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Checklist Streak: 366

I waited to celebrate until I hit 366 because it’s a leap year.

One of the good things to come out of this cross-threaded year is my commitment to an eBird daily checklist streak that has motivated me to get out and see the birds. Every. Single. Day. If not far afield, at least out in the neighborhood, at minimum out the back window, stopping for breath, eyes trained on the feeders. It’s been a great streak, even if it’s been such a local one–for me, birding in coronoviral times is mostly limited to a walkable half-mile radius. But within that 0.5MR I picked up three lifers in 2020, a nemesis, even, and there’s three more weeks to go. Who knows what’s in store?

Since the diagnosis I’ve been bringing discipline to various aspects of my life without always thinking about it or even thinking about what being disciplined means. So while I’ve adjusted my routines, committed to an exercise regimen five days out of every seven, and maintained this checklist streak, it is an open question as to why. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, after all.

The best I can come up with is that the reasons vary. Some are easy: the biking and the boxing are attempts to forestall what progression I can, to maintain flexibility and balance and also generally to get into better shape, and, knowing myself and my dislike of exercise, a disciplined approach is the only way to sustain such activities on a regular basis. Call it discipline overcoming aversion.

The birding is something else–it is a conscious focus on making time for something I enjoy, and making it a habit, because even though I love it I still curiously sometimes need a forcing function to get my fundamentally lazy ass up and out and about. In that case the discipline is more accurately an aspect of defiance against inertia, an unyielding spirit, or, as my wife would more accurately characterize it, stubbornness.

So now that I’ve passed a year in this checklist streak, do I keep it going? What’s the next milestone, another year? Or something more ambitious, like a thousand days? After all, at some point the streak will inevitably end. Maybe that’s the point–this obstinance is a positive form of compensation, a quiet raging in the face of that which I cannot ultimately control, and a focus on the now, one chickadee at a time.

I’d like to hear from you if you’ve ever maintained a checklist streak: why did you do it? Why did you stop? What do you think of all of this?

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Yard Lifer

As seeing birds has become more of a challenge, I am grateful for sustained looks at the commoner birds that visit the yard and feeders. For some winter finches this is an irruption year, and I’ve been watching eBird light up with reports of a “nemesis bird” for me, the Pine Siskin. Particularly as American Goldfinches started to visit in greater and greater numbers, I kept wondering if a lone siskin might make an appearance, especially hearing of the big flocks others in the state have had coming to their backyards.

I’ve been talking about the irruption for a month and Pine Siskins much longer than that–in fact, it had become a running joke in our home: “Look, Dad, a Pine Siskin!” It’s hard to believe over more than three decades of birding the Northeast that I haven’t seen one, but then again, such is the nature of the nemesis. I even went so far as to make, at my wife’s request, a reference poster/cheat sheet remixing images of Pine Siskins, American Goldfinches, and Evening Grosbeaks from Sibley.

For the better part of eight months I’ve been working from home, riding out the Coronavirus pandemic. Most days I try to escape the basement office, if only for a half hour, for lunch with the family. As I finished my lunch Friday, both wife and child excitedly pointed at the closest feeder and simultaneously exclaimed, “Pine Siskin!” This time they weren’t joking.

NEMESIS NO MORE

Pine Siskin

Over these past few days we’ve had as many as three at a time on the feeder, where the little pugilists are surprisingly aggressive and hold their own, fighting off much bigger birds such as House Finches.

I am so grateful: to finally see this nemesis bird; to see it in my own backyard, literally a few feet away; to see it with my family; and to see it because of my family.

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Fall on Me

Fall is almost here and it couldn’t come sooner for the BwP crew. This year’s covid-mandated isolation plus an associated reluctance to go anywhere, on top of the annual June-August doldrums, a regular occurrence when even the most vociferous locals shut up and get down to the business of (quietly) rearing young, has felt like an interminable quarter.

Yeah, yeah, we could have gone to the shore, scoped for vagrant seabirds and resident shorebirds, but the thought of vying with throngs of work-from-home cooped-up beachgoers suddenly released on their own recognizance sent a shudder through our introverted spines. So, we get no Piping Plover for the list this year, but perhaps gain an added appreciation for and intimate awareness of the comings and goings of what seems to be a bumper crop of local Blue Jays. Geri birding they call it, big sit, 5MR.

But besides the jays it’s otherwise been quiet. It was even an uncharacteristically slow summer for leps; not a single leaf on our milkweed was munched by a hungry Monarch caterpillar, and only a very occasional Vanessa shared the butterfly bush with a healthy and persistent troupe (flock? gang? cartel?) of Peck’s skippers.

