Chapter Eight
Strange things continued to happen in the yard, making me wonder if birding wasn’t moving into the metaphysical realm. We seemed to have a ghost bird. A phantom woodpecker, to be exact. I heard it on a cold April morning as I headed toward the barn. The drumming grew louder with each step and didn’t diminish after I jolted open the big red door and bumped my bones inside. I could even hear the tap-tap-tapping above the honking, quacking, and squealing of the ducks and geese. The hammering was sharpest at the east wall as I leaned over a stack of empty grain sacks, but when I hustled back outside I couldn’t find the bird.
Our barn, like our house, was built upon a slope with one ground-level entrance downhill and one ground-level entrance uphill. I trudged uphill this time and plunged myself into gloom that resolved into bales of straw and piles of household junk as my eyes adjusted. The huge space was woodpecker-less, unless the bird was invisible. Then in a small storage room I put my ear to the wall and solved the mystery. The woodpecker had squeezed into the barn through one of the numerous knotholes that also let in circles of light. After that it had made its way to the only part of the building with a double wall. For reasons known only to the bird’s concussive-resistant brain, it had slipped between the walls and imprisoned itself.
Outdoors again I stared up at the boards wondering if there wasn’t something I could do short of scrounging an extension ladder, a reciprocating saw, and someone to operate them. And then I saw the beak. It flashed in and out of a freshly excavated pea-sized hole at the vertical seam where two boards met. From the shape of the short, sharp beak, the woodpecker had to be a downy.
I trotted back to the house and told Linda. A few minutes later she came out in her robe, and we watched in amazement. “That’s one determined little guy,” she said.
He paused to catch his second wind. The boards on the barn had been exposed to the ravages of the world for even longer than I had. They had survived baking summers, freezing rain, drought, and near monsoons, and I didn’t expect that they would yield easily to the tiny beak of a bird. “At this rate, it will take him the rest of the day to get out, if he ever gets out.”
“I’ll bet you a horse it only takes him an hour,” she said as he started up again.
Both of us underestimated the power of the peck. After a quick breakfast with Linda and the parrots, I stuck my head outside the basement door but couldn’t hear the drumming. Worried that the bird had given up, I hurried back to the barn and discovered that the hole had been enlarged to the profile of a peach pit large enough for the woodpecker to squirm through and fly away. Not far from the barn, a male downy clung to a tree trunk. If he was the ex-prisoner, he didn’t seem the least bit ruffled. What had seemed to be a life-or-death struggle from my vantage point may have been just another day of wood chiseling to him.
Linda had rehabbed downies before. I’d held one in my hand, and it was like holding a puff of smoke. I couldn’t imagine how a creature that weighed less than ounce could carve a hole through wooden planks using a toothpick-tip of a tool that was made out of bone, not steel. It was incredible, miraculous, and far more impressive than anything a ghost woodpecker could have done. So I was glad that we hadn’t been haunted after all.
I was also happy to have been treated to a symbolically loaded encounter that felt like a scene from a dream, though my dreams were never so imaginative. Since I interpreted the world through the lens of me, I wondered about the significance of the event. Maybe after ineptly pursuing birds for years, I was finally on the verge of a real breakthrough. Either that or it just meant that our barn hosted some particularly tasteful beetles that woodpeckers couldn’t resist.
Still, I was feeling pleased about my progress as a birder. I could now reliably identify ninety-seven species by ear and at least another dozen unreliably. Add my eyes, and I turned into a finely tuned instrument capable of slapping the correct label on any bird common to city lots, rural yards, woods, and riparian settings, with the emphasis on “common” and as long as the settings were within a few hundred miles east or west of home—and half that distance north or south.
A charcoal black, triangular patch across a fiery orange face contributes to the blackburnian warbler’s black, burning appearance.
