he day before I’d been birding. Birding hard. The kind of birding where you’re ticking off birds before sunrise and where you keep going till after the onset of heat exhaustion eight-plus hours later. At the hadean Great Salt Lake, on one of the hottest days of the summer. I consider the Great Salt Lake in August to be one of the most spendid birding spectacles in the ABA Area. But that was yesterday.
Today I was making the long haul across southern Wyoming on I-80. You might say it was a non-birding day. I was just driving. Fun fact: You can do the whole drive from Salt Lake to Denver, a bit more than 500 miles, listening to just two “songs” on Spotify. Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier and Berlioz’s Les Troyens. Yeah, I suppose I wasn’t “really” birding.
But what does that really mean? Do we really ever stop birding? You might as well ask whether we ever stop breathing.
I got off the interstate at exit 211, and found my way to a tiny “city” “park” within earshot of the big rigs doing the cross-country haul. To stretch my legs. Get the blood flowing. Clear my mind. It would be a quick stop, I promised myself, and I’d soon enough be back on the road and back to the exploits of Énée and Cassandre and the rest of the Trojans.
Except that a little bird had other plans for me. An “LBJ,” or Little Brown Job, as birders of a certain generation say. Not one of the in-your-face blatantly cool birds like the ones they have at the Great Salt Lake: humongous long-billed curlews, bewitching burrowing owls, thousands of red-necked phalaropes spinning like tops, you get the picture. No, this was an “empid,” a birder’s bird, a small flycatcher in the tricky genus Empidonax. This guy:
It’s a fresh adult Hammond’s flycatcher. Check out the contrast between the gray head and olive back, a good mark for recently molted birds:
Seen from directly below, Hammond’s flycatcher shows a thin bill with rather straight edges:
The bill is small. I mean, okay, all empids have small bills, but the bill of Hammond’s is small even for an empid. The eye-ring is distinctive, too. It’s pinched back at the rear, imparting a characteristic “teardrop” shape:
The western flycatcher has a teardrop eye-ring, too, but that species is larger overall, with a bigger bill and shorter wings. Speaking of wings, check out the long primaries:
Even in this foreshortened view, the primaries extend well rearward. Which totally makes sense, ecologically speaking. Among the four widespread Western empids (the others being western, dusky, and gray), Hammond’s is the most migratory, and those long wings power the bird on its impressive migrations. Here’s another view from behind:
Look at the big head. True, Hammond’s is small overall, but it’s a blockhead. If anything, that big head accentuates the small body, if that makes any sense. And you can see the other marks in this view: the teardrop, the long primaries, etc. One last pic:
It’s a minor supporting character, but note the microhabitat. The flycatcher had lots of choices in that little park, but it definitely had a thing for the Rocky mountain ponderosa pines, Pinus scopulorum, planted there. Hammond’s flycatchers generally go for conifers, even on migration.
I glanced at my phone. It was time to get a move on. Back to the car, back on the road, back to Bach and Berlioz, and eventually back down to Boulder, where I live. It’s funny, if it weren’t for that little flycatcher, I’d surely go on, sooner or later, to forget about the drive, to forget about the whole day. Just the long slog on I-80 through the moonscape of southern Wyoming. Boooor-ing. But I snapped a few pictures, jotted down some notes, and uploaded an eBird checklist—and I’ll have the memory forever.
Which, if I might wax philosophical for just a moment here, gets at one of the strangest and most wondrous things about birding. We remember a tiny flycatcher, not even a third of an ounce. All the other stuff—the drive itself, the reason I was on the road in the first place, even my place and purpose in this world—I imagine those things will one day depart me. I imagine there will come a day when there’s nothing left in my mind but flycatchers. Individual flycatchers: the ones I saw as a child decades ago, the ones I’ve seen in my yard and the ones I’ve seen overseas, the ones I’ll see tomorrow and next year and beyond, and the one I saw on an otherwise utterly forgettable—and long forgotten—drive down the freeway. Surely hundreds, if not thousands, of such memories. Add to that total all the sparrows and thrushes, sandpipers and warblers, and there must be tens of thousands.
We go birding—I go birding—to see something new and cool. In the heat of the moment, I’m doing it for “present me.” Whether it’s a carefully planned trip to the Great Salt Lake, or a random stop by the roadside, it’s the promise of finding a good bird or birds right now. But I’m also doing it for “future me,” for that day—and it will surely come, for me and for every one of us—when “all” we have is what we have done in this life.
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.
