The Swallows of Capistrano

Cliff Swallows

According to the Catholic Church calendar, March 19 is the Feast Day of St. Joseph. It also happens to mark the day when swallows traditionally returned to the Mission at San Juan Capistrano.

The mission, founded in 1776 by Spanish Catholics of the Franciscan order, has had a fascinating history. An 1812 earthquake damaged much of the structures. In 1841, Governor Juan Alvarado declared the Mission a secular Mexican town, granting the few remaining residents rights of ownership or use of the land. In 1845, two Englishmen bought the Mission property under questionable circumstances. A smallpox epidemic in 1862 killed most of the native peoples of the area, and Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation on March 18, 1865—the month before he died—restoring ownership of the mission to the Catholic Church.

Mission San Juan Capistrano, photochrom print by William Henry Jackson c. 1899

It’s hard to say when people first associated the Mission with Cliff Swallows, but a play by John Steven McGroarty titled The Mission Play, written in 1911, ends “amid the broken and deserted walls of Mission San Juan Capistrano (the Mission of the Swallow).” The Cliff Swallows may have started nesting on the structure as soon as it was built. According to legend, the birds first started nesting at the Mission when an irate innkeeper outside the Mission began destroying their mud nests, but the swallows were almost certainly attracted to the structure anyway because the Mission walls conspicuously rose above the landscape, and its location near two rivers made it an ideal location for obtaining both the mud necessary for building their little adobe nests and a constant supply of the insects for feeding adults and their young. The walls also provided protection against the elements.

 In 1915, an article in Overland Monthly, a California magazine, told the story of the birds' annual habit of nesting beneath the Mission's eaves and archways, and made the swallows the "signature icon" of the Mission. The pastor of the Mission at the time, a Father O'Sullivan, capitalized on the swallows to generate public interest in restoring the Mission. A popular tale was that the swallows (las golondrinas in Spanish) flew over the Atlantic Ocean to Jerusalem each winter, carrying small twigs on which they could rest atop the water along the way.

 On March 13, 1939 (six days before St. Joseph's Feast Day), a popular radio program was broadcast live from the Mission grounds, announcing the swallows' arrival. Composer Leon René was so inspired by the event that he wrote the song "When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano," which became a hit released by many popular singers. A glassed-off room in the Mission was designated in the composer’s honor and displays the upright piano on which he composed the tune, the reception desk from his office and several copies of the song's sheet music and other pieces of furniture, all donated by René's family.

During all the time that the swallows were nesting at the Mission, they certainly never thought about St. Joseph nor about returning specifically on his feast day. But bird migration does have natural rhythms, and the birds most certainly tended to return by about March 19—as long as people could carefully avert their eyes to avoid noticing them before that date, they could count on their return on St. Joseph’s feast day.

There is something so deeply pleasurable in counting on the rhythms of nature that people all over the country loved hearing about the swallows’ annual return. As Rachel Carson wrote, “There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of birds. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature--the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

By the 1980s, the numbers of swallows returning were diminishing. At some point in the 1990s, I remember watching a CBS news story reported by Dan Rather about the birds’ return, only the cameras weren’t focused on swallows at all, but on swifts.

Cliff Swallow population trend in California, from USGS Breeding Bird Survey

Now few if any swallows nest on the Mission each year. Much of the loss is due to development. Optimists claim that now there are many more structures for the birds to use. But the truth is, Cliff Swallows are declining significantly throughout California. Pollution and overuse of the limited water resources have destroyed populations of mayflies and other valuable insects essential for fueling their migration and feeding families during the breeding season. Extended drought conditions exacerbated by overuse of water may also have decreased the supply of useful mud for building.

It mystifies me how people who treasure our nation’s human history and traditions don’t seem to see how much we lose in terms of human values as well as natural ones when our most beloved species decline. We learn as children that people eventually die, buildings and businesses and whole cultures and civilizations eventually fall apart, but the one thing we can count on—the one thing that gives us our very concept of permanence, or "forever"—is nature.

Watching the skies for swallows on St. Joseph's Feast Day may be at heart romantic silliness, but our trust in the future is fundamentally compromised when we sell out the permanence of nature’s rhythms for quarterly returns on our 401-Ks. I hope we figure that out before our society crumbles like the Mission’s walls.

Gifts from Birds and Other Internet Stories

Every day, people send me bird stories, pictures, and videos they’ve seen on the Internet. One kind irritates me—videos, invariably set to music, of captive birds, in rehab situations or from countries where wild native birds such as owls can be kept as pets, doing what superficially looks like funny or cute things. “Laughing” Snowy Owl pictures are invariably showing stressed or overheated birds panting.

Videos of cats or dogs playing with birds may sometimes be showing really well trained pets, but set up dangerously false expectations. Before I knew better as a rehabber, I used to let my golden retriever Bunter follow me everywhere. One time when I accidentally left her in a room with Blue Jay fledglings, I returned to find one baby jay hacking into her back like a woodpecker, and another leaning over on her snout, probing into her nostrils. This made for a wonderful story I’ve used for over two decades, but when I tell it, I add reasons why despite Bunter’s trustworthy nature, it was a horrible mistake to let this happen. Indeed, one of those jays ended up being unreleasable. During the period I was trying to acclimate her to the wild, she kept landing on strange people AND dogs—and was almost killed by a dog.