Exceptions were thrushes, which I could identify only if the bird sat in clear view while I fumbled through a field guide, and sparrows, which I had a fifty-fifty shot at getting right if they kept to their proper habitat. I played it safe with raptors by lumping anything large under the heading of “probably a red-tail” and anything smaller as “I’m thinking sharp-shin” due to the bewildering degree of plumage variation that can exist within raptor species. For the same reason I avoided places where gulls or shorebirds hung out, unless experienced birders were hanging out with them.
All in all, I had done quite well for myself in a decade or so of seriously bumbling around, and I felt confident that I’d eventually bring more unknowns into the “likely” column if only I had a chance to see them more often than fleetingly once a year. For this reason, I decided that I needed to take a crash course in warblers, and Magee Marsh provided the obvious classroom.
Linda wasn’t able to go with me. Because of her worsening back problems, she couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes at a time. She felt okay if she kept moving, which worked out well for her in daily life, since she was generally in motion. But her condition ruled out long rides in a car. Unless I wanted to visit the marsh by myself, I had to find another genial traveling companion.
“So just because you want to see this Connecticut warbler, you’re going to subject me to being around birders?”
“I don’t know how many people will be there,” I told Bill as we hurtled toward Ohio in his Volvo. “The boardwalk is big enough that we should be able to keep to ourselves.”
“It’s not the people I mind. It’s the birders.”
We flashed through an underpass. A blink and it was gone. “I’m having trouble with birders, too,” I said. “I keep finding birds and reporting them to the group, but apparently I’m not finding the right ones. I got zero responses for a bald eagle and nothing for a Carolina wren, except for stories from people who’ve had them nesting in their garage.”
“They just want to one-up you. Birders use bragging to compensate for their lack of social skills.”
“Most of the birders I’ve met have been great. I learned a lot from Caleb when we had the Audubon’s warbler in our yard, and you couldn’t find a nicer person.”
Bill took a perfectly timed sip of his coffee. “What did Caleb say about that indigo bunting of yours that looks like a goldfinch?”
“You’ve got a long memory.”
“I need one to keep birders honest. That’s one of my unachievable goals.”
I reached down to check and recheck my nylon bag to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Binoculars, camera, field guide, iPod. I rearranged my maps for Metzger Marsh and Magee Marsh, stuck them inside the front cover of the road atlas, and then pulled them out again. This didn’t feel like a typical birding trip. Something else was in the air—either in my head or in the atmosphere. I couldn’t sit still.
“Why do you keep doing that?” Bill asked. “Tapping the dashboard with your finger.”
“I’m a determined woodpecker.” I described the weird scene at our barn a few weeks earlier. “I must have assimilated the breakthrough tap-tap-tapping behavior. I feel like I’m speeding toward my destiny.”
“And the ‘Welcome to Ohio’ sign. There it is.”
For once I’d prepared for a trip. I’d been smart enough to make up for a whole lot of dumb in the past by studying warblers in my field guides and by learning as many songs as my Swiss cheese of a brain could hold via the More Birding by Ear CDs and a couple of iPod birding apps. I’d also looked back at the previous year’s reports and determined which warblers were particularly coveted—Connecticut, Kentucky, mourning, and worm-eating—and set my sights on them.
“How do you know we’ll see even one warbler?” Bill asked. “Or are you just going to claim to see them, and you want me to back you up for a price?”
“For fifteen years, Bruce Bowman has been keeping track of warbler numbers during his trips to Magee Marsh. He’s figured out that May 10 to May 17 is the statistical peak period for them. So we’re right on the money for a crash course in warblers.”
He winced. “Don’t ever say ‘crash’ when you’re riding in Gus.” Gus was the successor to Bill’s Volvo, Turbo, which had been totaled the previous summer—t-boned one half-mile south of his house in Lakewood Township, Allegan County, by a teenager. Bill was lucky not to have been killed. Within twenty-four hours of picking up Turbo’s first successor, Bill was celebrating the new purchase inside the Kopper Top bar in Grand Rapids with Marcia when a drug addict slammed into the parked car, totaling it. So he was understandably nervous about Gus, which he’d named after his father, Alf Gustaf Holm, who was 100 percent Swedish—just like the Volvo.
