Dawn Chorus hasn't appeared yet this AM. Here is a fill-in diary. If lineatus' diary appears I can take this down.
People reading this diary are here because they love birds. Presumably you, dear reader, spend time observing our feathered friends be it from your kitchen window, in your neighborhood park, on vacation at a national park, or on the far side of the world. During your bird watching hours you have had at least a few (hopefully many) experiences that were a bit above the rest. Experiences that struck you strongly enough that, even if only for a moment, the world slipped away and the only thing left was the bird(s) in front of you. I’d like to hear the stories of those moments. I’ll start with a few of my own.
From Wikimedia Commons. Image in the Public Domain
Summer 1975: Redstone Lake, Ontario, Canada
My family rented a cottage here approximately once every other summer for a couple of weeks. I turned 14 that summer and was a full-fledged nature junkie. For years my summer vacations involved combing lake shores for frogs, feeding chipmunks, catching insects, every now and then seeing something really exciting like a mink or a watersnake. Birds had never really grabbed my attention. Partly it was familiarity – I saw them every day. But partly I was that I couldn’t catch them – they didn’t fulfill my boyish need to have things in my hands.
I had looked through my mother’s bird book fairly thoroughly but she kept telling me that all the cool birds (scissortailed flycatchers, vermillion flycatchers, snowy owls, etc) lived far away and I was not likely to see them any time soon. My mother loved birds and was quite knowledgeable about them. For her watching birds was something you did as you did other things. I don’t think it would have ever occurred to her to actually go out and look for birds. She liked to go on walks in the woods or canoe around lakes or just sit and ‘watch the lake go by’. If she saw birds during those activities that was great.
One afternoon that summer I walked back into the woods by myself. I came upon a male scarlet tanager. I don’t think I had ever seen one before. Unlike most of the woodland species it stood out from the foliage. I went back and found my mother who was socializing with our neighbor, one half of an American couple who had the cottage next door. She knew nothing about birds but my mother assured her that the tanager was quite spectacular. So we went back and, much to my relief, it was still there. Aside from the beauty of the tanager this was my real start to independent bird watching.
From Wikimedia Commons. Image by Alastair Rae
Winter 1983: Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada
I was an undergraduate at a small university in my home town not far from Niagara Falls. Growing up, every time we had out of town guests we would take them to the falls. So I was a bit jaded. I was in my third year (a junior to use the American terminology) and taking an Ornithology class. I would have greatly preferred to take Herpetology but it wasn’t offered. In retrospect the guy teaching the course wasn’t the greatest teacher in the world but he was an excellent birder. He took us on a field trip to the falls. The rapid current produces a large ice free area in winter. We saw an amazing number of different birds that I had never seen before, simply because I had never gone to the appropriate habitat in the winter. I also had never been around someone with his level of expertise. Some one who could pick the interesting and novel out of a complex environment with ease. Some of the new birds I saw that day are really quite common in the area such as Great Black-backed Gull and Bonaparte’s Gull. A couple were quite unusual, a Glaucous Gull and an Iceland Gull. Also all kinds of ducks. This made me realize that where I grew up was maybe, just maybe, not quite as boring as I had imagined.
From Wikimedia Commons. Image by Adalberto Gomez Vega
March 1988 – La Selva Biological Station, Costa Rica
I was on my first trip to the tropics. Also my first trip ever outside of Canada and the US. I hadn’t really done all that much bird watching on the trip, a tropical ecology field course. The course leaders weren’t bird watchers and finding and seeing birds in tropical forest is daunting for the inexperienced. I had seen plenty of cool things. Then, late in the course, one afternoon while I was at the station a keel-billed toucan flew up and perched in a Cecropia tree making itself extremely conspicuous. It seemed unreal, like it had stepped out of a movie. Much the same experience I had with the Scarlet Tanager over a decade earlier.
I identified it myself (not very difficult) and could a good long look at it hopping from branch to branch. It was the start of a long positive relationship between myself and toucans. On my visits to the tropics I have seen them quite often.
From Wikimedia Commons. Image by Elaine R. Wilson
Winter 1999 or 2000. Phoenix Arizona.
The bird in this example is the black-throated sparrow. It is not a particularly rare bird in the Sonoran desert. But it is a really beautiful sparrow, almost chickadee-like with its black throat. The key to this story is that it was in my front yard. Black-throated sparrows are habitat specialists. They like the desert scrub vegetation and you don’t generally find them anywhere else. We lived in a 1920s era house in the middle of Phoenix. I had put in a great deal of effort into turning my front lawn into a little piece of desert. To have this sparrow show up in my yard was a great vindication of my efforts.
From Wikimedia Commons. Image by Wayward
Winter 2001. Urbana, Illinois
We had just moved into our new home and were getting used to life with a real winter again after years of living in Phoenix. A juvenile red-tailed hawk perched in the maple tree in our backyard. A squirrel climbed up high in the tree, ran out along the branch, and chased the hawk out of the tree. I remember this kind of happening in slow motion as I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing.
Those are some of my stories. I’d love to hear yours.