One video showing what is touted as a “snoring hummingbird” is actually showing a desperately stressed hummingbird coming out of torpor. That one and a lot of the ones showing young owls in rehab situations elicit comments on facebook about how people want a hummingbird or owl as a pet. Acquisitiveness is a quintessentially human quality, but in the context of possessing wild animals seems profoundly misguided. Why can’t we love wildlife on its own terms? If a photo of a lovely bird or mammal elicits yearning in us, why must that yearning be to own the animal rather than to experience it in the wild?

But as cranky as some viral wildlife videos and stories make me, some are wonderful. One of the stories making the rounds since last week is about an 8-year-old girl in Seattle who has been feeding peanuts to her neighborhood crows since she was a toddler. The crows came to recognize her not merely as a source of food, but as a comrade, and started bringing her little gifts, such as paper clips, Legos, rusty screws, beads, and a pearl-colored heart. She puts food for the crows into a dry birdbath, and they leave these gifts for her there, rather as Boo Radley left little gifts for Scout and Jem in a knothole.

It’s possible, of course, that the crows aren’t knowingly giving her gifts. Corvids carry food and other items in their throat pouch; if they come across a better morsel, they spit out what they’ve been carrying before they pick up the new item. So these gifts may simply be discarded items they don’t value as much as food. That would be my conclusion if the girl had found just one or two things in there, but they’ve left her so many things just since 2013 that it’s very likely that they really do intend them as gifts, or at the very least as a fair trade.

After this story went viral, other people started reporting on gifts they’ve received from corvids. After all my years of birding, I have only one story to offer. Back in 1981, I was staying with Russ’s parents for a couple of weeks while Russ and I were in the process of moving, and I took walks in Port Wing every morning. One day when I returned to the house, I noticed that my wristwatch was missing. It was on a leather strap, and the buckle had occasionally worked its way open. I thought it was lost forever.

The next day when I was three or four miles from Russ’s parents place, a raven flew over and made some interesting squawks I’d never heard before. A few minutes later, that or another raven flew over with something hanging out of its beak. I pulled up my binoculars, and there was my watch! The raven flew in, closer and closer, right over my head. And voila! It dropped my wristwatch at my feet.

The watch stopped working a year or two later, but I’ve never been able to throw it away. Somehow that raven had transformed my cheap old watch into a priceless treasure.

 

Fishicles

Photo copyright 2015 by Kelly Preheim

This winter has been colder than average over much of the Great Lakes—the ice cover over the Great Lakes system was at 88.3 percent as of March 1, and 94.1 percent of Lake Superior is ice-covered.

Here at the western end of the big lake, we can usually still see a big patch of open water, though that moves from day to day. The ice piles up on the South Shore when winds have a northern component, and on our side of the lake when winds are southerly, so our hopes of spring, pinned to that blue water, can be raised or dashed depending on which way the wind is blowing. Hamlet must have lived on the South Shore to be but mad north-northwest.

As the ice sheets slosh back and forth, colliding with the shore and other ice sheets, dead fish and other small aquatic critters at the surface end up getting embedded in the ice. By March and April, we see increasing numbers of crows, ravens, and eagles walking on the ice. When people ask me what they’re looking for, I explain about these frozen dinners, but I’ve never had a good photo of what’s happening, until I heard from Kelly Preheim, a kindergarten teacher and birder from South Dakota.

On February 28, Kelly wrote in her wonderful BirdTeach blog:

The lake at Lake Andes National Wildlife Refuge had a fish kill last year and in mid-March there were hundreds of Bald Eagles, American Crows and gulls at the lake in a feeding frenzy! It was quite loud amongst the flurry of wings and I was amazed at what I saw! This year is proving to be a repeat year. Today there were deceased fish scattered all along the surface with some fish in these vertical ice jams.

Photo copyright 2015 by Kelly Preheim

Kelly posted this amazing photo of fish trapped in the ice, and gave me permission to use it here. Apparently wind and wave action had pushed some ice sheets into a vertical position, and fish that had been trapped—probably dead on their sides when originally frozen—were propped up and appeared to be jumping—some looking quite alive within the ice sheet. She also added a photo of an eagle on the ice.

Photo copyright 2015 by Kelly Preheim

I’ve never ever seen anything so dramatic on Lake Superior. The oligotrophic nature of the lake—that is, its high oxygen content and low density of plankton and vegetation—and its sheer size, keep concentrations of fish down. Sure enough, the birds we see combing the ice aren’t nearly as concentrated on the lake as they are in Allouez Bay off Wisconsin Point, and even there I've never seen anything like what Kelly documented in South Dakota. She posted another photo to show how many eagles were gathered nearby.

Photo copyright 2015 by Kelly Preheim

Even if we can’t see the fish from shore in my neck of the woods in anything like Kelly's surreal photos, experienced birds know that fish are there, and even inexperienced ones discover them either by spotting them as they fly over or by noticing other birds picking away.  I’ve never flown over the lake myself, so I can’t be certain, but I’m sure there are both insects and fish, some mostly intact and some in bits and pieces sitting out there waiting to be eaten.