“Hey, if this is a peak period for warblers, it’ll be a peak period for birders, too,” he told me.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got it all worked out. Species, places, dates, days of the week—the whole ball of suet. We’d be trampled if we went to Magee Marsh on a weekend, but a Wednesday definitely won’t be a problem. And I thought we’d start out at Metzger Marsh, which is much smaller and out of the way.”
“As long as I don’t have to talk to anyone or otherwise suffer any unpleasantness. I’ve been through enough already.”
I was itching to see birds as we streaked along the access road to Metzger Marsh. To our left was a fishing canal dotted with small boats. On our right a group of birders huddled on the edge of the Lake Erie marsh, peering at waterfowl through their scopes. I unrolled my window to ask if they had found anything special when Bill sped up and shot past them. “Oh, did you wish to stop?” he asked.
By then we had already hit the parking lot, and I didn’t want to go back. The stand of trees between the lot and the beach was famed as a “migrant trap” for spring and fall birds. In three spasmodic jerks I was out of the car with my camera, binoculars, and iPod. But Bill, a state table tennis doubles runner-up, could sometimes be as slow moving on land as he was speedy behind the wheel. I watched in nervous pain as he looped his water-bottle-and-field-guide belt around his waist, dropped belt, bottle, and book when the clasp refused to catch, rehitched the rig, and recovered it from the asphalt a second time before we finally moved toward the trees.
The wooded patch didn’t look like much, but as soon as we entered I heard a confusing mix of bird songs. I did my best to try to turn a heavily shadowed dark brown bird that was flitting around the ground cover into a blue-gray hooded, olive green−backed, yellow-underneath Connecticut warbler—but I grudgingly recognized it as a house wren. Bill made a theatrical gasp as five more birders straggled through the brush. I was about to try to shush him into polite behavior when a middle-aged woman loaded down with optical gear reprimanded a heavy-set man in a knit hat.
“Sir. You’re trampling the violets. Yoo-hoo. Don’t you ever watch where you’re stepping? You. Stay on the path. That’s what it’s there for.” The man jumped back as if he’d been bitten by a snake. “Great,” she snapped. “Now you’re crushing a trillium.” Staring at us staring back at her, she said, “He still can’t find the path.”
Neither could I. I could make out faint suggestions of a route through alternating clumps of bare ground and vegetation, but nothing as orderly as a path. Sniggering as he walked toward us, he took off his knit hat as if he wanted to tell us something but continued on his way. I avoided Bill’s triumphant eyes as Flower Scold continued muttering complaints. As the man trained his binoculars on the middle branches of a large tree, I scanned the high weeds of a marshy area. Although I easily picked out the witchety-witchety call of a common yellow-throat, my hours of listening to More Birding by Ear came to naught when I confronted a song that could have been a yellow, magnolia, or chestnut-sided warbler. I couldn’t see a thing through the vegetation.
“What have you got?” asked a newcomer.
“Had a magnolia,” said Flower Scold. She pointed at me. “But that guy flushed it.”
I hadn’t been anywhere near her, but I moved further away, joining the man in the knit hat. A drab olive-yellow bird bounced around a lower branch. Failing to recognize it from my warbler studies, I decided it must be a vireo and pointed it out to Knit Hat.
“That’s an orange-crowned warbler,” he said with mild interest. “Pretty good bird. It’s better than a Tennessee, but not as good as a Kentucky.”
“I didn’t realize there were state rankings,” Bill said. “It sounds like basketball.”
His sarcasm was lost on Knit Hat. “I won’t even look at yellow-rumps and magnolias. Garbage birds,” he said.
After he headed for the beach, I stayed with the warbler long enough to hand it over to the man who’d been told I’d flushed the magnolia. He called to his companion, “This guy found an orange-crown.” But had I? For all I knew, it was Knit Hat’s bird.
