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.

Calm And Collected

I've always thought it would be cool to collect something. Collectors have fun everywhere they go. They'll pop into junk stores looking for salt cellars, or old toys, or movie posters. Their houses are cluttered with pigs, or frogs, or owls. Sometimes people give you stuff they're sure you're collecting, which is why I have a number of lizards that they mistook for salamanders. I do like salamanders, but I don't collect them.

I don't collect anything. If I could collect something, it would be Birds I Have Seen. I would have my own Life List Of Birds. Unfortunately, I can assemble a Life List about as well as I can build a house with Scotch tape and toilet paper. I don't have what it takes. I can't remember the field marks of a bird for as long as it takes to put down the binoculars and check the field guide. Later I can't remember having seen it at all.

So when I'm out birding with people whose brains are in working condition, sometimes they'll point out some marvelous feathered item and I get all excited, and they say "Is that a life bird for you?"

How the hell should I know? The other day I got my new debit card in the mail and had the opportunity to change the default PIN to one I'd be more likely to remember, so I did. Next time I used the card, I punched in the old number, then my address, my birthday, and my anniversary, and the machine ate my card. It wouldn't give it back until  I described its field marks. I was screwed.

I don't recognize my neighbors if they're not standing under their house numbers. I look up "oligarchy" at least three times a week. I've played piano for 55 years and have no repertoire. I still hold my cell phone up to my ear and wait for the dial tone.

I had to buy a new camera because last week I put it on a little patch of moss for a second and thought "Don't forget you left this here" and that was that, and then it rained.

We got a dozen gulls on this coast and they're peas in a pod. I'm not going to be sure I've seen a life bird unless it's threatening me and looks like a Victorian lady's hat.

That's why it was so cool that I just saw a life bird all by myself, and I knew it. I didn't know what it WAS; I had to look it up. But I knew I'd never seen it. It was a woodpecker. But not a hairy, or a downy, or a pileated, or a red-bellied (because it has a red head: yeah, screw you, new birder), or a black-backed, or an acorn. Them I has seed. This one was different. I was crowing, as it were, about my life bird later.

"What was it?" my friends asked.

Well, shit, you had to go and ask. I'd just looked it up, and now I can't remember what it was called. Let's see. I know it had a white head.

So I looked it up again.

It was a White-Headed Woodpecker. And possibly an Oligarch.

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!