Up here in the north, ice sometimes remain in Lake Superior until May and some pockets close to the lake may not have much leaf out before June, so signs of spring can be subtle and easy to miss. Even our fish kills are apparently not as dramatic as they are in other places. Watching crows and eagles combing the decaying ice surface for bits of dead aquatic animals may not appeal to some people, but I’ll take the season as it comes.

You can learn more about Kelly Preheim's adventures with her students at Kelly's delightful  Kindergarteners on the Go! blog. And check out the Destination Nature facebook page and Kelly's flickr photostream:

https://www.facebook.com/DestinationNature

https://www.flickr.com/photos/rookiebirder/

One could do worse than be a watcher of birds

(Part of this was worked over from a blog post from my Conservation Big Year.)

Three weeks ago, I had a mild heart attack. I realized it early on, and Russ rushed me to the hospital before there was too much damage, but the following week I had a bad reaction to a statin drug and ended up back in the hospital again. That turned out to be more debilitating than the heart attack itself, but I'm pretty much recovered again. Even so, intimations of my own mortality, which have been whispering for a few years now, suddenly have grown more insistent.

In addition to the heart attack, the past two months have provided a couple of other disturbing signs of advancing age. In December I had two basal cell carcinomas removed from my face. Considering how much time I spend in the sun, I'm lucky I've never had any skin cancers before my 60s, and this is the least dangerous form of skin cancer, but it was nevertheless disconcerting.

Then last week I got fitted for hearing aids. Of course, people much younger than I need them, too, and my audiologist assured me that most people can deal with my level of hearing loss without hearing aids at all, but I need to hear high-frequency bird songs for both my field and radio production work. I've spent time with older birders who insist they haven't lost any of their hearing even as I watch them missing nearby birds singing away. I wasn't afforded that luxury of denial—for several months, I've not been able to hear part of a Cedar Waxwing recording I've been using for many years, even when I crank up the volume to the maximum. Realizing I'm losing my high-frequency hearing has been distressing but, like skin cancer or my heart attack, is exactly the sort of problem that can be solved only when faced full on.

As mortal as I suddenly feel, I’m hardly ready to turn in my binoculars. Jack Kerouac wrote, “Why think about that when all the golden lands ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?” I'm getting a puppy in two weeks, and looking forward to having her in my life has definitely given my days a luster of gold. It had never even occurred to me when I arranged to get her on the day she was born, January 2, that it might be possible I'd not outlive her. Ironically, I'm actually less likely to suffer a heart attack now that I'm on blood thinners than I was before we knew I had a congenital aneurism in a coronary artery. Yet, regardless of statistics, I have an unsettling, visceral sense of my eventual demise that I'd never felt before—a feeling that will be forever reinforced by the little vial of nitroglycerin I'm supposed to keep with me at all times, prescribed by the same professionals who say my chances are excellent that I'll never need it. Being certain Pip will be loved and cared for no matter what gives me a feeling of security and peace even as I love being pretty sure I'll be here to enjoy every day of her life.

Every morning, the sun rises earlier than the day before—at least if we keep our bodies set to Standard Time—and every day the birds in my yard get more vocal. One chickadee seems to own the territory right by my upstairs window, and starts the morning singing for three or four minutes before he takes an interest in mealworms. There's something reassuring in the certainty that he and my other chickadees are doing just fine, and will be singing, mating, raising young, and carrying on no matter whether I'm there to watch them or not, even as each day that I see them feels precious in a way I never appreciated before the heart attack.

For several weeks now, redpolls and siskins have been descending upon my feeders at first light. They're eating more than 30 pounds of seeds each week—about 20 pounds of sunflower and almost 12 pounds of nyjer. The bustling activity is keeping my spirits buoyed even higher than the longer day length and singing chickadees are raising them.

Watching these birds keeps me grounded in a world that is natural, true, and sincere, and enlarges my capacity for honest and joyous astonishment about astonishingly genuine, beautiful elements of this planet. And in two weeks, I'll be able to enjoy all this with a new puppy at my side.

I'll be starting the list of birds I see with Pip starting March 21, the day I get her. She will be coming with me on several trips this spring, as far as Ohio and Florida. If all goes according to plan, we'll see at least 200 species together between now and the end of May.

I don’t know how other people get through their days without at least occasionally blocking world and national events from their consciousness. I don't know how any of us can sustain a dream of making the world a better place without knowing, deep in our bones from real experience, just how beautiful the world can be. And I don't know how other people deal with the grim sense of their own mortality. All I do know is that one could do worse than be a watcher of birds. And how could one possibly do better than be a watcher of birds with a puppy?

New Beginnings

Black-capped Chickadee: #1 on my life list, first seen March 2, 1975

March 2, 2015, was the fortieth anniversary of my becoming a birder. On that Sunday in 1975, I spent over an hour in Baker Woodlot on the Michigan State University campus searching for a bird—any bird—and finally found and painstakingly identified it—a Black-capped Chickadee. Three days later, I saw my second species—Mallard—on the Red Cedar River on campus. Four days later I doubled my life list again when a European Starling and House Sparrow first visited the bird feeder Russ put up for me behind our apartment. I doubled my life list again on March 17, when Russ and I visited the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago and I added cardinal, crow, Canada Goose, and Bufflehead, bringing my list to 8. That also marked the last time I’d ever double my life list in a single day.