“I saw it first,” Bill said.
I continued hearing birds and continued not seeing most of them as they popped in and out of the canopy far above our heads. Tired of squinting up at silhouettes, we broke free of the woods to trudge along a dike that followed the beach. In the 1920s, the dike kept Lake Erie from flooding Metzger Farms. Then in 1929 the waves broke through, and the once-prosperous truck farm literally went under. The dike was completely gone by the 1950s. In 1995, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited, local conservation groups, and the Ohio Division of Wildlife brought it back to the benefit of fishermen and hunters—and to the detriment of individual fish and ducks.
I puzzled over a distant flock of very large black birds on the ground. I could barely make out their shapes through binoculars. Had they been sitting in a dry field, I would have quickly identified them, but it took me forever because the habitat seemed wrong. “Who expects to find turkey vultures in a marsh on a lake?” I asked Bill.
“I never expect anything. Nowhere, nohow, and I’m never disappointed.”
I hoped things would be livelier at Magee Marsh. Just before we turned back toward the car, a birder climbed up onto the dike from the beach and strode toward us with lowered head. “Hello,” I said as a preface to asking whether he was having any luck. He didn’t stop or nod but uttered something like “ugh” as he passed us.
“Be glad you’re not that guy,” Bill said.
“I don’t know that I’m not. The bounce is going out of my life.”
En route to the car, we cut through the wooded patch again and right into Flower Scold’s clutches. “Do you like Kit-Kat candy bars?” she asked me. The out-of-the-blue question took me aback. Thinking I had run into her during a rare non-nagging moment, I told her that I did, and I happened to have a couple in my jacket pocket if she wanted one. “So you’re the one leaving candy wrappers all over,” she said. My protests that I hadn’t enjoyed the chocolately wafer treat since a rest stop near Toledo sailed right over her head. I could hear her denouncing me to the world as I crawled into Bill’s Volvo.
If we hadn’t been cruising in Gus, Bill would have had to hoist me across his shoulders and lug me to Magee Marsh. I was that disheartened by the elusiveness of the birds at Metzger and the negativity of the birders who should have been celebrating the world instead of cursing it. Bill knew and tried to joke me out of my black mood.
“Aren’t you going to write down your orange-wedge warbler in your little notebook? You’d better squeeze it in while there’s still room on the page.”
“Well, at least I proved my point about birders.”
“Yes, you did. They make you look somewhat saner in comparison.”
Bill had always been a placid pond of a friend with a few boulders of madness lurking beneath the surface, but unlike me he knew how to keep the jagged edges out of sight. Since the accident in his Volvo from which he had miraculously escaped with only bumps and bruises—and following his sessions with a shrink to address the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder—a few ripples of anxiety had begun to appear. But nothing as trivial as failing to find birds would ever have disturbed him.
“I don’t have anything against games,” he said, “but it seems odd to keep a species list, like you’re reducing your interactions with nature to numbers.”
“What about you and Dick placing bets on what the outside temperature will be when you drive to Monday-night ping pong?”
“That’s different. That’s sibling rivalry. And I’m not competing against every other driver like you’re competing against every other birder. As long as that loud woman doesn’t show up, I’m sure you’ll find the Connecticut Avenue warbler and Boardwalk warbler and Park Place warbler at Magee.”
I started to get excited again. I remembered a low, scrubby area near the beginning of the boardwalk where I imagined the Connecticut might skulk. I played its song for Bill on my iPod—a robust, repeating chip-chup-eee. “I figure if there are other birders there—and we have to assume there will be, because the birds are coming through—they’ll mostly be looking up at the trees, while we’ll be looking down at the ground for the Connecticut and find it first.”
“I’m banking on more birds and less birders,” said Bill.
