oaquín Andújar (1952–2015) was an eccentric, erratic, and sometimes brilliant righthanded pitcher active in Major League Baseball in the 1970s and 1980s. He said a lot of odd and interesting things. For example: “There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is, ‘You never know.’”
That one word, You never know, pretty much summed up my visit last month to the Konza Prairie Biological Station, a. k. a. “The Konza.” Everybody calls it The Konza. I’ve known about the place forever, but I’d never actually been there until May of this year. I was on a long road trip, and The Konza was (more or less) on the way, so I popped in for a quick stop. I reflected at the time on how that first visit could also very well have been my last. The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas are off the beaten path and far from home. I had no particular reason to go back in this life. But . . . You never know.
Not even two months later, early Independence Day morn, I found myself back on The Konza. It was just one of those things. I’d been roped into helping get a car from the Duke University Marine Lab in coastal North Carolina to my home in Colorado. And, once again, The Konza was on the way. You never know.
When my car-transport coconspirator daughter and I arrived on the Konza, it was overcast and muggy. We quickly bypassed the prairie habitat around the parking area and headed straight into the woods. Birdsong there was muted, unsurprisingly so, given the clouds and humidity and the fact that it was July. But this guy was going at it:
A Yellow-throated Vireo sings its strangely slow song: “Three-eight . . . Detroit . . . Surreal . . .”Audio by © Ted Floyd.
Yellow-throated Vireo, cool. At the extreme western limit of the breeding range. The species is an exemplary representative of the Eastern Deciduous Forest biome. Then we saw it:
Not teed up all nice and pretty. Because July. That’s the bird way in the dead of summer, especially in the “East Coast” heat and humidity. The bird, carrying food to presumptive nestlings, came and went in an instant. Other species, typical of the “Carolinian” avifauna, were similarly engaged: Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Carolina Wrens, Eastern Wood-Pewees, Great Crested Flycatchers, Red-eyed Vireos . . . even a Kentucky Warbler that belted out a few songs, then fell silent. This could have been, well, Kentucky, or even the Florida Panhandle.
Then the raindrops started to fall, and then a crack of thunder, and then within mere minutes, a full-on deluge. We ran back to the car, and our brief sojourn on The Konza was over.
Back to the Future
That was my second and perhaps final visit to the Konza. Not lost on me was that it also was the occasion of my second and, very likely, final semicentennial Independence Day. The first was the summer before the third grade, and I wasn’t a birder yet. But we’d been outdoors, my siblings and neighborhood pals and I, pretty much the whole day. That was the 1970s way, even in the Big City. It was a daylong gala, with flags affixed to our banana-seat bikes, a red-white-and-blue cake for lunch (washed down with warm water straight out of the garden hose), and shenanigans with fireworks that would attract the attention of Child Protective Services in 2026 but that were as normal then as screen time is now. Probably not as harmful either. If there was divisiveness or partisanship about celebrating the Bicentennial, me and my buds missed the memo entirely on that.
We weren’t old enough to reflect on the possibility that anything in this life might be the last occurrence or instance. I didn’t know it yet, but every birding adventure of mine was still to come; today, the simple majority of my birding adventures are, I assume, in life’s rearview mirror. If you’d asked me on July 4, 1976, to imagine America on July 4, 2026, I might well have imagined a morning on The Konza: muggy and warm, with peeps out on family hikes, even a little yellow bird carrying food to a nest. I might also have envisaged the following: science-based medicine and public policy in 2026; robust investment in education, civil rights, and the free press; and unwavering devotion to equal opportunity, the rule of law, and basic human rights. I was young, but I’d received sufficient grounding in civics and common sense to assume that the ideals and institutions of American democracy would endure forever.
Then again, we hadn’t yet heard from a certain 23-year-old who’d debuted a few months earlier for the Houston Astros. The guy who, upon reflecting on his career close to a decade later, would famously decree that one little word: “You never know.” 
Ted Floyd is the longtime Editor of Birding magazine, and he is broadly involved in other programs and initiatives with the ABA. Ted has written 200+ magazine articles and 5 books, including How to Know the Birds (National Geographic, 2019). He is a frequent speaker at birding festivals and has served on several nonprofit boards. Join Ted here for his semimonthly spot, “How to Know the Birds,” celebrating common birds and the uncommonly interesting things they do.