Bufflehead: #8 on my life list, first seen March 17, 1975

I was so inexperienced that it took forever to track down a distant movement or sound to find the bird, and then I had to work my way through the field guide trying to figure out what it was while it was still in view. I often missed, but by the time I finally did find and identify a singing bird, I’d securely memorized the song and worked through a lot of similar species in the field guide.

One day that spring, May 11, I added 10 lifers, including my first four warblers. The heady excitement of finding and figuring out all these new birds on my own was as intense as falling in love.

Magnolia Warbler: #33 on my life list, and one of the warblers I saw on May 11, 1975.

 I often encounter people who started their life lists at birding festivals or on organized field trips. A life list can mushroom that way—a morning walk with an expert in good midwestern habitat during migration can easily yield 50, 70, or more species, while at the end of my entire first spring of daily birding, my life list had reached only 40. But my slow initial progress paid off in the long run—the skills I was developing in finding and identifying birds, including learning their vocalizations, were solid.

I jumped on the fast track that June, when I took a field ornithology class at the Kellogg Biological Station, near Kalamazoo, Michigan, more than doubling my life list in 3 weeks, bringing it to 90. The class was held 2 days a week, and I spent much of the remaining 5 days each week out searching for birds on my own. All that focus, day after day, helped me ace the field exams.

Scarlet Tanager: #60 on my life list, first seen June 23, 1975

I added 30 more lifers in 1975, ending the year with 120 species on my life list. The next year I brought it to 225. I reached the 300 mark in 1978, and broke 400 in 1980.

Barred Owl: #268 on my lifelist, seen May 7, 1978 in Wisconsin

Russ and I made trips to Texas and to southeastern Arizona, using bird-finding books by Jim Lane to tell us where to go and what to look for. Madison Audubon sent me on a trip to Estes Park, Colorado,  and I got to go on a trip, mostly camping, to many Western spots with my sister-in-law. I delighted in figuring out so many unfamiliar species in my old, plodding way, though I was much more skilled now, missing few of the birds I searched for. My romance with birds and my joy in finding and identifying them on my own were as overpowering as ever.

Plain Chachalacas: #297 on my life list, first seen December 28, 1979

Brown-capped Rosy Finch: #357 on my life list, first seen in Colorado on July 2, 1979.

California Quail, #394 on my life list, first seen in Washington August 18, 1979

Costa's Hummingbird: #429, first seen in Arizona on April 5, 1982

 
Things settled down when we had our first baby in 1981. I was just as passionate about birds, but my love was ripening into something integrated with family life. I was limited to watching them closer to home and on family vacations, so building my life list slowed down considerably. I didn’t break 500 until 1991, and didn’t get to 600 until 1999. In 2001, when my youngest was in high school, I took my first trips to Costa Rica and Trinidad, which helped me break 1000.

Now I have about double that, and my love for birds is as strong as ever, but it’s matured into a quiet, constant love rather than a red-hot acquisitive passion. So soon after my heart attack, I’m feeling mellow and Zen-like, happy to enjoy whatever comes my way without feeling any compunctions to chase down rarities.

Florida Scrub-Jay, #600 on my life list, first seen March 28, 1999

On March 21, I’m getting a puppy named Pip, and have decided to start a whole new list of birds seen with her at my side. We’ll be starting out when I pick her up at her breeder’s home in a Chicago suburb, so our first birds together will include many of the ones I first saw 40 years ago. I don’t expect her to master the differences between Empidonax flycatchers, or even the differences between a chickadee and a Blue Jay, and I expect that a small dog will be more inclined to moseying rather than high-powered bird chasing, just as I seem to be right now. But both heading to wonderful birding spots and sticking closer to home, my jolly little birding companion will give me a lovely way to start anew, just in time to mark the beginning of my fifth decade birding.

Pip, my future birding sidekick

 

"The Dress" and bird colors

"The Dress." The center photo is the version that went viral.  On the left and right are how that photo appears when "corrected," with the light balanced toward white and gold, and toward blue and black.

Last weekend, after a wedding on Colonsay, a Scottish island, the bride posted a photo of the dress her mother wore. One of the members of the band noticed that most of her friends seeing the photo online thought the dress was white and gold. People seeing the actual dress at the wedding itself knew it was actually deep blue and black, but most people seeing the photo, including me, were certain it was white and gold.

“The Dress” is not the kind of optical illusion someone can stare at and eventually see both ways—most people seem to see it one way or the other, and that’s that. The reasons it appears white and gold to most people are complicated—the digital photo was badly overexposed, and thanks to some graphics algorithms that set up white balance, the resulting photo colors don’t look anything like the dress itself would in most light. And somehow our eyes seem to pick up cues from the background to add another layer to the potential for getting the color wrong.

