Duck And Plover

I have a modest goal for myself in this year's Birdathon. As a group we will almost certainly find over a hundred species of birds in twelve hours. I am hoping to find one of them. Before anyone else.

I'm not good at this. The most common visitor to my seed feeder is the house finch. I should be getting purple finches too, but I have yet to pick one out for certain, even though they're close by and stay-putty. There's a lot of variability in the house finch. Some are redder, some are more orangey. Some have a lot of color, some not so much. Here's what birders tell me: the house finch is reddish, but the purple finch looks like he's been dipped in raspberry sauce. "You'll know the purple finch when you see him," they say.

That's really similar to what someone once told me about having an orgasm. And they were right. So I'm guessing I haven't yet seen a purple finch.

Anyway, no sooner have I spotted a distant movement in the trees than half the people in my birding van will have hollered out its Christian name and lineage. Holding my own in a Birdathon van is like trying to impress the Nobel Prize Committee wearing a swimsuit, heels, and a sash, only without the pretty part. I don't have what it takes.

It's not fair. But I have a plan.

Once, at a party, the host had us play a game he called "Misspent Youth." He had a recording of theme songs of TV shows and other tidbits from the '50s and '60s. He'd cue them up and we'd try to name that tune as fast as we could. I knew them all but I never got the words out of my mouth on time. So I thought of some shows he hadn't played yet, concentrated on the opening chords, and prepared to hurl those titles in the first nanosecond. I had "Get Smart" and "My Three Sons" in my brain on a short fuse, and I was ready to fire. But I got too excited when they came on, and couldn't get my tongue unfurled. It looked like I was going to come in last, and then, out of nowhere, a tune came up, everyone looked puzzled, and I bellowed "THE DUCK AND COVER SONG!" The skunk was off.

Nailed the "Go You Chicken Fat Go" song soon after, just for extra credit. I'm not proud of either one of them but you have to take your victories as they come.

So I'm going to pick out a few big easy birds that we'll get in the first half hour (great blue heron, American crow, turkey vulture) and have them ready to launch like pebbles in a slingshot.  I'll bag my bird and sit back the rest of the day and watch the freaks do their thing. Also, I'm bringing cookies.

It's The Annual Begathon! I Mean Birdathon!

Hazel lives at Portland Audubon.

If anyone loiters at this site for long enough, they might begin to think they know me. They might, for instance, assert with confidence that I am a birder, because I write affectionately about birds. Who wouldn't want to look at birds? Given the knowledge that there are little fluffy dinosaurs flapping around outside in colored suits, who the heck would rather stay inside and watch TV? Well. Not me. So does that make me a birder? Do you actually think I am one of those people wearing a dopey nylon hat with my pants tucked into my socks driving thirty miles per hour under the speed limit with my head cranked out the window?

You bet I am.

That doesn't make me a good birder. Those people are freaky. They can reel off the names of any dot in the sky you care to point at and a bunch you can't even see, too. I, on the other hand, have spent the last six months looking at finches at a feeder six feet away and trying to decide if they're House Finches or Purple Finches. I've consulted guides. I've looked it up on the internet. I still don't know.

Real birders have something called a Life List. They maintain a list of all the birds they've ever identified and they get super excited when they get a new one, called a Life Bird, or Lifer, for short.

I've seen the exact same Life Bird dozens of times.

So does Aristophanes.

This is the problem. I have a memory in the same sense that I have a penis. That is, I don't have one. It's a serious issue. If I've met you before, I don't remember you. I don't care if we spent hours talking to each other at a party. I've never seen you before. If I do remember your face, I'll ask you how your family's doing, even if we'd spent hours talking about how their deaths in a tragic tightrope accident had left you with a fear of both heights and string and no sense of closure, and it was in the newspaper for weeks. I've learned five thousand classical pieces on the piano and I can't conjure up a single one to play for you.

I do have a gift for metaphor and hyperbole that serves me well as a writer. Both require a very loose rein on the brain cells so they can wander around and bump into each other in a serendipitous fashion, and my brain cells are whizzing all over the place because there are absolutely no facts or faces or useful data in there to impede them.

So when Sarah Swanson and Max Smith (who co-wrote the wonderful book "Must-See Birds Of The Pacific Northwest") invite me every year to join their Birdathon Team (The Murre The Merrier), it is not because I have birding skills. Best I can manage is to spot movement in the trees and point and go eee eee eee hoo hoo hoo and hope a knowledgeable person can home in on it before I get propositioned by a chimpanzee.