We noticed an unusual number of vehicles at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory building just inside the Magee Marsh park entrance, but nothing struck us as remarkable until we rounded the final curve and discovered a sea of metal at the end. Hundreds of cars, trucks, and RVs packed the parking lot from end to end. It reminded me of a big day at the beach. People sat in folding chairs next to their vehicles, some of them grilling food. Others had set up scopes on the asphalt and were surveying the trees that bordered the marsh. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t just haul themselves over to the boardwalk until we slid into a parking space and noticed the crowd jamming the entrance.
I couldn’t conceive of worse conditions for finding birds. Surely the throngs of people would scare them away. But as soon as we filtered through the first clutch of boardwalk gawkers, it was as if we had stepped through a door into a rainforest. I believed I could hear thirty songs at once, some high-pitched and stuttering, others sweet and sustained—some complex and multiparted, others simple and repeating—crisscrossing their notes and rhythms in a bopping natural jazz.
I understood why so few people were moving. The birds were coming to us. As fast as I could find them by looking where other people were looking, I saw Nashville, chestnut-sided, magnolia, palm, black-and-white, and yellow-rumped warblers, along with warbling, red-eyed, and blue-headed vireos. If I didn’t recognize a bird, I seldom had to ask. The murmur of its name rippled from person to person. We were all in awe together, an astounded harmonic whole. Then a woman poked Bill in the back with two fingers until he retreated from the railing and let her take his place.
We were ready to wander away anyway after a soprano sweet-sweet-sweet call knifed through the marsh. We followed it to a disintegrating stump where a golden sundrop of a prothonotary warbler climbed the bark like a dandified woodpecker, flicked his blue-gray wings, and stuck his black dagger beak into a crack in search of a bug. Flipping upside-down he probed another fissure in the wood, so bright in the shaded swampy woods he seemed to throw off light.
His appreciative audience scattered as a three-legged monstrosity lurched forward, pushed by a grunting, red-faced birder and dangling a DSLR camera from a monster of a telephoto lens that was larger than any scope I’d ever seen. The tripod legs nearly spanned the width of the boardwalk. The photographer acted as if hogging valuable observational real estate was his due. Though Bill and I grumbled, the intrusion didn’t faze the self-obsessed prothon, who posed like a runway model as galactic flashes exploded from the camera rig and lesser lights popped from several point-and-shoots.
On our way to see the little ball of sunshine we had passed an observation tower. “Let’s go back and see what’s up,” Bill quipped.
Working our way back toward the entrance against the human tide proved difficult, but vertical progress came even more fitfully. Everyone wanted to climb the stairs, but no one wanted to come down. A woman ahead of me in wide khaki pants pushed into a void. I filled half of her former spot and Bill jiggled in beside me. Every thirty seconds or so, we gained another step. How we continued to ascend in the absence of a reciprocal descent confounded my meager grasp of basic physics, though as a consequence of the crowding I found myself shoved against the railing. Below me nervous red-winged blackbirds churned in the wet weeds. A gray catbird flicked its tail. A squirrel and earth-bound birders stared up at me.
Finally we squeezed onto the platform eyeball-to-eyeball at treetop level with Baltimore orioles and scarlet tanagers—plus a leaf-obscured bird whose foraging commanded the attention of all binoculars. He came out into the open.
“Jeez, what is that?” I blurted out, startled by a face so fiery orange, it might have been painted with a fluorescent highlighter pen. Two birders told me its name. A charcoal black, triangular patch across the eyes contributed to the blackburnian warbler’s black, burning appearance. At that moment I understood why I’d really come. Not so much for the numerical exercise of adding species to my list—though there was that undeniable pleasure—but for fleeting encounters with beings too splendid to exist. My mouth was so wide open with wonder, I worried I might swallow the bird when he zipped away.
I floated back to solid ground and meandered down the boardwalk with Bill, shouldering through clogs of spectators and stopping whenever we reached a crowd whose faces wore the same amazement as ours. In between we experienced improbably named epiphanies of our own—gnatcatcher, kinglet, waterthrush, ovenbird, northern parula—set to appropriately wheezing, nattering, bubbling, hectoring, or buzzing soundtracks. When we finally left the marsh, the absence of bird songs struck my ears so oddly I traipsed down to the beach and decompressed to the whoosh of Lake Erie waves.
