As of today, Tues., Sept. 8, 2020, I have submitted at least one complete eBird checklist per day every single day since Mon., Jan. 1, 2007, a run of 5,000 straight days. Why? How come? What has motivated me to do this?
We had a hankering to see Mississippi kites, the most summery of summer birds in Colorado. Kites like it hot: in the old towns along the Arkansas River well east of Pueblo, where cicadas drone from the tall shade trees.
I saw an American avocet, a presumed male by bill structure, thus less spectacular than the female. The bird was bleached and worn, but still: An avocet, any avocet, even a sun-blasted, straight-billed male, is the sort of bird that bids you stop.
I presented iNaturalist with my Hardscrabble Mountain gray flycatchers, and the app performed flawlessly. Not just the adults teed up in textbook fashion atop junipers; but also the fledglings, nearly featureless blobs of downy softness.
The second half of 2020 is going to be difficult, and I have no intention of downplaying or dismissing that reality. But I wonder if something quietly wondrous is beginning to happen: an awakening of community, of shared responsibility, of devotion to a cause greater than ourselves.
Seeing the bird was bittersweet for me. Sweet: What’s not to like about seeing a rock wren, indeed seeing and hearing and experiencing an entire landscape come alive with these blithe, brown birds? Bitter: I wish I’d been there with my friends from Camp Colorado, understandably canceled out of concern for the health of would-be campers and the broader community.
The bird was a grasshopper sparrow, Ammodramus savannarum, singing, as grasshopper sparrows are wont to do, in the middle of the night. The time was 12:26 am. The full moon peeked through the haze and persistent cloud cover, but it was to be of no use in actually seeing the sparrow. Which was the whole point of this exercise. My companion and I had come to this place specifically to hear the unseen bird.
One doesn’t ordinarily go to the Wyoming Hereford Ranch in search of workaday western kingbirds. No, the ranch is best known as a “vagrant trap,” a magnet for rarities. But I had a hankering this sunny Saturday afternoon for an encounter with a kingbird.
The whole world seems to have started to notice birds, a phenomenon that has been widely reported in major newspapers, on network news, and at online information sites.
If there’s a silver lining in the cloud of the coronavirus, it’s that so many people are noticing birds for the first time. Even in this era of social distancing, people are also noticing other birders and engaging the broader birding community. Some of them will find their way to the ABA. But even those who do not will, at least to some degree, find themselves within the ABA’s sphere of influence.
