Happiness is a Rare Bird

by Gene Walz

  Some people just aren’t meant to be birders. People, for instance, that I like to call the Whazzats. These are earnest people who can hear sounds but can’t locate or identify them. Sometimes it’s the sound of a truck backing up, or a common bird like a robin way off in the distance. There’s usually one on each bird outing. Every time they hear even the slightest sound, they immediately ask, “Whazzat?!” In fact, it’s usually not a question but a command. This can drive even the most patient bird guide batty.

  I once asked another, more expert guide what his least favourite guiding experiences were. He told me about the Shoveler Lady. He was guiding a group at Oak Hammock Marsh and was starting with the ducks there, very easy to identify. Of all the ducks, the Northern Shovelers are perhaps the easiest of all to identify. Their distinctive green, brown, and white markings and oversized bills are hard to miss, and their names are hard to forget as well. (Northern Pintails are pretty recognizable too. They have distinctive pin-tails.) But one novice birder kept pointing out different shovelers and asking the guide what they were. “What’s that funny-looking bird there, the one with the oversized bill?” After the third time, he thought she was pulling his leg. But she wasn’t. He resisted the urge to say, “It’s another shoveler, you twit!” That would have been bad bird-guiding protocol. Instead, he patiently pointed her in the direction of other birds that were more interesting to look at.

  If you’ve ever been in a van with other birders on an outing, you’ve probably gritted your teeth at birders who work on a different concept of time than everyone else. They lag behind the group and are sometimes five or even fifteen minutes late returning to a van. Everyone else must wait for them. Or they insist on sitting next to the side door of a van and blocking everyone else from getting out while they check something in their bag. They drive bird guides nuts!

  On a recent bird trip to Vietnam, a photographer with a huge camera lens would subtly bump people out of the way to get a better picture of a bird. I got elbowed twice as I caught my first glimpses of “life-birds,” ones I’d never seen before and likely would never see again. I wanted to throttle the guy or at least drop his camera into a ravine. We had words. By the end of the trip, we all wanted to throttle him!

  Then there’s the person who won’t shut up. Or can’t speak at less than volume ten on his or her dial. He or she sees the bird outing as a social occasion, a place to catch up on the latest gossip or even talk politics. European Union? Not even slightly interested, I’m afraid! The Kardashians? Lord, save me!

  Or the constant complainer. He/she uses every slight or unusual challenge as an opportunity to moan and groan. “This path is too rocky! Can’t we take another break? We’ve been going too fast!” Or uses the final evaluation as a chance to vent about the most trivial problems. Lord help the guide that doesn’t find the bird that a complainer “needs!” I’ve been party to both. It ain’t pretty.

  Then there’s the constant caviler who feels the need to dispute your identifications with no evidence and little experience. “Are you absolutely sure that isn’t a Magnolia Warbler?” Or “That looks more like a Wood Thrush to me!” And usually in a querulous tone of voice.

  I’ve even been on trips with people who can’t help bragging—at the most inappropriate times—about all the birds they’ve seen and all the places they’ve been. “Oh, that reminds me of the ibis I saw on the Brahmaputra River back in 1999. It’s the most glorious bird, much better than other…” and on and on and on.

  I used to consider myself a pretty expert identifier of birds and birdsong. I thought that I could retire and maybe devote some of my days to bird-guiding in the tropics. I now realize that expertise isn’t enough. A bird guide has to be a teacher, a psychologist, a nurse, a cop, a diplomat, a counselor, a navigator, an intercessor, a food consultant if in a foreign land, and many other things as the occasions arise.

  Maybe I’m not cut out to be a bird guide unless it’s with a few carefully chosen, compatible people, in some hyper-birdy locale on a perfect, hot, sunny day. Maybe I should just content myself with being a mentor to my two grandsons. They don’t complain. They don’t argue. And they’ve got quicker eyes than me. That’s good enough for me.

  Nerdy?

  No Way!

  Nerdy.

  That’s how a reporter characterized the group of people who assembled in River Heights in the summer of 2014 to catch sight of a pair of Mississippi Kites that seemed to magically show up there, thousands of kilometres from their ordinary range.

  Nerdy! I don’t know about you, but this, to me, is not a compliment. Nerds, aka geeks, are people who are socially clumsy, physically weak, psychologically inadequate, or narrowly focussed. Foolish caricatures. The birders I know are anything but.

  I wonder if this careless reporter was even on the scene to see the birders he so casually dissed. What I saw when I was there (and I showed up often and never saw a reporter) were lawyers, some doctors and nurses, an engineer, a landscaper, a luthier, a former TV technician, a farmer, a handyman, some school teachers and profs, government workers, secretaries, several retirees from all walks of life, and other ordinary folks. I doubt any one of them would self-identify as a nerd, if pressed. Well, maybe facetiously as a “bird nerd” because of the amusing assonance. However, I personally took offense at the nerd word. Clearly this guy was falling back on old, discredited stereotyping rather than even perfunctory observation or elementary-school research.