Later I tabulated my species list in a hotel room forty miles away, which I’d reserved to save us thirty dollars compared to Toledo-area prices. I told Bill that between Metzger and Magee, we’d racked up an impressive eighteen warbler species—including the highly desirable orange-crown—plus twenty-one species of other birds.
“I’m more impressed by the amenities in our room. It even has a desk lamp. And these.” He sniffed the curtains and pulled them apart to let in more light. “But don’t you notice the flaw in your perfectly thought-out birding plan? There’s no way to report your orange-slush warbler. No Internet connection. Definitely no wi-fi. And nothing to connect with, since I didn’t bring my laptop, and both of us have dumb-phones.”
“It’s way too late, anyway. Someone else would have jumped on it by now.”
“Your research missed another item, too. The reason why there were so many people in the middle of the week, contrary to what you claimed.” He retrieved a brochure from his jacket pocket. “This was outside in the parking lot, almost right under my car.”
So much for a quiet getaway in search of the Connecticut warbler. The brochure described an event at Magee Marsh, Metzger Marsh, and Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge that we just happened to drop in on. I read the name out loud. “The Biggest Week in American Birding.”
“Well,” Bill said. “They were right.”
We returned to Magee Marsh the next morning for more of the same, but things were different. Without understanding how or why it had happened, Bill and I discovered that we’d been magically transformed from know-nothings to know-it-alls. It started just inside the boardwalk entrance when Bill announced, “Bee-yoo-ti-ful magnolia.”
“What did you say it was?” asked a woman whose husband kept flipping a laminated warbler identification card over and over in his hands.
“Magnolia warbler,” said Bill. “And a prothonotary. The yellow bird on the broken branch.” He looked at me and shrugged as if he’d been a birding docent for years.
After we edged closer to the prothon and ogled it for a while, Bill suggested that we make a beeline for a large constellation of birders. “They must have found something pretty good,” he said.
I slowed to a stop on the way, following three women’s eyes to a leafy bough that hung directly overhead. Over the years I hadn’t gotten any better at memorizing complex plumage, and in poor lighting even simple, blocky patterns caused me trouble. Backlit, the olive-green back and blue-gray head of the bird above us weren’t immediately obvious, so I couldn’t distinguish him from other dark-on-top, light-underneath birds. Then I focused on the face. Not only did he have a white ring around his eye, but he also had a white line that formed the “nose bridge” to his pair of “spectacles.”
“Blue-headed vireo,” I told the women.
Sweater Around the Waist told Rapid Blinker. “It’s some kind of vireo.”
“Blue-headed,” I repeated. Bill kept his jaws clamped shut.
“He’s gray like a warbling vireo,” Rapid Blinker said to her friend.
The bird sang softly as he foraged. Listening to my CDs back home, I had tried in vain to differentiate the red-eyed vireo from the less common blue-headed. But this bird was a patient teacher. “He’s repeating his two-note phrases slowly. Then pausing a few seconds in between,” I said. “Definitely a blue-headed vireo.”
For some reason this description convinced them. Once we had wandered out of earshot, Bill explained, “You don’t look credible. Now that’s what an expert looks like.”
Ahead of us, a man in a sleeveless khaki vest with birding hotspot badges and a nametag danced a green laser light into the gloom of the marsh. “Straight back from this oak about twenty-five feet and low in the bushes,” he told the big group of birders we had noticed earlier. A short man with curly red hair said to me, “Someone saw a mourning warbler, but I wouldn’t get too excited. That was twenty minutes ago.”
Bill and I moved on. Whenever we glanced back, the same crowd was waiting for the same mourning warbler in the same spot.