 One would think bird colors would be more straightforward than that, and they usually are, but sometimes bird colors are tricky. Most plumage colors are produced by pigments within the feathers. The main pigments in bird feathers produce shades of yellow, red, and brown to black. Pigments absorb specific wavelengths of light, and our eyes see the colors the pigments don’t absorb. A crow’s feather pigments absorb all the colors, so all we see is black. Pure white feathers have no pigments, so all the colors are reflected back as white. If you find a pigmented bird feather, such as one showing yellow, red, or black, it will look that color no matter how you hold the feather, whether light is bouncing off it or going through it.

This Blue Jay really is blue, along with black, white, and gray.

Some plumage colors are not produced by pigment. Not one American bird produces blue pigment, yet the feathers of Blue Jays, bluebirds, and Indigo Buntings are truly blue, thanks to their feathers’ structure. If you’ve ever zipped feathers together, you’ve noticed that they’re made of tiny branching structures, which are beautifully patterned when seen with a magnifying glass, and even more amazing under an electron microscope. In blue feathers, the beta-keratin that gives feather barbs their strength is arranged in an intricate nanostructure with air pockets that are exactly the diameter of the wavelength of blue light. So blue light is reflected while all the other colors simply pass through or bounce off and cancel each other. If you look at a Blue Jay feather from most angles, you see the blue wavelengths that are bouncing off it, but if you hold it so light passes directly through it, you don’t see that blue reflectance. The dark pigments absorb most colors, allowing the brownish gray to bounce back to our eyes.

Eastern Bluebird

Some people misunderstand the issue of structural vs. pigment colors, and so I frequently hear people saying there are no truly blue feathers in birds, when of course there are. The color of anything is due to nothing more than how light bounces off it to our eyes, whether that is due to structure or pigment.

Photo by Melopsittacus_undulatus_-Fort_Worth_Zoo-8a.jpg: Jerry Tillery derivative work: Snowmanradio [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The best example of the combination of color types is in the body feathers of pet budgies. Wild budgerigars are mostly green. The green is caused by yellow pigments absorbing all wavelengths of light except yellow, and by the blue structure of the feathers bouncing back blue while allowing other wavelengths to pass through. We see both blue and yellow in balance, making them appear green. Some budgies are selectively bred to lack the yellow pigment. They still have the blue structure, making them appear true blue. Some are bred to lack that arrangement of the beta-keratin and air pockets, and no colors are reflected by the structure. If they still produce the pigment, they appear yellow. (The head feathers of wild budgies are yellow for this reason.) Some are bred to lack both the yellow pigment and the blue structure: they appear pure white. The areas of the feathers that are black have a dark pigment (melanin) that absorbs all the wavelengths of light.

Iridescent feathers on Mallard drakes usually appear green, but can take on blue or turquoise shades in some light.

   

Iridescent feathers may have a simple dark pigment, but the brilliant color we see is due to structure. Unlike blue, though, we see most iridescent colors reflected only when light bounces off in a specific direction, so even the tiniest hummingbird sitting in one spot can show lots of changes in the amounts of color in the gorget as it moves its head.

   

Fortunately, internet photos of hummingbirds don’t go viral, setting off flurries of people passionately arguing about what color they are. No matter how persnickety a birder is about bird colors, we save our passionate arguments about them for dresses.

Here's a good more in-depth explanation of structural colors in nature, from The Scientist.

Red Slough birding festival

I keynoted at this great festival in 2013. Best looks EVER at Swainson's Warblers!

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

Pine Siskin

2015 is one of the magical years when lots of us are seeing gregarious winter finches that spend most of their lives in the northern reaches of Canada, Eurasia, Iceland, and Greenland, such as redpolls, or at least in the boreal forest of Canada and the northern reaches of the US, such as Pine Siskins. People notice them by their frequent, almost continual calling as they seem to be invisible within dense conifers, by how they congregate at feeders, and by how they gather at the salt and grit on country roads, barely taking off in time as we drive through. Finches feed almost entirely on seeds, and the grit they eat both helps their gizzard grind down seeds so they can extract as much food value as possible, and provides minerals that their simple diet lacks. Winter road salt lures them in even more than bird feeders do.

Pine Grosbeaks on road.

It seems to me a no brainer that when flocks of birds are on the road, people should slow down, not just because of the immediate danger to the flock right there but because there are so many flocks all along. But our mindset gets so locked into human concerns, even as we drive through the most hauntingly beautiful northern forest habitat, that most people don’t even notice the enormous Great Gray Owl or the exquisite Northern Hawk Owl perched atop a tree right in the open near the road, much less the hundreds of little brown birds that look like leaf litter until they flutter off as we get too close. I see so many of them dead on the roads, and sometimes stuck onto car grilles—including those of birders who were in such a hurry to see the next new bird that they plowed right through the ones right there.

Pine Siskins and Common Redpolls

When we see these finches in their big flocks, it’s easier to see them as aggregations rather than individuals. Of course, birders carefully scrutinize each individual in hopes of picking out a possible Hoary Redpoll among the Common Redpolls, or to find other outliers, but once our list needs are served, we all at least occasionally look at these flocks as undifferentiated winter finches rather than breaking them down into individual species. And even when we do that, we seldom pay the kind of attention to individuals that we do when we encounter an owl or shrike or curious chickadee.

