking. I injured my knee at Bahía de Cochinos. You probably know it as the Bay of Pigs.”
“Was this while you were delivering medicine?”
“Just after. We had a free afternoon, so we went to a park at the Bay of Pigs—the real-life Bay of Pigs, for God’s sake—where we could eat and drink all day for twelve dollars each. It was surreal. Some Cubans had brought baseballs, bats, and gloves to the park, and we were just starting to play catch with them.”
“You played baseball with Cubans at the site of one of the worst foreign policy disasters in American history?”
“Yeah, and at the same time I managed to compound the humiliation of our great country. I made a heroic leap for a bad toss by one of the Cubans, but it sailed just over my glove. I turned to run after it, but my old knee twisted the wrong way and I collapsed in a heap. It’s still bugging me. It’s as if I have assumed the burden of American guilt. And I have to ask, ‘Why me?’”
Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, Bill fished around in the backseat with the other until he had retrieved his phone. “We did have time for birding when I wasn’t busy writhing in pain.” He flipped through the photos as he drove.
“I got a good photo of a tocororo, their national bird. It’s a trogon. The Cubans we were with were fascinated, because none of them had ever seen one, even though we were in a park where they go all the time with us Americans. Guess they’re not birders. They’re always focused on us Americans, making sure we don’t do something stupid.”
“Maybe we’ll find a trogon in Chelsea,” I said.
The pine siskin was a cinch. As we slid to a stop on Dave’s snowy street and Bill flung open his door, we were greeted by a buzzy zzreeee ascending trill from high up in the trees. It got better when we strolled up his driveway and found siskins squabbling over perches at a pair of thistle seed feeders. Though I’d seldom seen reports of crossbills before this season, siskins, like red-breasted nuthatches, popped up here and there across the state each winter—though never in our yard. Suddenly a decade’s worth of the striped little finches chattered within fifteen feet of us. Another feeder slot was occupied by a streaky brown bird resembling a female house finch, but with the added adornments of black around the beak and throat, a white breast dipped in strawberry juice, and a jaunty red cap that a bellhop would have envied. Three more of them flew in and unselfconsciously chowed down alongside the siskins as if they were the most commonplace birds on earth.
“Redpolls!” said Bill.
“That’s two new birds for me in two minutes.”
“Find the crossbills and we can leave.”
I thought I had. Birds hung from pinecones in trees around the yard, but my binoculars exposed them as siskins. Trudging past the house, I sized up the path down the hill as easily manageable, but on the pretext of needing to examine Dave’s instruction, I let Bill slip ahead of me to break trail. “Head north past the huge, downed, split ancient silver maple, and you’ll see a more substantial stand of spruce set around past the base of the hill. The crossbills seem to love this stand,” I said, quoting the email.
Bill acted as if he knew where he was going. I followed until deepening snow bogged us down and he turned to confirm that we were heading in the right direction.
“We’re okay if that’s the downed, split silver maple,” I said. “Do you know what a silver maple looks like, downed, split, or otherwise?”
“It has silver leaves. But if the tree is downed and split, they’d be on the ground under the snow. There’s probably a shovel back at the house if you want to dig them up.”
“How about a stand of spruce?” I asked as we resumed our slog. “Is a spruce the same as a pine? And what’s an evergreen? Linda says that holly is an evergreen.”
“Maybe crossbills are eating holly berries under the snow.”
I was grateful when a broken tree limb blocked our path. In warm weather I would have lumbered over it, but a lifetime sitting in chairs had ill prepared me for plowing my legs through drifts, and it was so cold I could barely speak without stuttering. “I th-th-think those are the s-s-spruces,” I said wobbling a heavily gloved hand toward a clump of distant trees. Neither of us moved. Behind us, Dave’s house towered on top of a hill that seemed to grow steeper the longer I gawked at it.
Bill saved the day by giving the spruces a glance through his underpowered binoculars and proclaiming, “There aren’t any birds over there anyway.”
It would have been difficult making out condors at such a distance, but I agreed. “Let’s try the d-d-driveway again.”
The climb sapped what little strength that the cold hadn’t knocked out of me. I shook and shivered as I scanned the trees in Dave’s yard. “What’s this bird on the wire?” Bill asked. “Sort of a dirty yellowish gray—black wings and white wing bars. Are you looking at this?”
“F-f-female goldfinch.” I was busy tracking a silhouette that turned into a pine siskin.
“That was no goldfinch. It was one of your crossbills, and it just flew away.”
“Which way did it go?”
“Up.”
