Happiness is a Rare Bird

by Gene Walz

  Not every trip I take is devoted exclusively to birding. In many cases, birding takes up only a small portion of my time. I went to Maui for the whale-watching, the seafood and fresh fruit, the beaches, and the warmth. Especially the warmth! It would have been great had I been able to get good, long looks at all the bird species I targeted, though. I guess I’ll have to go back and look a bit harder. In the warmth. Damn!

  Andean Cock of the Rock

  The Bird Gods Smile on Us

  Sometimes I feel as though I’ve been given a thousand blessings from the elusive and unpredictable gods of birding.

  Up at 3:00 am after maybe four hours of fitful sleep. Eat breakfast from a bag on a bouncy van ride through total darkness to a parking area somewhere in the Andes, east of Quito, Ecuador. Walk in dismal blackness up and down bumpy trails, slippery with mud and tree roots. My head is a blizzard of pain. My arthritic knees and hips throb and ache. Why on God’s green earth (now black and indecipherable) am I doing this?!

  Three of us were hoping to find the elusive Andean Cock of the Rock deep down in the western shadow of the Andes at the Paz de las Aves Bird Refuge. It was supposed to be at its lek—a place where male birds strut and battle for the attention of observant females. We had to be near the lek before dawn so as not to spook the bird or birds. If we stumbled noisily down the steep trail, chances were, it would not make an appearance. Our special guide, Angel Paz, owner of the property, led us downward in the pitch blackness with the aid of a thin pencil of light. Even if we did get to the lek on time, the bird might not show up. After a twenty- to thirty-minute descent, Angel unexpectedly turned to us and held up his hand. My eyes had adjusted, but it was still so dark that I bumped into him. We stood stock still as he walked farther down to check on the arrival of the birds. When he returned, he led us to our spotting site and motioned for us to be quiet. Shifting carefully and uncomfortably from foot to foot, we waited an agonizing eternity. We were so far down the ravine that glimmers of light came to the sky well before anything reached where we were.

  Suddenly, from the depths of the thick darkness of the ravine, I saw a pinpoint of flame red, almost like the flash of a Chevy tail light at the far end of a long tunnel. As the red light hopped and flitted from branch to branch and drew closer, we could see that it was the bird we were after: a magnificent male Andean Cock of the Rock. It seemed like an emissary from some fiery place deep inside the bowels of the earth. An ambulatory eternal flame.

  Larger than a Blue Jay, the Cock of the Rock has brilliant scarlet or orange plumage, black and grey wings, a black tail, and a large disk-like crest. From the side, the crest makes it look like it’s got a giant red knob, almost as big as its head, extending from the tip of its beak to the middle of its head. It’s truly bizarre.

  As we watched, transfixed, a second bird appeared out of the darkness and then a third. Usually shy, inconspicuous, and seen only briefly, the three males began doing what male birds do at a lek: performing an odd mating ritual to attract nearby breeding females. They displayed their colourful red plumage by flapping their wings, bobbing, hopping, shimmying, and jumping up and down from branch to branch while uttering a variety of low, guttural calls. If there were females around, we couldn’t see them; they are a drab, chestnut brown and were perhaps watching at a safe, hidden distance lest a bunga bunga party break out.

  I don’t know how long the performances lasted. Time seemed to be irrelevant in this low, dark place. Gradually the three birds lost interest in their own croaking (which would have been hilarious if the birds were not so strikingly coloured). Then they flitted off into the darkness they’d emerged from. Despite the rising sun behind the mountains, the darkness was still almost total when they finally disappeared.

  There was a moment of deflation while we returned to the normal world. Then exhilaration. Wow! We had just seen one of the great birds of the world and been privy to one of the most remarkable spectacles in nature. That’s why we’d put up with all the aches and pains to get here. The outside world with all its hassles and personal grief had evaporated. The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, somewhere, about finding finding luminosity in a world that has somehow ceased to be a source of delight. That’s what finding a glorious, rare bird like the Andean Cock of the Rock can do.

  Antpittas

  The Bird Gods Spurn Us

  Then again, I often feel that I’ve been dealt a thousand curses by the abusive and unreliable gods of birding.