The more scientists reveal about bird intelligence and individual variation, the more strenuously people seem to grab onto that popular meme that individual animals don’t matter—only populations. I’ve always found that a depressing concept, because it’s so egotistical. In terms of wildlife management and conservation, of course the focus must be on populations, but within these two disciplines, our sense of the appropriate size of populations is informed not by what is best for the larger world but by what will serve a given human “user group.” Red-winged Blackbirds are slaughtered by the millions in western Minnesota and the Dakotas every spring to appease sunflower growers. Cormorants are slaughtered in many areas to appease sport and commercial fishing interests. Meanwhile, white-tailed deer and Canada Goose numbers have been “managed” to bring them to unsustainable levels over decades, to please hunting interests, even after it was obvious that their numbers were growing too large for the health of major habitats and competing species. Now we’re watching that exact same ecological disaster slowly unfold with Wild Turkeys. Meanwhile, I hear the same delight in shortsighted people seeing turkeys in their area for the first time that I heard back in the 70s when people were so thrilled to see Canada Geese raising young in places they’d never before bred.

 We are supposed to be the smartest species on the planet. We could use our intelligence to look at the Big Picture of population levels even as we see the Little Picture—the value of individuals of all species. We could learn from our mistakes. We could use our supposedly superior awareness to notice the beauty all around us. And we could use our supposedly superior ability to plan ahead so we’d leave early enough to drive a little slower during times when birds gather on our roadsides. Forest Gump famously said “stupid is as stupid does.” The same also could be said of human intelligence.

Common Redpoll

How did you spend your Friday the Thirteenth and Valentine's Day?

(rewritten for my radio show script Feb. 16)

I managed to find a unique way to combine both bad luck and the heart to mark this year's back-to-back Friday the 13th and Valentine's Day. Thursday night I had a mild heart attack. Friday, after everything was stable, they did an angiogram, which indicated that I have a congenitally enlarged coronary artery. Apparently a clot developed there and then got blocked from passing into a more normal artery. I've been on blood thinners since as soon as I was admitted, so am entirely out of danger. I didn’t need a stent or any surgery at all. I'll be taking medications and use one of those days-of-the-week medicine things now, so can officially feel old and decrepit with a minimum of actual problems associated with it. This was pretty much a best-case scenario for a heart attack. It was indeed scary, but after receiving excellent care at the hospital and now some follow-up appointments and 36 sessions of cardiac rehab, I’ll be entirely in the clear.

Usually at this point in a radio program, I’d talk about whether or not birds have heart attacks, and get into lots of cases. I’ll just say, yes they do—both from clots and from other causes, especially associated with their high blood pressure. Fighting males rarely but occasionally have keeled over dead from their heightened blood pressure actually blowing out a hole in the heart or a coronary artery. 

But I’m going to break my normal pattern this time because I’m extremely lucky that I realized I was having a heart attack. Symptoms in women are way different from those we usually hear about. I did not feel ANY pain or tightness or heaviness in my chest when I decided I was probably having a heart attack. I just suddenly, after getting ready for bed about 10 pm, had a fuzzy, weird feeling in my chest, a sensation that was running up my neck to my jaw. The sensation itself made me feel a little panicky, so when I climbed into bed, I kept sitting up and thinking I just felt wrong.

The possibility of a heart attack was on my mental radar screen because in the past couple of months or so, I’ve had four or five dizzy spells that lasted only a few seconds. They felt weird and nothing like anything I've felt before, but I couldn't see making an appointment unless they got worse. Also, for two or three days before the heart attack, my face looked paler in the mirror to me. My father died early one morning when he was only 50 from a massive heart attack, and my aunt, his sister, died this summer after waking up, getting out of bed, and simply dropping dead. In my last photos of both of them, their faces seemed unusually pale.

I’m not particularly superstitious, but it did occur to me that, uh oh—if this was an actual heart attack, there was a pretty good chance I’d climb out of bed on Friday the 13^th and keel over dead. And that made me think of the puppy I’m getting in 5 weeks—how much I want to be healthy to train and play with her, and how she deserves a healthy owner.

I still thought if this was a heart attack, I should be experiencing some actual pain, so I opened my iPad and googled heart attack symptoms. They all started with descriptions of massive chest pain or pressure (like that "elephant sitting on your chest" I'd read about) radiating down the left arm, but then got into more vague symptoms, and all specifically mentioned jaw pain, especially in women. I wasn’t having pain, but my neck and jaw as well as chest had that fuzzy, weird sensation.

So Russ ushered me to the hospital. The guy at the door admitting patients looked rather skeptical, but the moment he let me through, I was ushered away, with a whole team wiring me to an EKG machine and an IV and taking blood tests and I don't know what else.

 My EKG was slightly abnormal. The first blood test for a protein called Troponin that is released into the bloodstream after a heart attack was negative, but they were concerned about the EKG, and the next time they did the blood test, it was, indeed positive. Six hours later, it had risen even more. So the event was an actual heart attack, and it turns out that it was very lucky I went in before it became a massive one. Those strange symptoms women tend to show, which often do not involve pain, are too often not taken seriously until it is too late.

So there you have it. I guess I dodged a bullet. But really, if I had to have a heart attack, could the timing have been better than the weekend when Friday the 13^th and Valentine’s Day collide?  

