All That And A Bag Of Cheeps

It was a great day at the zoo. In recognition of International Frog Day, my friend Shawn and I spent the day posing in front of our Frog Taxi poster, explaining why we shuttle frogs across the highway during their winter migration to their breeding ponds and back again. Shawn is the Frog Queen, pretty much, having started the taxi service to begin with (along with our friend Rob). She is even featured in the poster, in her headlamp tiara. But we also had the Frog Princess in the (firm, young) flesh. There is such a thing as a Frog Princess. Evidently. I guess if we absolutely must be obsessed with princesses and we absolutely must dress our little girls in pink tulle all the dang time, it's good we have at least one Frog Princess.

So we were all set, royalty-wise. And we greeted many young parents with their eager spawn at their sides, and did a little recruiting for the frog-shuttle team, which now boasts some eighty volunteers. There was something a little rough-looking about one father, but he did pay attention, and declared "his boy" would be our best frog-nabber, because he can git 'em like nobody's business. There was something about him that made me wonder what the boy does with the frogs he gits, but I kept that to myself. And he listened to our whole spiel, the breeding pond, the migration, the intervening Highway Of Death, and then he said:

"So, what good are frogs? What do they do for us?"

Awesome! Clearly, here was an opportunity to educate. Out of the goodness of my heart, I left that opportunity to Shawn, while I excused myself to wander off to a corner where my thoughts wouldn't leak out. Primarily: What the hell good are you, dipwad?

I often think I would have been a good teacher, once we got past that paddlin' I'd have to administer to get my students' attention. So much is lost when there hasn't been any foundation laid about our puny place in the universe, and people have grown all the way into adulthood with blinders of ignorance on, allowing them to imagine that their own needs are paramount, and can be fulfilled with a big TV and a big car to roar around in and a bag of chips and some foldin' money; and the trail of detritus we leave behind has no consequence. I simply don't know where to start to answer a question like his, although there are many answers. I do know when to start. With kids.

That's one of the reasons I keep humiliating myself in the Birdathon van: to raise money for the Portland Audubon Society, with its great educational outreach. Yes, once again, after a year off to think about what I've done, I am going to sally forth and attempt to identify one single bird species before anyone else does, with all day to do it. We're likely to spot over a hundred, so you'd think this would be easy, but it's not. Eleven other people in that van are going to be confidently hollering out bird IDs from chips and squeaks and dots in the sky and tricks of the light, and I'm going to be pointing and saying ooo ooo ooo like a chimpanzee. It's mortifying. My method is to get one in the brain pan all ready to fire and wait for it to flit by. I do get marginally better every year but I am to bird-watching what Kim Kardashian is to erudition.

Hear ye! Hear ye!

That's not fair. I don't actually know who Kim Kardashian is, which means it's possible she's a bird.

Anyway, I do have a donation page you can toss an eyeball at, and go ahead and pitch in if you want. I'd like to help Portland Audubon teach the children well, and preserve something to teach them about. Get the little dickenses outside noticing things besides themselves, before they grow up and think they're all that and a bag of chips.

Would you like to help me raise funds for Portland Audubon? You can do it right here.

101 Semipalmations

Last year's Birdathon Day dawned auspiciously sunny and we hit the Willamette Valley hard, ready to kick some avian heinie, but by noon the mercury had shot through the top of the thermometer and the birds just parked it for the day. All we could see was the bottoms of their little hammocks, where they stretched out with their tiny feet up and hoped a bug would drop into their daiquiris. We had a respectable outing, but we definitely didn't bag our limit.

We sure didn't want a repeat of that, and we didn't get one. Fifteen sunny days ago, someone in Meteorology Central penciled in a rainstorm for this year's Birdathon Day, but when has anyone accurately predicted the weather fifteen days out? Why, fifteen days ago, thanks for asking! It was gray and drippy, and then grayer and drippier, and then biblically wet. This makes bird counting challenging. For one thing, a lot of the birds just hunker down somewhere in damp pajamas and dream about ordering in. In fact, home-delivered pizza capability is the main thing distinguishing us from the animals. It certainly isn't having the sense to come in out of the rain.

Second, if one did want to locate one of the dozen or so birds that pulled the short straw and had to venture out to find bugs for the family, one would have to try to do it looking through speckled eyeglasses and smeary binocular lenses and possibly through a steamed-up van window. It's not ideal. In fact, under these conditions it is not always possible to distinguish a bird from a bird decal on a team member's hat. This is why we were not able to count the New Zealand wrybill, even though I, personally, saw it.