  The darkened, leaf-littered floors of the tropical forests of Ecuador are home to billions of ants. These ants attract all kinds of ant-following birds: antbirds, antwrens, antshrikes, ant-tanagers, ant-thrushes, antvireos, and, the funniest looking of them all, the antpittas—also the ones with the oddest name. They are mostly brown, inconspicuous birds of the forest floor, feeding not so much on ants but the other insects that ants (especially army ants) scare up. Antbirds are usually difficult or virtually impossible to see, especially the antpittas.

  On the very same day that we were fortunate enough to see the Cocks of the Rock, we went looking for other rarities. Paz de las Aves in the high Andes, where we found the Cocks of the Rock, is also known for attracting antpittas. The Paz family, especially brothers Angel and Rodrigo, first learned that antpittas could be lured out of hiding by offering them meal-worms. The brothers have even learned to mimic the antpitta’s call to signal that the mealworms have been set out. Paz’s pittas, sort of like Pavlov’s dogs.

  Our new target bird is a Giant Antpitta. We are guided quietly to a secluded place where this bird feeds. It’s not there yet.We trudge back up the steep path, still in darkness, and wait for a signal from Angel. When it comes, we clamber quietly down to the viewing spot. Still no bird. We head back up the trail and wait. We feel like mute versions of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.

  Vladimir and Estragon did not have to deal with weather. We do. Ecuador has two seasons: wet and dry. Luckily, we were in the Andes in the dry season. But as any Ecuadorian will tell you, “In the dry season it rains every day; in the wet season it rains all day.” We get a little wet—not uncomfortably soaked, just annoyingly dampened.

  As we wait, we check our bird books. The Giant Antpitta is a strange creature. About the size of a small crow, at first glance it looks like a large thrush that’s had its tail chopped off and is standing at attention. Its plumage is mostly deep rufous-brown except for a grey streak running from the top of its head and down its neck. The throat and breast feathers are orange with black edges, resulting in a dark barring. The legs are half as long as the body; it stands on them as erect as Abe Lincoln.

  Our overall tour guide, has never seen this particular kind of antpitta or many other antbirds; they were notoriously difficult to see until the Paz brothers developed their antpitta feeding strategy. So we traipse up and down the trail several more times—far too many—before Angel Paz declares that the Giant Antpitta must be on its nest. It will not be lured away by mere mealworms. Our guide is hugely disappointed; we are sad but relieved. Yes, we miss an important target-bird, but we’ve no more mountainside hiking to endure. A near relative, the extraordinarily rare and vulnerable Mustached Antpitta, also fails to put in an appearance. In the book, it looks like a large robin with a white malar stripe (mustache) and no tail. We do hear it off in the undergrowth and we consider that a bonus since it’s almost never seen. We can enter the bird onto our lists as “heard-only”, but this is a bit disappointing since some listing sticklers consider this “non-sighting” as un-list-able.

  The day quickly turns into an extended quest for antpittas. Antpitta. Antpitta. Antpitta. Midway through the day, all I can think of is The Pita Pit, a restaurant where you can get wraps full of fresh veggies and meat. An Ant Pita. A wrap crawling with ants. Luis Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou, where ants seem to crawl out of a wound in the palm of a hand, comes to mind. Aaarrgh!

  Carted to anothe
r mealworm site, we finally get to see one—the tiny Ochre-breasted Antpitta, like a pint-sized thrush without a tail. The Paz brothers have taken to naming their antpittas; this one is called, for reasons unknown, Shakira. Later we come upon a mealworm-eating Ocelated Antpitta (named Thomas), plus a near relative, the Ocelated Tapacula, another ant-swarm chaser, and a Yellow-breasted Antpitta (Willie, by name). They’re all good “gets,” birds that would have been impossible to see five or ten years ago, but they’re hardly the kind to get your pulse racing like the magical Cock of the Rock. Or the Andean Condor, which we missed because our guide seemed more interested in seeing the rarities that he hadn’t seen before rather than what we’d hoped to see.

  Sometimes birding is simply an exercise in avian frustration.