When it is this slow, you can worry too much, become easily discouraged: locally about your own looming physical decrepitude, and more broadly with an abstract concern–perhaps not so abstract nowadays– that radiates out to include the country and the world. But reaching down past the gray featureless despair, past its whiff of lurking, atavistic malice, you may find just-in-time beacons of hope: the first warblers have started passing through. They’re here and there at the beginning, characteristically in the company of mixed flocks of chickadees, with the occasional associated titmouse or nuthatch. Like back in April, a Yellow-rumped was first, but a Redstart was soon to follow, and even though they are generally less colorful and less vocal than in the spring, they (anthropomorphizing here) still flit cheerfully with a certain reassuring, uplifting, and infectious joie de vivre.

Time to dust off the monopod and get off this couch.

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ADK 2020

“Forever Wild” is debatable as we cross the Blue Line doing 70 mph on the six-lane Northway, but the Adirondack Park is indisputably big: a contiguous but internally fragmented mass, government lands veined with private property and huge tracts of private land; nineteenth century Great Camps like Jack Ma’s retreat on 28,000 acres, these parcels eclipsed in turn by holdings of timber companies you’ve likely never heard of (Molpus, Lyme)—273 thousand and 240 thousand acres respectively—the People of the Great State of New York’s 2.6 million acres of wild forest, the park in total 6 million acres.

What a great place for lawnchair birding! I picked up 18 year birds (41 species total) in just a few days hunkered down on my campsite, including three warblers I missed in migration — Blackburnian, B-t Green, and, my favorite, Magnolia. (In camping trip planning I always question the added weight, but I am never sorry to have brought the scope; an angled eyepiece or module dramatically boosts the octane level of “big sit” birding and is a superior tool for people with PD.)

Ravens are awesome, and I was glad to see and hear several every day, chatting each other up with a wide variety of vocalizations. It was a privilege to catch a glimpse of a Black-backed Woodpecker and to become newly cognizant of the odd, ringtone-like song of a Junco, a vocalization I never get from my winter visitors. The more familiar call of a Common Loon is hopeful, not haunting: it speaks volumes about the health of the watershed, and Osprey and Bald Eagle affirm that the fishing is good, healthy up and down the food chain.

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Streak Update: 225

My eBird streak continues at 225. Although we are still constrained by the coronavirus, it has been good to have the impetus to go birding, just for a little while, every day.

keep on keepin’ on

I always carry bins and usually carry a camera, but find I rarely use either on my morning course. Birding my neighborhood in July reminds me of how important birding by ear (no matter how bad I am at it) has become to me. Probably 2/3 of the species I observe are heard-only, and bird vocalizations in the summer are rich with communicative chips and chirps, a colorful and diverse cacophony of juvenile chatter and begging calls, but very few actual songs. Song Sparrows seem to be the exception to the rule.

Caution is in order, though. Some mornings a Carolina Wren sounds an awful lot like an Eastern Towhee, or maybe even an Ovenbird (especially if I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet.) Blue Jays are accomplished mimics, and an occasional starling gets into the act as well. My neighborhood rarely has a mockingbird, but makes up for it with a healthy population of Gray Catbirds. At least they usually throw in a nasally “mew” to give away their doppelgänger songs.

Birding-by-ear skills not only open up a leafed-out world, they are particularly useful to people with PD. Shaky hands don’t get in the way of your ears, and sharp listening can help locate interesting birds when you do want to try to get them in sight. Just as in visual birding, a good strategy is to familiarize yourself with the usual suspects before going afield, not trying to figure out a call after the fact. One good place to start your study is the Macaulay Library.

Of course, in addition to keen—or at least attentive—ears, it helps immensely to have the support of others. I am tremendously fortunate my son is here for me, seeing what I overlook and cheering me on in my streak. I get the joy of seeing him experience new birds, and he repays me with a fresh look—or listen—of the familiar.

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Summer Doldrums

T. S. Eliot really had it wrong–July is the cruelest month, at least for birders, and this year it feels as if summer has come all at once, July early, and the birds mute. A quiet midsummer is not at all odd, but this year, coming on the heels of an upside-down spring (the pandemic rules enforcing social distancing, closing refuges and other hotspots, disrupting travel near and far) the summer seems early. Every tick mark of every checklist is a struggle. Except for that one insistent Warbling Vireo.

In other (not terribly exciting) updates:

  • Its time to bump up the dopamine agonist settings. We’ll see how that affects birding (when and if there are any birds to see);
  • Still putting the new camera (Panasonic ds-z70) through its paces–backlit birds are very challenging for the autofocus; need to experiment with manual focus settings? (Just what my hands need, something else requiring manual adjustment);
  • Do large mosquitoes count as “birds”?
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The End of Spring (warbler) Migration

It was a terribly sparse and spotty spring for warblering, thanks to quarantine measures such as the closing of numerous hotspots (parks and cemeteries–ironic that many cemeteries are hotspots, perhaps indicative of the sheer numbers of the damned in this part of the country) and my own reticence to get into the car to go anywhere, also fed by the pandemic.

