Happiness is a Rare Bird

by Gene Walz

  A Christmas Story

  CUT YOUR OWN TREE. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS”

  The newspaper ad sounded like a challenge to return to the simpler, heartier days of yore. The days before the sixty-five dollar Christmas trees that drop their needles so quickly they look like they’ve been fire-bombed three days after you put them up. The days before artificial trees that smell like your basement no matter how much aerosol pine scent you douse them with.

  “CUT YOUR OWN TREE.” Dream visions of Currier and Ives danced in my head.

  I cracked the whip lightly over the head of a gaily blanketed steed. Bells jingled from its harness. Hot breath snorted crystalline from its nostrils. Effortlessly, our sled cut a fresh track through the virgin snow, and frosty billows spangled in our wake. In the back of our sled, next to the gleaming double-bit axe, was a perfectly shaped scotch pine, felled by three vigorous strokes of the axe. Nearby was a pile of freshly cut holly. We sang carols in perfect harmony and joy, and they echoed through the receptive silence as a Great Grey Owl, a cardinal, some Evening Grosbeaks, Whiskey Jacks, and Boreal Chickadees posed obligingly, as if auditioning for spots on our living room tree. Two cute bunny rabbits and a yearling deer, Bambi’s identical twin, paused to watch us pass. Coming out of the clearing, we slowed to wave a greeting to … Norman Rockwell, busy at his easel, his pipe a reddening glow against the…

  The alarm clock jarred me from this reverie. I groaned a deep, grudging, late-1970s groan. Then I jumped up expectantly. Away to the window I flew like a flash, tripped over the throw rug, and saw through the Venetian blinds that Saturday had dawned grey. Grey as ash. Damp grey. Even Norman Rockwell would have passed it up as unsalvageable.

  No problem, I rationalized easily. This is perfect weather for spotting Great Grey Owls. My secret plan was to make this a combination tree-cutting and bird-finding trip. I hadn’t been into the boreal forest for quite a while. Maybe I could find a Boreal Chickadee, or an elusive Black-backed Woodpecker, or its cousin the Three-toed. I snuck my binoculars and bird guide into the car.

  Instead of a home-made stack of wheat cakes with real maple syrup and tangy country sausage, we decided to make a quick stop for Egg McMuffins so as to get a good head start. But, by the time we were on the Trans-Canada Highway, there was an almost unbroken line of vehicles heading eastward for their own Christmas tree adventure. Our Hornet wagon was between a customized Dodge van and a brand new, black Mercedes casually handled by a guy with Gucci driving gloves. We sang rock’n’roll Christmas songs along with the radio to pump up our slackening enthusiasm.

  The Manitoba government-sanctioned tree site was several miles off the TC, along a rutted, narrow, twisting road. By the time we got to the parking lot, the Mercedes had proudly and patiently, car by car, worked itself up to the head of the line. I was almost glad, therefore, to see about 200 cars already in the lot, a bumpy clearing, slick with ice and mud, like chocolate pudding spilled on the floor.

  Smoke curled from discarded stumps while trees, rejected at the last minute, were strewn everywhere. Children yelled and/or cried. Dogs howled and tried to yank the bumpers off the cars they were chained to. The persistent, angry growl of overworked gasoline motors—from hundreds of power-saws and snowmobiles—assaulted us. It was like a refugee camp from the Fourth World as painted by Hieronymus Bosch.

  Undiscouraged, we chose at random one of the well-trampled trails and set off in search of the perfect tree. The farther into the woods we went, the more we realized this was no simple venture. There were no four-, five-, six-, or even ten-foot trees. Only fifteen-, twenty-, and twenty-five-footers and larger. Axmen had to appraise, chop down, and top these monstrosities to get the living room-sized specimen that one saw being lugged back to the parking lot.

  After about a half-mile walk through the woods that reminded me of TV pictures of napalmed targets in Vietnam, we came to a fork in the trail. A Doberman was busy doing what he’d be arrested for doing on the sidewalks of New York. We waited until he bounded off and then watched in stunned silence as three couples dragged their freshly chopped trees right through the spot the dog had just vacated. “Ah, nothing like the fresh smell of the woods on a Christmas morn,” they’ll no doubt say. “Is the dog around anywhere?”