We are tragically burdened by integrity. We have a rule that two people have to have seen or heard a bird before we can count it, and one of them has to be one of our team leaders, Max and Sarah (authors of Must-See Birds Of The Pacific Northwest). This specifically addresses problem team members like myself who are perfectly willing to contribute an eastern warbler that has never made it across the Rockies, even for a destination wedding.

We did find the Dipper right away. Dippers are not much put off by rain. In fact dippers make a living by strapping on goggles and walking along the bottoms of streams for food so they don't have to share it with sparrows. By that time it was dumping rain. I had on a pair of pants advertised as "highly repellent" (although I'm told they look nice), but nobody does repellent pants like a dipper. They come out of the water looking like Miss America.

The songbirds and such, not so much. We eked out a few bedragglers and sopsuckers and drenchtits. But we were headed for the ocean, where birds are famously indifferent to being soaked.  Even I am capable of recognizing a harlequin duck or a puffin or anything else with a fancy enough suit, but we needed numbers, dammit, and that means someone had to parse the shorebirds and seabirds and gulls. Shorebirds: that would include several theoretically different species of identical scampering fuzzballs. Seabirds are horizon dots that look like eyeball floaters. And the only things more annoying than gulls are the people who can identify them. Sure, they have their ideal field marks, on a seasoned adult. That's not what you're going to see. You're going to see something as variable as a city pigeon and then you're going to sigh in despair as your team leader looks into the scope for a nanosecond and snaps off: "Female Western-Glaucous hybrid, third-year, prom-night molt." And when you get over yourself and ask for assistance, they patiently explain about the ringed bill on the ringed-bill (that they don't even have until they're old enough to get their license) or the spots on their wingtips (but they aren't wearing shoes).

But we were ferociously successful. In trying conditions and damp underwear we wrestled that species list to the ground and headed home in the 99-species stinkhole, one mere mourning dove away from glory. And we would have taken that MODO, too, but instead we stopped off for a cup of acorn woodpeckers. Because we, my friends, gots class.

Then we picked up the mourning dove. Why not? Prime numbers are nice too.

Many of you wonderful people helped make our Birdathon fundraising team, The Murre The Merrier, a success. There's still time to contribute--we're real close to a heroically round number!--but I would like to salute the following friends now: 

Susan Alderman, Janyce O'Keeffe, Vicki Hollingsworth, Mary Ann Dabritz, Reynolds Potter, Kim Beard, Kathy Haranzo, Barb Padgett, Jane Hartline, Dallas DiLeo, John Schumann, Elizabeth Axelrod, Kevin Anselm, Margaret Herrington, Sharon McMahon, Chris Hill, Holly Doyne, Carolyn Barkow, Charles Barr, Amy Fritz, Heidi Schweizer, Mary Wyatt, Ruth Dabritz, Devon Spencer, Margo Reifenrath, Sheila McDonald, Carole Orloff, Liz Howell, Pat Zagelow, and my baby, Dave Price.   THANK YOU!!!                 

Cheeping In

Yes, it's Birdathon time again at Portland Audubon, and we all know what that means. That means I am going to be begging you and you and other complete strangers for money, even though nothing makes me squirmier in this whole wide world. I'm typing away here with my shoulders bunched up under my ears and my face all puckery. I hate asking you for money. I'd give anything to not ask you for money. I'd even give money. In fact, I will.

I hate asking you for money even though I bought, every year, all those boxes of Thin Mints you kept at your work station with the cash envelope on the Honor System (bully for you), and doesn't anybody's kid have to go door to door anymore by themselves like I did when I was a Bluebird selling salted peanuts? Now the little darlings aren't allowed off their own front porch, and for that I thank you, and here's an extra twenty bucks, hold the cookies.

And did I not buy hundreds of pepperoni sticks over the years for your kid's soccer team even though I don't like pepperoni sticks and they only use them for fundraisers because they never get any worse? I did.

Yes I will sponsor your girls for the Jog-A-Thon so they can get band uniforms, and I'll buy holiday wrapping paper from your son too so he can go to camp, but I'm folding up like a glued wallet if he shows me that list of stupid magazines again this year, I swear to God, oh, all right, I'll order one, but don't send the magazine.

And of course I chipped in for that poor beagle that had to be glued to a skateboard, so he could have therapy for his depression because his name was "Reginald" but everyone kept calling him "Stumpy;" and I also chipped in for the litter of Siamese kittens who were born joined at the ankles so you could open them like a fan, even though I was pretty sure I could have taken care of it myself in fifteen minutes with a nail clipper and electrical tape.