As a result, I missed any reported fallout; all my warblers this spring were hard-won, mostly singles, just 14 species in total. No Magnolia, Black-throated Green, or Blackpoll, let alone Prairie, Blackburnian, Tennessee, Blue-winged, Bay-breasted, Cape May, etc.,.. Maybe it is my choice of habitat to frequent, but I did see some of the other, more common transients, as well as a Wilson’s and a Canada.

And a Mourning Warbler. On May 17 I was drawn to a skulker in a bramble thicket, expecting yet another Common Yellowthroat. Instead a surprise: a burst of song , and a richly colored yellow, charcoal, and greenish bird popped out, granting me crushing views at maybe ten or fifteen feet. I watched in hushed appreciation at this bird, a lifer for me. And later that afternoon I was able to relocate it with my eight-year-old.

The bird was still there early the next morning, singing, and I saw it just long enough to get a very blurry picture (thanks, PD!) before it flew off. Then it was gone for good. I was profoundly grateful. In these crazy times, you have to appreciate any glimmer of hope, no matter how skulking and fleeting, that presents itself.

I’m not winning any prizes with this terrible, awful picture of the wonderful, obliging Mourning Warbler. Note the black bib margin contrasting with a slaty grey head, and the otherwise yellow undersides. The blur is is a product of tremors, low light, and rapid heartbeat. I have since bought a new camera with optical image stabilization. (More on that soon.)
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Birding with Non-birders

My eight-year-old son is the birding version of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. This morning he was enthusiastic about the prospects of a walk around the pond, grabbing “his” binoculars (actually the family feederwatching bins) and donning socks and shoes, uncharacteristically without complaint. He was in good spirits in the morning sunshine, ticking off the regular birds and finding our FOY Blue-gray Gnatcatcher.

Fifteen minutes later he had unceremoniously foisted the bins on me and charged down the trail, tossing rocks and sticks off the crown of the esker, running pell mell ahead with the aim (or so it seemed to me) of scaring off any stray Catharus thrushes whIch had ventured into the county. My son had gone from promising protobirder to chaotic antibirder in the blink of an eye.

I have to remember not everyone shares my time-stands-still patience or my willingness to do an about-face and head 20 yards back down the trail in what is usually a misguided search for the source of a poorly heard chip note. Chipmunk!

My sluggishness compounds my frustration–i am slower on the move, slower to get on a bird, shaky, which sometimes means slower on the id. Slower, slower, slower! No wonder my son ran ahead. I shouted, “watch out for coyotes!” Hoping that might make him pause. Naïveté…

Today, a week later, he was 90% Hyde but I (oddly) didn’t care. It was warm in the sun and in the other 10% he’d helpfully pointed out a pair of Catbirds carrying nesting materials. He was so excited to show me and I got to share in his genuine excitement; I even caught a glimpse of the wonder that hooked me in the first place thirty years ago.

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WARBLERS!

They are coming…well, a lot of migratory passerines are, but if you’re a birder in eastern North America you’ve been waiting for this ever since the winter became unbearably tedious. Sometime in early December, to be precise. Yes, they are coming! It’s almost religious.

I got my first spring warbler this morning while walking the dog. While I did have my bins, I did not have my monopod, but in its place, still puppylike after seven years, a semi-obedient cur pulling on my “bad” hand. I had already easily identified the little bird, since it was singing to beat the band, but I wanted to see it. So I took a deep breath to calm myself, let out the leash a little so I could bring the handle up in an ill-founded hope to provide additional steadiness, poo bag dangerously close to my face (the deep breath helping here, too), and there he was: my FOY Yellow-Rumped Warbler.

Setophaga coronata. That’s right, I was excited about what some would call the closest thing to a “trash bird” in the warbler family: YRWA, Myrtle, Butter-butt, Rump, Lousy-not-something-else Warbler, Another One. “How could you possibly get excited by that?” some of you will say. “Wait,” others of you will say, “those are half-hardy and aren’t necessarily even migrants.” To both of which I reply, “F*$# off! it’s a wood-warbler, and you’re probably among those jerks who lumped Myrtles with Audubon’s in the first place. And decimated Dendroica, and made me learn a whole new set of latin names. Bastards.” But I digress.

If you stop to look at them, like you only can do when you have fresh eyes (and a relaxed neck ) at the beginning of migration, Yellow-rumps are really quite handsome. More than that, to me this tiny suburban bird, common though it may be, is a true herald of spring, kindling my optimism: spring is truly here, the birds are returning, we haven’t completely screwed up everything! With the help of this little warbler I revel in that bit of self-delusion and bask in the anticipation that I might see as many as two dozen species of these colorful little travelers in the next month, most just briefly pausing on their way to breeding grounds further north.