  Forty-spotted Pardalotes

  Rare Australian Endemic

  Endemics are birds found only in one place. Though they might be fairly common where they are, they are impossible to find anywhere else in the world. That gives them a special kind of rarity. If you’re in a place where there are endemics and you don’t find them, especially a place you’ll likely never return to, you are doubly regretful. You try not to mention to your birding friends that you’ve been to that certain spot because you know that the first thing they’ll ask you is: have you seen the special endemic found there? Then you just pass it off as bad-lucky.

  The Atherton Tableland in Queensland, Australia is home to a tiny skulker called the Atherton Scrubwren. My wife and I spent a rainy afternoon trying to spot this plain, tawny-coloured little bird on the forest floor of a very small area. They were supposed to be there and only there; they weren’t. All we got was wet. But we did find a small, clear, shallow river where eight duck-billed platypuses (platypi?) swam about. We wouldn’t have found these odd creatures (like a genetic experiment gone wrong—matching duck, muskrat, and beaver DNA) had we not been searching for the nondescript scrubwren.

  After Queensland, we flew to Tasmania, the heart-shaped island off the southeast coast of Australia. As soon as we got there, I started hunting for the island’s twelve endemics. I was almost as anxious to find the island’s endemic subspecies—four birds that have diverged from their mainland counterparts after time in isolation and now differ in certain physical features. Some day they might be split off into a separate species, so they’re well worth hunting down. Who knows? I might get to add a bird or two to my lists without having to fly back to Taz.

  It wasn’t difficult to find a Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle in the skies above Mount Wellington, the towering monolith overlooking the neat Victorian city of Hobart. Likewise, the Clinking Currawong (aren’t Aussie names great?!), a variant on the Grey Currawong, was easy to spot on Wellington’s trails. For the life of me, I couldn’t see the differentiating features of these subspecies from the mainland’s species. Since Wellington’s trails were easily accessible to our nearby lodging, I tramped them regularly, picking up three endemics, the Tasmanian Thornbill, the Yellow Wattlebird, and the Yellow-throated Honeyeater, without much difficulty. On the beaches nearby, it was even easier spotting the Tasmanian Native Hen, a large gallinule that’s unable to fly but can run as fast as a halfback. For the others, I knew I was going to need help.

  Near the end of our stay, we booked a weekend at the Inala cottage on Bruny Island. Dr. Tonia Cochran promises that you can find all twelve endemics on her property or nearby. We figured it was worth the price—until we got there.

  On the long drive from Hobart to Inala, we found two previously unseen endemics on our own: Green Rosellas, yellow-bodied parrots with blue cheeks and broad tails, and Dusky Robins, more like European robins than American and called “thickheads” because they look and act like colourful flycatchers (not because they are as dense as some reality TV stars). We also saw Pink and Flame Robins, two of the more colourful thickheads, their names describing their breast colours.

  The most amusing pre-Inala sightings occurred along the isthmus connecting North and South Bruny Islands. On the sand dunes here are the nests of Short-billed Shearwaters, also known as Muttonbirds. They are graceful in the air above the waves, but when they land at dusk and after, they are as clumsy as flying sheep would be. They fly in, full-throttle, bang into the sand hills, and then waddle groggily to their burrows. Archie Bunker could easily classify them with his son-in-law: muttonheads.

  In the evening when we arrived at Inala, I was easily able to find and identify the most sought-after bird in Tasmania—the Forty-spotted Pardalote. It’s one of the smallest and rarest birds in Australia, classified endangered. A light olive green bird, it has black wings with distinctive white spots. To be honest, it was a disappointment. The Striated and the Spotted Pardalotes that hang out with the Forty-spotteds are more colourful and the Spotted ones seem to have more spots. Fifty? Sixty? I couldn’t count the white dots on either of the small, jittery, treetop birds. I’ll have to take the taxonomists’ word and simply delight in savouring the tongue-twister name. Say it ten times: Forty-spotted Pardalotes, Forty-spotted Pardalotes….

  That left four endemics for the guided birdwalk the next morning. It looked easy-peasy until we awoke to rain. Rain so torrential that it would scare Noah. Rain pouring from low, cement-grey clouds as if from giant waves. Then drizzly, annoying rain. Followed by steady and dispiriting rain. Then a downpour. What bird would possibly show its feathery, beaky face in this weather? None. It looked like we’d spent our money in vain. But Tonia sensed my frustration.

