Odds And Ends In The Junco Drawer

Oregon Junco female

Shitty birder Murr reporting in again, with birdy enthusiasm and Magic Slate brain. Birds are erased from my memory as fast as they slide in. It's a problem, if you want to have a Life List of birds that means anything.

I don't. Instead, I will get all excited about spotting a Life Bird and one of my friends will say, "No, you saw that one back in 2012, perched at three o'clock in a western cedar, just to the right of a varied thrush." And I will respond, "Who are you, again?"

So I was excited to find an honest-to-goodness new bird when I visited my sister in Colorado. I do know some birds pretty well, and this one acted a lot like a junco. For instance, it hopped around on the ground, both to and (as noted on the Audubon site) fro. And it had those white junco tail feathers. But this one was sort of bluish and had a red sweater, not at all like our Oregon Junco, which is brown and white with an executioner's hood. I looked it up later and was pretty chuffed to discover it was indeed in the junco family. I had not only bagged a Life Bird but I'd gotten it down to a near relative.

Oregon Junco male

Only, no. Hold on there, little missy! As it happens, there are at least five distinct juncos out there and all of them are now called Dark-Eyed Juncos. You see one, you've officially bagged them all. It's totally not fair. If I'd seen them in 1972, I could have counted them as five different species, but since then, ornithologists, who are people unduly interested in bird sex, have decided they're all the same thing.

This because in those areas where the different types overlap, they interbreed freely, as opposed to reluctantly.

(And the areas where they overlap would be your cloacal areas.)

Now, otters have been known to mate freely with cocker spaniels, but they are not considered the same species, because they do not get a live Cock-Otter out of it, and in fact the cocker spaniel usually doesn't make it either. Otters are real cute, but they're assholes.

But an Oregon Junco can mate with a Gray-headed Junco and get real operational nestlings out of the situation. I don't know what they look like.

Juncos have been much studied because they're easy to catch and relatively tolerant of manhandling, which is to say they don't spazz out or drop dead. This is probably an unfortunate trait for the junco. Being studied by ornithologist rarely works out for the bird. Some early ornithologists messed with a bunch of juncos by exposing them to cold winter conditions while simultaneously adjusting their light exposure artificially to make it seem like spring, all to see if they went ahead and mated or just pooped in their water dish. I don't know what they found out, but I'm sure it was grad students who had to clean it up.

Slate-colored Junco

The reason all the forms are now considered the same damn bird is they have only begun to diverge recently, since the retreat of the glaciers around 13,000 years ago. That gave them plenty of opportunity to branch out sartorially while maintaining a healthy ecumenical horniness.

I'm interested in this because I happen to have a Slate-Colored Junco in my yard. Yes I do: he's supposed to be east of the Great Plains, but he isn't, he's right here. Not only that, but he's been coming here for at least two years. Yes, I'm going out on a limb and saying it's the same individual, which means they spend a season up in Canada somewhere and then come right back to the very same city lot every time. Mine. And if my Slatey mates with an Oregon Junco and produces something new, say, something in a dapper plaid, I'm calling it Murr's Junco. Junco murrus nanner-nanneri. Boo-yah.

The Junco Drawer

When you do start noticing birds, you find yourself becoming familiar with their habits. You might notice that the juncos, for instance, park their fannies on the feeder and hoover sunflower seeds. If the seeds still have hulls, those go flying off like Frisbees and the meat goes down the hatch and it's on to the next seed. That's not a big feat--I've seen Norwegians do the same thing. But a chickadee pops up and takes one single sunflower meat out and runs to the nearest branch with it. It then pins the meat down with one adorable little toe and shaves it down until it's gone, and then it thinks about maybe going in for another. They're very dainty. The chickadee is eating grapefruit sections with a serrated spoon, pinkie extended, and the junco is on the beanbag chair dumping a bag of chips in his face.

I'm assuming the chickadee is a pluck-and-go guy because he's cautious. This doesn't seem to be a factor with the juncos, who actually spend less time at the feeder proper than they do on the ground underneath. That's where they spend most of their time, which is a pity, because so does my neighbor's cat, Sid. Juncos don't care. They look around and all they see is other juncos all over the place and they figure odds are it's some other guy who's going to get whacked.

I have gobs of juncos and they don't look alike. They have white outer tail feathers and they flick them when they fly, and that's about all they have in common. We have dark-headed ones and gray-headed ones and ones with brown sides and ones that are only gray and white, and every last one of them  is called a Dark-Eyed Junco. When I visited my sister in Colorado, I saw some real cool-looking bluish birds with rusty backs. I'd never seen them before, but they acted like juncos. And guess what they turned out to be? Juncos. Dark-Eyed Juncos, just like mine.

It's a little disheartening when you're already a sort of shitty birder and you've spent all that time peering through your binoculars and totting up all the ways your birds are not at all like each other, only to be told they're one and the same. You've got one wearing a gray vest and a dark topcoat, and one with an executioner's hood, and one is mostly gray, and one might even have a corporal's stripes on his wings, but you do not have four different birds there. You get to add only one of them to your Life List. You can score a different junco if it turns out to be a Yellow-Eyed Junco, but he's about to be on the other side of Trump's wall.

Meanwhile, we have three different brands of chickadee here, the Black-Capped being the most common, and they look different from each other, but no more so than the Dark-Eyed Juncos do. However, elsewhere in the country, you might find yourself in territory shared by the Black-Capped and the Carolina Chickadees. Good luck telling those bastards apart. Evidently there's a line north of which you have your black-capped and south of which you have your Carolina, but unless one of them has a drawl, there ain't no difference between them. One is the eensiest bit greener on the back, until the light changes, and the other is slightly less fluffy, unless it's cold. I recently gazed at painted renditions of the two and I couldn't tell them apart even with the captions and arrows pointing out the differences. You want to add a Carolina chickadee to your life list, you can probably put a black-capped in a shoebox and drive south with it.

The good news is Sid the cat got run over by a car. My neighbor has his ashes and I invited her to sprinkle some under our bird feeder, since that was his favorite place to hang out. She said she would. Maybe if all those different juncos figure out who to bang this spring, they can use the calcium for their egg shells.