Really, the only reason to invite me into a birding van is for my entertainment value, my homemade

Boo Boo lives at our house.

cookies, and the number of people I can badger to chip in a few bucks to sponsor me. The money goes to the Portland Audubon Society to further their conservation work, right here under the watchful eyes, churning wings, and trailing legs of the Pacific Flyway.

Nobody will poop on you if you don't contribute, but you might get winked at by a sandhill crane. Can't beat that, loves.

If you're badgerable, you can sponsor me by chipping in a few bucks right here. If you like to live dangerously, you could pledge a certain amount of money per bird found. Last year, we scored 120!

It's Either A Dunflap Or A Whimbitcher

It's May again, and regular readers know what that means around here. It means the kitchen is crawling with Windex-scented ants, the chickadees are parked in the birdhouse waiting to see which one of them an egg will drop out of, and I've just come back from my Birdathon trip with the team "The Murre, The Merrier." This is my second year with the group, which qualifies it as a tradition. In a Birdathon, an individual or team tries to spot as many different species of birds as it can in a given period, even though many of them already come spotted.  For this effort, good people, friends, beloved blog readers, and resigned, annually-hit-up family members part with cash for the Audubon Society and its conservation work. Thank you!

Of course, I suck at this. My bird-identification skills are not good enough to nail down a seat in a respectable birding van, so I bake cookies. Everyone else is better than I am, and some are certifiably freakish. Watching them nail down bird IDs is like watching the Rain Man recite the phone book. We were going for 100 species. The team record is 108.

A note: the rule is, it only counts if two people identify it. And hearing its song counts. Real birders are very good at that because they know the language. For me it's like going to a bazaar in a foreign land, with people crammed in elbows to armpits and all hollering in a whole different alphabet. I can't make out a single word. The birder can stand in the center of the plaza with her eyes shut and pick out the one fellow who's hawking ground yak balls, and tell you which stripey tent he's in, too.

If you see a "life bird," that is, a bird you haven't seen before, you are expected to execute a "life bird dance," hopping from one foot to the other with arms flapping. If you're rhythmically challenged, a "life bird wiggle" will do. If you're the most inexperienced birder in the group, you can be doing a lot of wiggling. If you're forgetful on top of it, you can get three life bird dances out of one bird. It's downright aerobic. I was thrilled with my first life bird of the day because I'm not likely to forget it: the lazuli bunting. Not so any of a number of speckled mud-pokers on the coast. For me, discerning whether it is Greater or Lesser, Semi-Palmated or Full-Bore Palmated, or Long-Billed or Short-Billed is hit or miss, more or less. I couldn't tell them apart if they were standing in a police lineup with the measurement dealie behind them. "Is that a life bird for you?" my teammate will ask. Sure. It will be next year, too. It just doesn't take. Hell, I've looked up the female red-winged blackbird in the wrong section of the field guide at least fifty times now. No offense, but I'm not going to remember you if I meet you, either.

Don't think of this as a walk in the park. It's cutthroat. There are other teams out there. We've got people who say things like we'll pick up the tits in the parking lot and score the rail on the way to the coast to knock off the peeps and the rhinoceros auklet, and then we have people like me, who just like to hear that kind of talk.

We always do our best, but this year there was the added incentive of a challenge from Patty's team, The Paddywagon. (The Red-Breasted Wine Suckers were not considered a serious threat.) The mysterious Patty texted us throughout the day with updates. She was decent enough to give up the location of the coveted Red Knot and we reciprocated with her missing Kingfisher. We were holding our own, were even a little ahead, and then roared to a finish with a record-smashing 119 birds as the light began to fail. We posed with 119 fingers aloft, got back in the van, and rounded up to 120 by bagging a merganser from the vehicle as we hurtled back home. Fists were pumped and high-fives negotiated, while a fascinated kingfisher kept pace out the left window. Then Patty texted in with a final tally of 121.

Shit.

The Murre The Merrier: photo by Max Smith

Even in the interest of public safety, we didn't need the big warning Birdathon sticker on the outside of our vehicle. If you see a van weaving down the highway for forty miles with all twelve heads craned out the windows looking for a kestrel on the wire in the dying light, you know enough to give it room. You just know.