**I don't want to be answering everyone's questions about this ad infinitum. This was not an aortic stenosis, I have no problems with valves, and virtually no plaque buildup. And I do not need anyone's suggestions for or critiques of my treatment. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing and thinking about my puppy.

**Additional update: I had to be hospitalized again due to a horrible reaction to Lipitor. Fortunately, my blood cholesterol levels are only marginally high and there was no evidence of any significant clogging of my arteries—just that genetic aneurism—so statins aren't really called for in my case anyway. This was way more debilitating than the heart attack itself, but I'm back on the mend. 

**One final point: Having a heart attack is terrifying. I am trying to make light of it, partly to reassure my family and friends that the probabilities of my keeling over dead haven't risen too dramatically above what they are for any reasonably-in-shape 63-year-old, and partly because that's the way I always cope with things. But just because I am trying to deal with it as best I can does not give anyone the right to make jokes about it, and especially not to say "I thought you had a sense of humor." This is a no brainer, and as far as friendships go, a deal breaker. 

Why I'm Not a Birding Guide

This past weekend, a birding acquaintance of mine from Florida came up to Duluth to celebrate what I’ve long called Superb Owl Sunday. He arrived on Friday afternoon, and we birded steadily during daylight hours until he left on Monday afternoon. He added three lifer owls—Snowy Owl on Friday at the Superior Airport, Great Gray Owl on Saturday in the Sax-Zim Bog, and Northern Hawk Owl on Sunday on Jean Duluth Road north of Duluth, so both Superb Owl Sunday and the rest of the weekend lived up to the hype. We also saw lots of other northern birds that were new for him. So all in all it was a wonderfully successful weekend.

Superb Owl Sunday Northern Hawk Owl

But it was also an exhausting one. I put over 700 miles on my car, making it expensive and energy-intensive as well—much more than if I were covering the same area on my own, not feeling like I had to go back repeatedly to spots where we missed a single “target bird.”

Boreal Chickadee: One of the target birds we got skunked on

Maybe that sense of targets is the trick for me. I have a genuine antipathy for wasting fuel, so I don’t bird far from home without serious thought about the energy costs, but I do love occasionally getting up early and setting out for the bog, or for the Superior National Forest along Highways 2 and 1 north of Two Harbors, in hopes of seeing cool birds. It’s fun to be open to all the possibilities without specific goals, and my birding virtually never holds any disappointments—heck, even when I went to Quincy, Illinois on a failed effort to see an Ivory Gull, my lasting memory is more of what a fun experience that was than of disappointment.

My first Illinois Eurasian Tree Sparrow--bonus bird when I was in Quincy, Illinois.
You win some, and you lose some.

When I do come upon something interesting, which may be something as universally thrilling as a Great Gray Owl or as simple as a chickadee taking a sample bite out of a shrike’s cached mouse impaled on a thorn, I don’t enjoy jumping back in the car to move on to the next target. If I really want to see a specific bird that is supposed to be in one area, I prefer staying there as long as possible, enjoying everything else there in the interim, to moving on and coming back repeatedly so I can get a whole panoply of “target birds.”

When it comes down to it, I’m a moseyer. Like any other birder, I love having as long a list of species as possible for a given jaunt, and measure my skills by the birds I pick out by sight and sound. When I started birding, before I'd brought my life list to over 600 for the Lower 48, I was pretty intent on that milestone, but even when I was most acquisitive, except on specific "Big Days," I've never enjoyed birding just to have a long list of species.

The Florida Scrub-Jay was #600 on my life list. I saw my first, with my whole family, in 1999, at Lake Kissimmee State Park. My kids and Russ were all charmed by these friendly birds--the PERFECT milestone species for meeting my ultimate birding goal of 600 species in the Lower 48. 

Looking back on most birding jaunts, I remember specific cool experiences with individual birds and other critters far more than the final number. And I especially don’t like feeling responsible for what other people see. I do enjoy leading birding field trips—those experiences helped improve my own birding skills when I was starting out, and I love sharing my knowledge of places and birds with others. But leading field trips never feels anywhere near as intense as showing someone who has come a long way all the birds that person "needs” to see to make the trip worthwhile.

When I was amassing my own life list and Russ and I took trips to new places, I loved exploring on my own. We covered all the best spots in Florida, southeastern Arizona, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, Florida, and California following instructions in birding books and checking out spots that looked interesting or just happened to be near where Russ had to be for something else, as well as the spots pinpointed in the birding books. The pleasures came from getting a feel for different habitats and how to find different birds in new places entirely on my own.

Even when I did my Big Year, when part of the whole point was to amass a big list, I did most of the birding by myself—somehow birds feel more earned and “mine” that way. I did have some special target birds for which I spent an inordinate amount of time searching, like the Colima Warbler for which I hiked twelve miles, alone in the rain, in Big Bend National Park, and the Hermit Warbler for which I went to San Lorenzo Park in Santa Cruz, California, three times before I finally got the bird--though each time I went there, I had plenty of other wonderful experiences, as well.

Crappy photo of a Hermit Warbler--a target bird I specifically searched for three times before I finally saw. 

Anna's Hummingbird: One of the bonus birds I saw one of the times I was missing that Hermit Warbler.