  We knew we were getting close to something when we passed the last of the enterprising boy scouts and hockey players selling hot dogs and cocoa from Coleman stoves and hibachis; the chainsaws and the sporadic oaths of frustrated lumberjacks gave us our second clue.

  I left the family on the trail, looped my binocs around my neck, and ventured into an area without any previous footprints. Virgin territory. Not a creature was stirring here. No birds, not even a brave chickadee or a curious crow. No animals. Nothing. The racket had likely scared them all deeper into the woods, perhaps into Ontario.

  It was tough going. The snow was waist-deep, the ground uneven, and there were unfrozen puddles of water beneath the snow. Muskeg country. The puddles were about mid-calf-deep and I was wearing hiking shoes that covered my ankles. My wife kept track of where I was by my decreasingly imaginative cursing. A Blue Jay jeered at me. Jay! Jay! Jay! I could have seen him in Winnipeg. The birding part of this adventure was turning sour. Even Roger Tory Peterson himself couldn’t have found a bird.

  The first tree I chose I dropped in twelve strokes—after inspecting it for nests. No Paul Bunyan feat, but no parlor-game either. The top seven feet or so were green and full—until the tree hit the ground. Then the top three feet broke right off. Too short to use in a house with nine-foot ceilings.

  The second tree I felled in about twenty strokes. But its top seven feet had only a single, crooked branch on one side. I rejected it before I topped it. I did the same with the third and fourth trees I dropped. I was pausing between every third or fourth whack by this point. Birding and jogging, I realized, were inadequate training for Christmas tree lumberjacking.

  I finally chanced on a twenty-footer that had been cut through almost entirely by a chainsaw but was still standing upright. I felled it with three quick strokes and a mighty shove. It then took me about twenty-five strokes to separate the top seven feet from the rest. In the process, I nearly chopped off a toe and one of the main branches. I also realized that I had slightly miscalculated the fullness and symmetry of this seven-foot top portion. I decided to keep it anyway.

  We tried to march triumphantly back to the car, but our hearts just weren’t in it. I did start out with a sense of old-fashioned accomplishment. This was no bogus balsam. No fraudulent fir. No paltry parking lot pine. No…

  On our way out, the Mercedes driver, seeing my binoculars, asked me whether I’d seen any birds. No, why? Plenty of them back up the trail about fifty metres. Any woodpeckers? Uh, woodpeckers, uh, yeah, plenty. Was he just pulling my chain? My wife gave me a weary nod, and I lit out to find some birds. No luck at all.

  We decided to carry the tree out so as not to add to its fragrance and constitution by dragging it along the trail. My wife toted the baby and the top of the tree; I carried the axe and the stump end. We began by exchanging ends, axe, and baby every five minutes or so, resting for a minute while we switched. I used that time to scan the treetops for birds. Again, no luck.

  By the time we got back to the car, we were resting for five minutes and changing burdens every minute. We paused to eat charred hot dogs and drink some lukewarm cocoa. A Whiskey Jack eyed me hungrily, interested in my hot dog. At last: a bird! Fresher souls heading past us in search of their own perfect trees seemed to look at us and ours and lose some of their cheeriness and resolve.

  On the way back to Winnipeg, I was masochistically calculating how much my twenty-five cent tree had really cost me in gasoline, food, hurt pride, and disillusionment when the black Mercedes Coupe glided past. My eyes glazed over.

  The wheels of the Mercedes weren’t even touching the highway. The top was down and the driver was beaming. Propped in th
e backseat between his Abercrombie & Fitch chainsaw and his LL Bean specially designed, Christmas tree chopping outfit was a magnificent, fully proportioned tree. Douglas fir. Suddenly, a quick gust of wind snatched the tree and dashed it under the wheels of an enormous garbage truck. The Mercedes careened out of control and crashed into a passing CN freight train. A Boeing 747 plummeted into the debris. Then Santa Claus and his reindeer flew over with an autopac insurance representative in the back of his sleigh, both of them laughing derisively. Then…

  My wife shook me from this delicious daydream just as we drove past our house. I turned around and looked at our meagre coniferous trophy. It seemed fuller and healthier somehow. Its fresh, woodsy smell was more invigorating than before. With some colourful avian ornaments on it, we may have a heart-warming, old-fashioned, birdy Christmas after all.