Whenever the bug hit me to pursue a particular bird, I would be obsessed with it for days. But when the fever broke, due usually to a shock of physical discomfort, my interest level would drop like a rock. That’s how it was with the crossbill. The triple whammy of weakness, an 18-degree Fahrenheit air temperature, and missing a target bird that had perched in plain sight kept me lingering in Dave’s driveway just long enough to satisfy myself with a quick glimpse of another yellowish first-year white-winged crossbill. A brilliant red adult bird would have to wait for another opportunity—perhaps in another decade. The important thing now was having lunch in some crummy, overheated Chinese restaurant with gallons of piping hot jasmine tea.
Forty minutes later, as we wolfed down our food, I told Bill, “I know why I look for birds. It puts me the closest that I get to anything like a meditative state.”
“I didn’t know that Zen monks whined.”
“But why do you do it? You don’t call yourself a birder. Yet you go out and look for birds.” I didn’t expect more than a shrug as he poked at his plate of almond chicken. Then he set down his fork and stared at the red paper lantern above our table.
“Birding is a creative act,” he said. “It’s a way of not only being in nature, but also of being more in the creative flow of nature: you stop, listen, watch, shiver. Most creative pursuits are fundamentally solitary activities. But seeing unusual and beautiful birds—or any bird, really—is a form of expression, like pottery or painting. It’s not easy to bird well. The bird symbolizes you, and you’re closer to nature than the usual idiot. It’s got to be good for you. The trouble is, the usual human flaws end up making birders insufferable snobs whose sense of wonder and connection is foiled by competitiveness, bad social skills, and anger. Maybe that’s too harsh.”
I shrugged as I shoveled shrimp fried rice into my mouth. The mysteries of birding had just deepened.
Linda ran out to meet us in the driveway. I knew that something had to be up, because she was wearing her slippers in the snow. Bill rolled down the window.
“Hurry, come into the house and look out at the feeder. There’s a brown-striped bird with a little flash of yellow on its wing, and I think it might be a pine siskin.”
Tracking snow into the house, I clomped down the hallway and into the dining room. Bill was right behind me, but he’d had the sense to leave his boots on the porch.
It couldn’t be happening, but it was happening again. Sharing our sunflower feeder with goldfinches and a chickadee, a pine siskin treated me to a witheringly condescending stare. “How is this possible?” I asked.
“How far did we just drive?” said Bill. “Better keep an eye out for crossbills.”
I just shook my head. I was flabbergasted. “Why today, why this exact moment, rather than tomorrow or yesterday?”
“I think you know.”
Unlike the “loop-back” red-breasted nuthatch that disappeared shortly after splashing around in our birdbath, the siskin and a few of its friends stuck around to frequent our feeder. Meanwhile, crossbill fever struck again as I read continuing accounts of them in southern Michigan. Most of the reports came from the eastern side of the state. Then Scott Manly found a flock of white-winged crossbills at a Christmas tree farm near Ionia—a mere thirty-minute drive from our place. He had watched them from his vehicle, which meant I didn’t have to brave the single-digit temperatures that had just arrived.
Santa didn’t smile upon me. I drove up and down the road bordering the tree farm without a sign of any bird. Ignoring admonishments from my new GPS unit, Gypsy, to “make a legal U-turn when possible,” I meandered along gravel roads for miles in every direction, slowing whenever I passed a stand of trees or a house that looked vaguely like Dave Sing’s. I should have gritted my teeth against the cold and stayed in Chelsea until I’d seen my adult male bird. Now it appeared I had lost my chance. I checked our yard when I got home, but I didn’t even find a siskin.
The next day I trudged out of the building where I worked at my morning job. While buckling my seatbelt, I glanced up at a row of spruces. At the very tiptop of a tree, a red bird sang his heart out in unfamiliar song.
My old fifty-dollar binoculars huddled underneath the passenger seat. Keeping an eye on the bird, I grappled for them and despaired when the strap caught on a spring. Crouching on the floor, I wrestled the binoculars loose and raised them to my face, expecting the bird to be long gone. Instead he waited patiently as I brought him into view. He looked like a white-winged crossbill. In order to be sure, I needed to see his side to distinguish him from the male house finches that loved that line of trees. Right on cue, the bird rotated to show me a black wing festooned with two bold white stripes. As soon as I lowered the glass, he flew away.
I sat in the parking lot with my heart thumping wildly, realizing I was on the cusp of a major breakthrough. I may not have found a Lapland longspur, let alone a snow bunting. I may have failed to identify an introgressed Audubon’s x myrtle warbler when it flitted around in my own backyard. And I may not have been cut from the proper heavy cloth to succeed at winter birding. None of that mattered. I had discovered the “loop-back” phenomenon, and I had penetrated its deepest meaning, which boiled down to this: in birding, as in life, we don’t so much find things as things find us.
In that vein, I decided to avoid further birding excursions, electing instead to stay snug and warm inside hoping for another rare bird to appear outside the window. But once spring arrived and birding fever struck again, I made slightly more ambitious plans with Bill.