A man my age, whose existence reminded me how old I had become, stared at a dark-on-top, yellow-underneath bird and shook his head when he saw me. “Nashville warbler,” I told him. “The eye-ring is the giveaway, plus the lack of bars on the wings. Some female common yellow-throats look like Nashvilles, but they tend to stay near the ground, while this guy’s fairly high up.” I recalled the “staying low” part from having seen most yellow-throats in bushes. Just like with the blue-headed vireo, details of the plumage had slipped by me—a Nashville has a gray back, and a yellow-throat, an olive-brown back. Nevertheless, a couple of “tells” had allowed me to clinch the ID.
Bill kept finding birds that the rest of us walked past, including a robin-size fellow with a reddish-brown back idling in a clump of weeds. “Wow, nice veery,” a woman told us. “I’ve never seen one this close.” I hadn’t recognized it as a cousin to the wood, hermit, and Swainson’s thrush. The speckles on its breast were as faint as my knowledge of thrushes. But by a process of elimination I might have eventually come up with the name. The bird’s size and placid demeanor on the ground would have eliminated lots of other migrants. Bill’s discovery caused a minor stir, and he pointed it out to a few newcomers before his resistance to birders kicked back in.
By the end of the morning, after having racked up seventeen warbler species—for a total of twenty-one in two days—I put a little swagger in my stride as we headed back to the entrance. Like our little downy woodpecker, I’d finally made my breakthrough. Yesterday, I’d been a shrinking violet downtrodden by life, life lists, and the Flower Scold. Today I had blossomed into a fertilizer of would-be birders.
As I was congratulating myself, thunder clattered in the distance and a murmur of concern swept through the crowd.
“And away we go!” said Bill in Jackie Gleason’s voice.
I didn’t get a clear view of the sky until we stepped off the boardwalk and into the parking lot. God’s thumb was pressing down on us, the leading edge of an immense black cloud. Instead of racing for the Volvo, I turned toward a woman with lively eyes who was jotting in a notebook. To demonstrate my membership in the fraternity of birders who knew a rare warbler from a “garbage bird,” I asked, “Has anyone seen a Connecticut warbler yet?” I knew the answer. The place was too crowded for expert-level birding.
“I found one yesterday morning, not too far from here on the stretch just past the tower,” she said. “He was right out in the open for a while.”
I thanked her for the information and kicked myself back to Bill’s car. I brooded that I’d been so busy having fun seeing birds, I hadn’t bothered looking for birds. “I probably walked right by the Connecticut,” I told Bill. I considered turning around and asking the woman to show me where she’d last seen the warbler, but the bad weather rescued me.
“You probably did walk right by it,” Bill agreed. “But it’s not your fault you only saw 700 warblers instead of 701. It’s my fault.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“I should have brought a bottle of my special bird-attracting fluid.”
Rain hammered on the windshield as I dumped my binoculars and camera in Gus’s backseat. People poured from the boardwalk, shrieking, huddled, stretching jackets over their heads as they ran. Switching on his Benny Goodman Live at Carnegie Hall CD, Bill nosed through them. Once we hit the main drive, I asked him about his reprise of the birding fluid joke. “Is your memory this good when it comes to important things?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “If anything important ever happens, I’ll put it to a test.”
I thought about my crash course a month later as I marveled at a woodpecker through our dining room window. The trip to Magee Marsh had definitely paid off. I could now identify many more spring warblers by voice or plumage than before, plus a couple of vireos and Bill’s veery. Although I gave myself a failing grade in finding anything rare, the crow-sized pileated woodpecker swinging back and forth from our suet feeder made me consider that one person’s rarity was another’s backyard bird.
The maniacal laugh and prehistoric look of a pileated impressed us whenever we found one in our woods. My birder/photographer friend Alan Ryff told me that in pre-Christian Rome, a pileum was a pointed felt cap, fitting close to the head, worn at feasts—so it’s an apt name for a bird with a conical red crest. The beak is equally impressive. After seeing the rectangular cavities they excavated in trees, I felt lucky that one of these woodpeckers had never gotten trapped in our barn.
