Teenage Angst

My, how much you've grown!

Life moves at warp speed in the bird world. The baby American Avocets at San Joaquin are already starting to show their breeding colors through their fluff, and the little baby Killdeer are looking and acting more like their parents:

For reasons I won't go into, the past few months have been really rough for me, and birding has been a source of both sadness and solace. Sadness, because the swiftness with which their lives unfold remind me of how short life is, and how much of my own life has been wasted. Solace, because, well, any world with Yellow Warblers in it can't be all bad.

Some of this year's babies have hit adolescence before I even realized they had been born. At Canyon Park yesterday, I saw lots of little olive-and-yellow birds darting about in the underbrush, chirping strangely. I'm guessing, from their numbers, their size and shape, and their behavior that they were young Common Yellowthroats. Noisy Hooded Orioles were everywhere, rattling and whistling from the treetops. A few, I suspect, also appear to be young ones just getting their adult plumage, such as this not-so-brightly-colored male:


EDIT: I checked Sibley, and found that this is a first-summer male, one this last year's babies.

It's fitting that the birds hit flight-readiness during graduation season. And they don't have to sit through pompous speeches about following their dreams and making the world a better place for the following generations of Orioles/Killdeer/Avocets. Their job is just to be.

Making the world a better place for them is our job.

Hot Fuzz

Nothing is more inspiring than the hundredth American Robin of spring!

Spring migration is definitely over, but the spring breeding frenzy continues. At Huntington Central Park and San Joaquin Marsh this weekend, just about all the songbirds we saw were dashing about with beaks full of down and twigs, and pairs of dualing and/or mating Black Phoebes and Downey Woodpeckers were chasing each other noisily through the treetops. Glenn's cameras are in the shop (all the pictures here are mine), all the exotic migrants are gone (no one had seen the Huntington Central Park Yellow-throated Vireo in several days), so we resigned ourselves to kicking back and watching the locals make out.

At Huntington Central, we found Yellow Warblers, Bullock's Orioles, Western Tanagers, and Black-headed Grosbeaks (among other birds) near the island, as well as a very loud nesting House Wren. There were also a large number of singing American Robins.

And the Robins made me think of the weird East Coast bias that seems to permeate U.S. cultural education. It still seems odd to my SoCal-based birding brain that these (and Northern Cardinals) are considered the canonical backyard birds that everyone knows: I only got my first Cardinal last week, and it was most likely an escapee. Robins are not exactly rarities here, but they're not all that common either. I don't remember ever seeing one when growing up in the Hollywood Hills, where we had a ton of birds. I do remember seeing dark brown birds with reddish underparts—which I realize now were California Towhees—and thinking to myself that these HAD to be Robins, since according to every science text and children's novel I had ever read, every red-blooded American had Robins in their back yard! And Northern Cardinals. I figured that for some reason, our Robins were a bit plain, and thought it was grossly unfair that we didn't have any Cardinals. And that we didn't get to go out in the winter and tap maple trees, like the kids in all my school readers. Or get snow days.

It would be a great day for cross-cultural education when East Coast school kids have to slog their way through stories about Dick and Jane assembling earthquake kits, or learning the fundamentals of surf etiquette or draught-resistant gardening.

End of digression.

At San Joaquin Marsh, we lingered at the front of the reserve. The singing Yellow Warbler was still in his favorite spot right across from Pond E. In Pond E, we saw three fluffy baby American Avocets—potentially the children of the courting pair we had been following for about a month:

Uncharacteristically, there were almost no ducks in Pond E. We soon found out why: as soon as any Mallards tried to land, the Avocets, who normal co-exist quite peaceably with them, would chase them off. Apparently, the babies need all that extra space and protection.

Further along, on the edge of Pond C, we found a pair of Killdeer with three fuzzy babies:



They were interesting to watch—Killdeer parents keep a close eye on their young, and the young stay close to them. The little one in the picture above eventually snuggled up to his mother (or father) and tucked him/herself under the parent's wing.

And from all the nesting activity going on this weekend, it looks like more little ones of any number of species are on the way.

What I Should Have Said

              Me and my big mouth...

"So, tell me about birding—I really don't know anything about it."

We were at my sister's place in San Diego yesterday, after a thoroughly unrewarding day of poking around the Tijuana Estuary. Apart from a few Clapper Rails, an Osprey, a Northern Harrier, a Cooper's Hawk, several Brown Pelicans, Killdeer, and Forster's Terns, the day's birding had been a wash. Nothing new for our life lists, and not even any sightings of any local birds that don't usually make it all the way up to Orange County (such as the Gull-Billed Terns or Little Blue Herons.) And now we were sipping wine in the kitchen with one of their neighbors, who was asking very nicely exactly what birding entailed, and what its appeal was.

And being sleep-deprived, sunburned, and dizzy from wine drunk on an empty stomach, I gave him a totally incoherent answer. I nattered on about Big Days and life lists, and left the poor dude with the impression that birding is something like paintball for nature lovers with obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Here's what I should have said instead:

I like birding for the same reasons I like Harry Potter novels—both allow an escape into a rich alternate world filled with both great beauty and incredible tension and danger. But birding is even more rewarding than great fantasy fiction: unlike Hogwarts and Diagon Alley, the magical parallel universe opened to birders is real—and all you need is a pair of binoculars and some patience to get in.

During the spring, I spent a lot of time in ordinary suburban parks filled with playground equipment and picnic tables. None of the minivan moms and kids yelling about how bored they were had any idea what was going on right over their heads. Did any of them have any clue that the trees were filled with gorgeous wild creatures with colors and patterns even brighter than those of domestic parrots? And that many of these would only be here a few weeks, before slipping off again to some distant locale?

If I were to tell one of the kids that I was looking for a bright yellow bird with a traffic-cone orange head, or a tiny songbird of blazing metallic aquamarine, most would think I was joking. After all, everybody knows that birds in southern California are all brown or black or grey. But Western Tanagers and Lazuli Buntings are unambiguously real—and with a bit of effort and some luck, I can find them.

And when I do, I know I've slipped into that parallel universe—but even better, I know it's not really a parallel universe, but the same one in which I live, work and fight off freeway traffic, only in exquisite detail. Because I bird, I can see parts of the physical world that most people miss. I can find incredible beauty and dramatic life-or-death struggles in seemingly mundane environments.

The search for different birds can become competitive, and the competition can be fun—it's rewarding to be able to quantify how much of the veiled physical world one has mastered, and to match one's skills against those of other birders. But the real pleasure of birding for me is just being a part of this hidden world: watching raptors pursue their prey, and fledgling terns learning to fly and hunt, is satisfaction enough.

I can see all of this, and most people can't or won't. Strangely, this makes me feel powerful.

And this is a kind of power nobody can take away.