  Things That Don’t Make Me Happy, People Who Do

  Common Grackles

  Unloved and Unwanted

  My yard gets overrun by Common Grackles every fall. Scores of them, perhaps eighty or so at a time. It happens at the same time every year. They arrive, scour the lawn for grubs and other grackle delicacies, and move on en masse. I have no idea how they get together, where they come from, or which one decides which yards to invade and when. Maybe my grandson, when he gets to be an enterprising grad student in ornithology, could study this.

  Some people consider grackles to be attractive birds. And in a way they are. With their iridescent blue-purple sheen, blazing yellow eyes, and longish, vee-shaped tail, they are distinctive.

  But they were not attractive to my mother. In fact, she hated grackles with a rare fury. The only time I ever heard her curse was when she once snapped, “Those damn grackles!”

  Grackles are not musically gifted. The noises they make are among the most grating of any bird. Their raspy squawks sound like iron train wheels on rusty rails. It’s hard to call these noises “songs.” The birds sound like they’re being throttled.

  “I do not know which to prefer … The blackbird whistling/Or just after.” That’s part of a stanza in Wallace Stevens’s great poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” He can’t be talking about the Yellow-headed Blackbird, the one bird with a “song” worse than a Common Grackle. Unlike Stevens, I know for sure that I do not prefer a grackle’s whistling, if that’s what people call its “song.” I can’t wait until the song is over, when peaceful silence erases the squawks. (Great-tailed Grackles of the American South have a much more musical sound than our Common Grackles; a British friend of mine calls them “bubble and squeak” birds. I much prefer their song.)

  The sound of just one Common Grackle can be annoying. Many grackles can make a deeply religious woman curse. And you rarely encounter just one grackle. That’s because grackles are social nesters, and for many years when I was a child, several grackle families took up residence in the mature blue spruce trees in our front yard. They woke us in the morning, squawked all day, and kept us awake at night.

  To make matters worse, the grackle babies, like many birds, create mucous packages for their excretions—called fecal sacs. Their neat-freak parents would remove these sacs from the nest, fly to a convenient body of water, and drop them in. Our family wading pool was a favourite drop-off target. You didn’t dare go in the pool if there was one single sac in it. Yuck!

  Someone, probably our only neighbour whose kid had a BB gun (we didn’t), suggested that we shoot them. Someone else, probably facetiously, suggested that we could then bake them in a pie. The grackles were after all “black” birds, though oddly named, and, with four and twenty to a pie, according to the nursery rhyme, we’d have enough to last us the entire winter. My mom nixed that idea; someone could get their eye shot out. Besides, she hated the noise they made, and the rest of the rhyme goes, “When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing.” What an insufferable racket that would’ve been.

  My mom put up with all this until late one summer when more than 100 grackles showed up on our lawn.

  To her, this invasion was the last straw, like a scene from Hitchcock’s weird horror film The Birds. She blamed the spruce trees and demanded that my father get rid of them. He grudgingly obliged—happy to eliminate the birds’ homes but unhappy at the lumber-jacking it entailed.

  My mom wasn’t the only person to hate grackles. If you Google “Getting rid of grackles” you’ll find over 100,000 results. Turns out we were lucky. In the southern US, thousands of over-wintering grackles can invade your yard, creating a raucous cacophony of unpleasant sounds. Plus noxious excretions. Lots of people hate those damned grackles!

  I myself don’t really hate them. I just don’t like it when they show up around the tenth of September. Like all black birds from myth and folklore, they are bad omens. Their arrival is prelude to their departure. Gorging themselves on travel fuel from my lawn like long distance runners loading up on carbs before a marathon, they prepare for their southward migration. The grackles are a premature reminder that winter is coming. Winnipeg winters are long enough without two months of depressing anticipation.

  Yeah, those damned grackles.

  Wrynecks and Other Jinx Birds

  By the time you read this, I will not have seen a Black-throated Blue Warbler in my home province of Manitoba or a Middle-spotted Woodpecker in Europe or a Wallcreeper anywhere. You may read this ten years from now, and it’s likely that I still will not have seen these birds. These are my current jinx birds. I’ve been searching for them for years.