  Halfway through the morning, after creeping along in her pickup and looking dejectedly out of steamy windows, Tonia accelerated up and around the twisty roads, heading towards the spot where Captain Cook landed. As we crested a hill, she slowed. I thought I saw a ghost. A pure white apparition or a strange animal of some sort at the far edge of a meadow. It kept bending over and rising up like a furry, white oil derrick.

  It took me a full minute to figure out what it was. Tonia smiled.

  “Is that what I think it is? An albino kangaroo?”

  “Nope. It’s a Bennett’s wallaby.” A smaller, cuddlier relative of kangaroos.

  This one was almost pure white. Almost, except for a patch of brown around the mouth and nose. When it stood up, I put my binocs on it, and laughed. The wallaby was eating the leaves of a burdock bush, and the burrs were sticking to its face. It had an exaggerated mustache, almost like a Groucho Marx mustache. I laughed harder than I probably should have.

  Before my time with Tonia was up, we’d seen three more albinos. Albinism is the result of isolation and inbreeding. Bruny Island is small and isolated enough to produce handfuls of albino Bennett’s wallabies. When the rain finally subsided enough to draw the birds out, just before my time was up, we also scored my final four Tasmanian endemics: a Black Currawong, a Black-headed and a Strong-billed Honeyeater, and a Tasmanian Scrubwren (aka Scrub-Tit). Whew! I got them all. Plus more than a dozen new species enjoying the post-rain sunshine as we drove slowly back to Hobart.

  Birding does have its non-avian compensations. Although I had vigorously cursed the birding gods in the rain, I thanked them graciously for a very productive weekend. They had blessed me with all the Tasmanian endemics, and gifted me with the strange and amusing platypuses and the otherworldly wallabies. Birding expeditions have given me a lot more than just fabulous, rare birds.

  The Resplendent Quetzal

  My Favourite Bird

  When people find out that I’m a birder, they invariably ask me what my favourite bird is. As a response, I’d sometimes suggest, impertinently, asking a doctor what his favourite body part is or a lawyer what his favourite law is. But I’m usually a genial conversationalist.

  I understand the awkwardness and curiosity behind the question. For forty years I was a film prof, and people always asked me at some point what my favourite movie was. It’s a natural way to start or prolong a party conversation. The trouble is, my answers usually vary. Favourite
movie? Dr. Strangelove, City Lights, Casablanca, Blade Runner, Wings of Desire, Jules and Jim, etc., etc. Favourite bird? Frilled Coquette, Bare-faced Go-Away-Bird, Hoopoe, Blue Pitta, Hyacinth Macaw, Cock of the Rock, Great Grey Owl, etc., etc. (Google these to see why.) There are so many to choose from!

  If cornered, if I really think about it, the answer always comes back to the Resplendent Quetzal, a bird that truly deserves its unique, descriptive adjective. It is one of the few birds that I can think of that should be called “resplendent.” Definition: shining brilliantly, lustrous, glowing with blazing splendor.

  It’s a bird of contradictions, a bird that could have been designed by a Milanese haute couturier. The male seems to want to camouflage itself and show off at the same time. It has a luminous, neon-green head, as well as breast, wings, back, and top-side of the tail—the green like a lush, perfectly watered, fertilized, and brightly sunlit lawn. The green wings are scalloped in an artistic pattern and the head has a spiky, punk-style crest. But the underpart of the body is shiny, blood red and the underside of the tail is bright white. The crowning touch, at least in the male during breeding season, is a pair of metre-long, green tail feathers twice the length of its body. Flamboyance, thy name is quetzal.

  Resplendent Quetzals are the perfect rare bird. As distinctive as they are, they are not plentiful and not easy to find. They sit dead still and silent for long periods of time in the darkly forested mountains of southern Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama. You can pass right underneath them and miss them if you’re not alert. Usually, you have to hear their deep and simple song to find them. Because they’re so imperturbably stationary, they’re easy to examine, once found. Sitting still, they look like they’ve been placed on a branch by a taxidermist. Or like they’re posing in all their finery for a fashion magazine photographer.