On my Big Year, I relished getting to spend days of intensive birding with a few close friends, such as Paula Lozano in Ohio, and Eric Bowman, Larry Foard, and Ali Sheehey in California. I also participated in a few birding festivals for which I was a speaker and so got to attend the field trips. I thoroughly enjoyed the Space Coast Birding Festival in Florida, the Red Slough Birding Festival in Oklahoma, the Biggest Week in American Birding in Ohio, the Rio Grand Valley birding festival in Texas, and the Monterey birding festival in California (I wasn't a speaker at the last two), and I took two guided tours with Kim Eckert, to Texas and Colorado. I was invited to be the keynote speaker at Kansas's Wings N Wetlands Birding Festival; when that was cancelled because of the drought, I still got to go and was taken around to great places by Curtis Wolf and Robert Penner. I spent a couple of weeks in Delaware, being escorted to splendid birding spots by Debra Chiczewski. To see a Bicknell's Thrush, I went on the auto tour up Mount Washington, so I wouldn't enter and risk disturbing more pristine habitat. I heard and saw Kirtland's Warblers on my own, knowing how to find them without going off roads (they're loud singers!), but I also went on the public tour to support the best way for anyone to add this splendid bird to their lifelist.

Bicknell's Thrush seen on the Mt. Washington Auto Road tour.

When I was headed to the Southwest, I learned that a Rufous-necked Wood-Rail had just been found at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, so I made that my first stop. Hundreds of birders descended on the refuge for that first U.S. record bird, and since the only vantage point to see it was from a specific boardwalk, birders gathered with lawn chairs and cold drinks for what felt more like a social event than a birding jaunt. It was wonderful fun, and most of us got to see a really cool bird, to boot.

Rufous-necked Wood-Rail

So I do enjoy all kinds of birding experiences. But on my Big Year, I was very pleased to see every species of North American warbler entirely on my own at least once, except for the MacGillivray's Warbler that I only saw one time, with Eric Bowman in Yosemite. That one we both picked out simultaneously, so we both earned it. It was fun to see a Swainson's Warbler—a North American lifer—with Mia Revels, the researcher who is the expert on the Oklahoma population, as well as hearing them and getting one quick glimpse entirely on my own. Spending time with experts and local authorities provides a wealth of information impossible to get entirely on our own, and can be darned fun as well.

Swainson's Warbler found by Mia Revels in Oklahoma.

My friend Heidi Trudell told me exactly where to go to get my North American lifer Golden-cheeked Warbler at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge. The birds were silent—I got there in late afternoon in mid-July—but it was thrilling to find them entirely on my own.

Golden-cheeked Warbler in Balcones Canyonlands.

I sat on my good friend Susan Eaton's deck eating lunch while watching Eurasian Tree Sparrows in comfort at her feeders for my Big Year. So it's hardly that I object to easy birds or birding with pleasant company.

Eurasian Tree Sparrow in my friend Susan's backyard.

I enjoy being a participant on birding tours, too. They allow us to see more species than what we could find on our own in an unfamiliar area, plus we don't need to drive or figure out logistics—that's all taken care of. But except when I’ve birded outside of the country, I’ve virtually always birded a new area on my own before going out on an organized tour—it makes me appreciate the leader’s added knowledge and local experience more, even as I recognize many of the birds from having figured out their habits in that habitat on my own.

But I'm really too much of an introvert to enjoy large group birding too often. And there is no way on earth I'd be good at actually leading an organized tour. I forget about food and am perfectly content to sleep in my car when I'm having fun birding. You can't hear a Flammulated Owl calling all night long from even the finest motel, while I got to do just that when sleeping in my car in Water Canyon in New Mexico. Normal people expect meals and a bed to sleep in and have other needs I just don't want to deal with. And I'm completely out of my element at explaining what expenses and responsibilities other people should take care of themselves when birding with me, so I'm easily taken advantage of as well.

I read a lot of posts by birding guides on Facebook, and am always impressed by how they can go out, day after day, week after week, showing each individual of each group a huge number of birds. They earn their pay with their skills, ability to juggle logistics, and unflagging focus and ability to keep moving on to the next bird while ensuring their participants all have a satisfying experience. It was fun for me to get out for one weekend for the first time in years to show someone around the north woods. But the experience reminded me that at heart, I really am an introverted moseyer.

Recently I discovered that a few bird guides and photographers up here have been publicly ridiculing me, claiming that all my knowledge comes from reading about birds rather than going out and actually experiencing them. That's hurtful, of course, as well as patently false, but I don't even know how to begin to answer that kind of silliness. Fortunately, most of the birders up here, like everywhere else, don't need to cut down anyone else to carve their own place in the birding world. As Robert Frost might have put it, birders work together, I tell you from the heart, whether we bird together or apart.

I can’t wait to get my new puppy. I’ll take Pip everywhere birding with me. I may have named her for a character in Great Expectations, but the great thing about puppies is they don’t have any expectations. For her, our tracking down every pigeon and nuthatch will be an adventure, and when we don’t see the birds I want, she’ll be perfectly content with what we do find. That, for me, is what the funnest birding is all about.

My future little birding companion, Pip