  Jinx birds (some people call them nemesis birds) are those annoying species that all your birding friends have seen but you haven’t. To be a jinx, a bird must be difficult to find but not extraordinarily rare, elusive but not impossibly so. (If a rare bird shows up and sticks around for a while, it can qualify as a nemesis bird if many others get to see it and you don’t.) It’s a bird that you should be able to find but just can’t—even with research, dogged dedication, professional help, and prayer. The birding gods conspire against you.

  Talking to other birders, I’ve discovered that almost all of them have jinx birds. My friend Andy Courcelles just cannot find a Barn Owl anywhere in North America; it’s not for lack of trying. He now believes that the bird does not actually exist. It’s a myth created by smug tormentors or an extinct species like the Carolina Parrot or the Dodo.

  Another person I know made nine trips all over the west, including to Alaska and British Columbia, to find a White-tailed Ptarmigan. No luck, the last I heard. Bobwhites have unaccountably eluded people. Also Scaled Quails. Long-eared Owls. Northern Mockingbirds. Ask any birder, and there’s usually one species that causes him or her to curse the birding gods.

  For many, many years—far too many—my jinx bird was the Black-backed Woodpecker. I made at least two dozen bird trips with this woodpecker as my specific target bird. All were in vain. I even enlisted the help of local experts who scouted appropriate areas (burnt over forests) ahead of time and vowed that a sighting was guaranteed. No luck. For me, the bird was “temporarily extirpated.”

  It got so bad that I became the butt of jokes whenever birders got together. “Seen a Black-backed yet? Ha. Ha.” Or: “Uh oh. Walz is here. No Black-backeds today!” And it was true. I saw the more elusive American Three-toed Woodpecker long before I finally found its near look-alike, the Black-backed.

  Sometimes I’d even be on an outing where people would get ahead of the pack or fall behind, and they would see the bird. They’d yell out to the rest of us, but by the time we got to the place they saw the bird, it would have skedaddled. Or they’d mention it at the end of the day. “Oh, by the way, did you guys see the Black-backed?” Duh!

  The truly annoying thing is that once people hear about your particular jinx bird, they will line up to tell you about their own sightings of the bird. Usually they will mention how easy it was to find one or how often they’ve seen it.

  Or they will offer a
dvice. “Get to the appropriate habitat at the right time of year and look for other birds.” Or, “Put the bird completely out of your mind, and it will come to you.” Right! Thanks.

  Another maddening thing about jinx birds is that once you break the jinx, you will often see the bird everywhere you look. For many years, my European jinx bird was the Golden Oriole. Then one fine day I thought I heard one. So I abandoned my group (they all had already seen one) and struggled through thick foliage, thorn bushes, and swampy grounds for thirty minutes. The oriole, hearing my noisy, profane pursuit, kept flitting just enough ahead to elude me.

  Finally, battered, bleeding, and wet-soxed, I tracked it down. A wonderful bird—more brilliantly lemon-coloured than golden but a stunner. Well worth the effort.

  When I finally made my way back to the group, I discovered that they had just had close-up views of six Golden Orioles from the comfort of a roadside rest area! AARRGH!

  It’s a cruel joke that above all others, even the pesky Golden Oriole, the European jinx bird that eluded me for the longest time was the oddly named Eurasian Wryneck. I searched for it more than a dozen times. In vain. Then Christian Artuso, the person who captained the Manitoba Breeding Bird Atlas even though he was not originally from this province, heard about my Wryneck frustrations. He told me I should have looked around the Colosseum in Rome; they were plentiful there. I’d visited the Colosseum, even had my binoculars with me. I never thought to check out the birds in the vicinity. I thought they were just House Sparrows!

  On my thirteenth (lucky) Wryneck search in northern Germany, I finally eliminated it as a jinx bird. Believe it or not, its Latinate name is Jynx torquilla. I kid you not!

  What’s in a Name?

  Several years ago, when I heard that the brainiacs responsible for naming birds were going to split the Winter Wren into two separate species, my biggest fear was that they were going to name one of them the Wilson’s Wren. It all goes back to the time they changed the Common Snipe into the Wilson’s Snipe. Why not just call it a Snipe, like every gullible Boy Scout who ever hunted one? Or the American Snipe (to distinguish it from the European version). Even the Gutter Snipe would have been preferable!