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

4 Bdrm, 2 Bath, Ark Parking

Our friends Scott and Kevin have a new animal again. It's been one after another since we met them, almost thirty years ago, and most of them--not to say all--have never been served to us for dinner. At first, when they lived in the city, they maintained a modest cat collection and a German Shepherd. Then they brought home a box of quail chicks and the fun began.

The only rule, see, at Scott and Kevin's house is that all the critters have to get along. Kevin believes that all creatures should live in harmony, although her cat Squeeker, before being re-educated, thought that maybe one of the chicks could live in Squeeker. Then they got a horse, and it was clearly time to get out of town. Scott and Kevin moved to the country and began pouring a slab for the Ark.

Not really. It was already there. You could see the direction they were heading when the sellers of the house they bought actually left their own dog behind. Three more showed up eventually. Cats materialized in the yard like puffballs after a rain. Goats happened. Pigs occurred. Most of the animals that lucked onto the farm were castoffs with a sob story of some sort, although the chickens were hired help. The rooster that came with the chickens fell out of favor the day he objected to Kevin bending over to collect eggs. He was well-spurred, bad-tempered and delicious paired with a nice pinot gris.

Other than the rooster, everyone seemed to get with the getting-along program. But Dave and I are city folk and tend to be a little leery. Take Einstein the sheep, for instance; he looked fine on the front end, but harbored enough maggots in the damper regions to send veterinary students peeling out of the school parking lot and home to Mommy. The goats were mannerly, as were the pigs most of the time, but Dave is unlikely ever again to sign up for pig-catching when it's vaccination time. Looking back, we should have been tipped off when Scott provided us with ear protection. Myself, I was amazed at just how far a two-hundred pound man can slide on his belly, and how high a wake of pig poop he can kick up. The whole vision continues to be a day-brightener.

The emus were something else again. They had heads just big enough to mount eyes and a very pointy beak on, with no room left over for a brain. Dave engaged them in a stare-down, until they decided to get a quick look--a very, very, very, really amazingly quick look--at his crotch. To this day, Dave maintains a personal space just a bit longer than an emu's neck.

So now there's Chester. Chester is an alpaca, and Scott and Kevin came by Chester in the same general way they got all the others. They were told that if Chester did not come to live with them, he would become tiger food. I could poke any number of holes in this story, but I'm here to tell you that if someone came up leading a crocodile on a rope and claimed he was rescued from speed-bump duty at the Wal-Mart, the sturgeons in the lower pond would be getting instructions in getting along.

Late-Breaking Bulletin. Three new alpacas. Stand by.