We rarely got within a hundred feet of them. They had a habit of loudly announcing their presence—which seemed rather counterproductive to me—then flapping off to a distant tree with a showy flash of white underwings. So it surprised us when a male began visiting the suet feeder just outside our house.
The feeder was a shallow cage about four inches square that hung from a wire I’d stretched between our house and the milk house shed to keep it out of the reach of squirrels. It had been designed to accommodate downy woodpeckers, nuthatches, and other small birds. A hairy or red-bellied woodpecker could also use it, though their bulk threw the feeder off balance. It was preposterously small for a pileated. But all of a sudden the massive bird would just be there, clinging to a rocking and bucking cage. The landing couldn’t have been easy—like setting down a fighter jet on the roof of a motel—but he managed it somehow.
On a tree, a pileated has an imperial bearing. Dangling from the feeder, ours was a textbook example of awkwardness. His stiffened tail angled in toward his body. His neck arched up to pound his beak against the suet. Great shards fell to the ground as he mined himself a mouthful with a mad look in his eye, as if he couldn’t believe a meal could be obtained from such a ridiculous contraption. He jolted the cage, sending shockwaves down the wire. Then, with the concluding twang of a bass string he was gone. I was sure each visit would be his last, but he returned for six days.
On day seven Linda and I stood outside the basement door watching the darkening sky, when a gust of wind swept in. “Here it comes,” she said. Our huge spruce hissed and shook its limbs. Then with the smallest sigh our electricity winked out. After an hour I wheeled out a portable gas generator from the barn. Against all odds, I got it running and connected it to the switch box a few feet away from the suet feeder. For three days we relied on the noisy, sputtering machine for lights, water, heat, and satellite TV. It wasn’t to the pileated’s liking. He didn’t return.
I posted to my birding group about the woodpecker’s visits and received more emails than any other report of mine had ever garnered. A check of the range map for the bird in Ted Black and George Kennedy’s Birds of Michigan indicated why. In West Michigan where I lived, nearly every rural yokel I knew had seen a pileated, but the woodpecker was rare in the southeastern part of the state, where most of the listserv members lived.
This caused me to experience an “aha moment” about the locality of rarities.
A couple of weeks earlier, Bill Holm and I had zipped over to Nayanquing Point to look for the yellow-headed blackbird and a few more coveted species. We didn’t have hundreds of birders helping us this time. We didn’t need them. Just as we stepped out of Gus—and Bill dropped his water-bottle-and-field-guide belt—our ears were assaulted by the red-winged-blackbird-coughing-up-a-hairball song.
“Yellow-headed blackbird,” I gasped. It was shockingly beautiful, grafting the brilliant head of a yellow warbler onto the body of a cowbird.
“Isn’t that one?” asked Bill pointing to a second patch of weeds less than twenty feet from the car. “Sitting with a female?”
We gaped at them for a while. Then we climbed the observation tower and were rewarded by the emergence of an American bittern from the cattails. A few minutes later, a much smaller black, white, and rusty-brown least bittern broke cover and flew past us. I was thrilled to see these secretive and uncommon members of the heron family, though much more impressive to Bill was my misidentification of a pair of bulky, slow-flying black-crowned night herons as slim and agile Forster’s terns.
Back home, I submitted my species list to the birding group and waited for plaudits that never came. What I didn’t realize then, and what my “aha moment” taught me later, was that locality means everything. Bitterns and yellow-headed blackbirds may be unusual finds in most places, but they’re fixtures at Nayanquing Point. Similarly, the birding group members who responded to my email about the pileated woodpecker at our suet feeder either didn’t know I lived in the western half of the estate or didn’t realize that a pileated was fairly ho-hum in my area.
So I needed to find a bird that was rare throughout the state, not just here and there. But if the downy woodpecker in our barn had promised a birding breakthrough, I wondered if the incident with the pileated woodpecker and our generator indicated a loss of birding power on my part. I also wondered if Scott Manly could tell me how to stop seeing birds as symbols.