You say your cousin didn't make it through the birth of her third set of quintuplets? That IS sad, and sure, I'll poke in some change to help send the brood to private school, since you're shaking that jar at me, Mrs. Grocery Clerk Lady. Although I do think that those kids in particular might benefit from being around kids who are different from them.

And might I remind you that I did kick in for your Kickstarter campaign to develop a prototype combination sofa/refrigerator/toilet, even though I had my suspicions from the start that you might have underestimated the ambition it would require to see it through.

What's that you say? You've survived Cancer of the Entire Body and you're going to go on a hundred-mile plod in the pelting hail until your stigmata open up, all for cancer research? Cancer? Isn't that, like, kind of cheating, fundraiser-wise? Isn't that a little hard to compete with for the rare public fundraiser dollar? If all I've got is "I'm in perfect health and I'm going to spend a whole day going to pretty places and looking at pretty birds and I'd like you to give me money so Audubon can patch up some busted sparrows?" Sparrows can get cancer too, you know, at least I think they can. And besides, one of the really important things Audubon does is help introduce kids--your little soccer player, those Girl Scouts, the wrapping paper boy, and the dead lady's set of fifteen--to the outdoors and educate them about the natural world so that they have a chance of growing up and voting right.

You'll see how important that is, real soon.

If you're so inclined, please trot over to my Birdathon Pledge Page and cheep in to sponsor me. Maybe I'll have some extra wordage over there for entertainment. You never know. Thanks! 

No Tits For You!

It was Birdathon Day and I was up in time to hear the dawn crack. The team was gathered by the bird van, hard by a woodsy urban park. I had my plan in place. At the stroke of seven, I hollered "SCRUB JAY! HOUSE FINCH! CHICKADEE!" and relaxed. My work here was done. Time to let the experts take over.

The van was something. It was a brand-new rented wonder with only a few miles on it. In retrospect, it looked a little like the vehicle that transports people to the pokey, and the BIRDATHON magnet on the back was just a little soothing ruse, like when you tell the kids that you're taking Buster Dog to the farm. But all twelve of us jammed into it just fine along with our lunches and binoculars and three spotting scopes. We were going for 100 species, and we were ready to roll.

We knocked off about thirty species in the park; tacked on a few more in a rest area; and had 69 in the bank by 10:30. This was easy!

It got harder.

Especially since this year our intrepid leaders Sarah and Max took us down the Willamette Valley, for a change, to sparrow territory, and we never got near the coast. At the coast, birds fly right out of the field guide and onto our checkoff lists in alphabetical order. There would be no seabirds for us today, but there were plenty of ducks and long-legged jobs that make a living poking their faces in the mud, not that I'm judging. We eked out a few more at every stop. Just when we thought we couldn't get any harrier, we did. But it was getting hot. Stupid hot, for Oregon, for May. By the time it was a hundred and fifty in the shade, all the sensible nesting birds had gone home to make sure their eggs weren't getting poached. Ha ha! That's a little bonus double-entendre bird humor for you, there.

Our intrepid leaders are as ethical as they are skilled, and they declined to count my Imaginary Woodcock, my Western Eastern Phoebe, or my Least Sanitary Pigeon, and they similarly failed to ink in the massive emu we all saw glowering behind a fence ("that's livestock"), which should by itself have counted for ten species plus a hadrosaur. I personally spotted the Lazuli Bunting I was hoping for, which buoyed me greatly, although it's possible I called it a bluebird, out loud.

But we were still missing many likely candidates. Sparrows were sparse. With time running out we were still nine shy of our goal of one hundred.

Well, shoot, it's just an arbitrary number anyway. It's only an accident of nature that we humans evolved ten fingers before the invention of the table saw. So we want things in groups of ten. Still, although I'd never call us Angry Birders, we hurtled home fired up and ready to bird hard to the end. With one last swing through the urban park in fading daylight, we failed to scrape the missing bushtits and nuthatches out of the trees, but scored an owl, a wren, and the briefest of hawks, and finished the day with 98. That's close. That's real close.

And, especially after the can of giant cashews made its fourth trip around the van, we were all starting to round up.

If you want to see the Honor Roll of my sponsors for this year's Birdathon, click here. And although I made my fundraising goal and then some, it's not too late to drop some change in the bucket!

Photo by Max Smith's camera even though Max is in it

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.