  Google, for instance, indicates that US president Teddy Roosevelt, the original tough-guy Rough Rider, was a birder. He once criticized famous naturalist John Muir for not knowing birdsongs as well as he did. Call him a nerd?

  Or how about Wes Craven, the maestro of horror movies. The writer/director of Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street and all their scary sequels was a birder.

  Fidel Castro is a birder. So is Prince Philip. And US president Jimmy Carter.

  Michael J. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Steve Martin, and Cameron Diaz are birders. And, it is said, Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. So too are novelists Ian Fleming, Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and David Arnason as well as writer George Plimpton who once suited up as a goalie for the Boston Bruins, played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, and got knocked silly by boxing champ Sugar Ray Robinson. All are birders and not a nerd in the bunch.

  When I returned to serious birding as a grad student, one of the things that kept me interested was the fact that the birders I met were from all walks of life, including a cop, a gas station owner, and an ex-football player. They came in all shapes, sizes, races, and genders. It was an invigorating cross-section of people. There were some weirdos, I guess, as there are in every hobby and social group. But these birders were real people with interesting lives, outdoorsy and outgoing.

  Birding is not an extreme sport, but there are risks that every birder understands more than most people. Ticks and mosquitoes with their communicable diseases, Lime disease and West Nile, and plants with their poison ivy and nettles. Farther abroad: snake bites and animal attacks, hepatitis, malaria, zika virus and dengue fever. It’s not a hobby for the timid.

  Helping my grandsons find and identify birds, their behaviours, and the environments they frequent, however, is not dangerous. It’s a fun thing to do. But I’m not trying to make them into birders, just observers of nature who are comfortable outdoors and alert to its power, variety, and beauty. Birds are messengers from another realm. Through them, I hope people learn to love and respect nature and the outdoors—experience some of the delight, wonder, and awe that I have. If my grandsons do become lifelong birders, that’s a bonus. It sure beats sitting in a dark basement experiencing nature second-hand—on a screen. It pains me to hear that the only tweets that kids experience these days are on their Twitter accounts on their computers.

  If my grandsons do become birders, I hope they are not stigmatized by ignorant bullies who mistakenly catego
rize them as nerds. There are trolls and shamers out there who will do anything to slake the thirst of their stunted egos. They think that watching endless sports on TV makes them somehow more manly or normal. It’s bad enough that stifled people sit around and use their computers to bash and critique people they don’t know. To find a reporter slinging casual insults is reprehensible. Oh, oh. I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man. I’d better say something nice about him. Hmmm. Well, at least his grammar is flawless.

  The Old Man and the Lek

  Birding is not just about finding birds and ticking them off your life list. It’s about the spiritually replenishing experience of being outdoors, seeing other kinds of fauna and flora, and meeting other wacky and wonderful people.

  To get that full-value birding experience, you have to go to Colorado to see the prairie chickens. These birds are among the great, eccentric performers in the world, and besides, the scenery there is magnificent, the animals (pronghorns, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, etc.) are not terribly difficult to find, and you’ll meet some memorable folks while you’re at it.

  Fred Dorenkamp is one of those memorable characters. Fred was a professional rodeo cowboy for forty years, specializing in bronc busting. He also ran a Colorado rodeo company and was a livestock contractor with bucking broncs and mean bulls that left their marks on many cowboy riders. Tall, raw-boned, and toughened from dustbowl summers and fearsome winters, Fred hardly shows his 80-plus years. A lifelong rancher, he now owns and operates a local convenience store, is a self-described “chief bottle-washer” at the county fair, and runs Arena Dust Tours, where he serves, in his words, as a “chicken-rider.”

  Fred doesn’t ride barnyard chickens—he rides people to wild ones. In his well-worn-in Stetson, blue jeans, and flannel shirt, he leads birding tours to find endangered prairie chickens.

  He’s been monitoring Lesser Prairie Chickens in the vicinity of his Lamar, Colorado ranch for many years. They’re endangered grassland birds and if they survive, it’ll be because of Fred and people like him.

  Lesser Prairie Chickens have been dancing on ancestral leks for eons. These leks are the bird-equivalent of ’70s singles bars. They’re places where horny, amped-up young males assemble to impress the few hot young females that show up. They usually outnumber the females about five or six to one. Sometimes more.

  To see these prairie chickens you have to arrive at their secret, remote leks well before dawn in March and April. That means getting up at 4:00 am and meeting Fred for a ride through pitch darkness to a grassy field in the middle of nowhere. You ride in a bouncy school bus that’s only somewhat younger than Fred. It’s uncomfortable and full of people, parkas, backpacks, and spotting scopes.

  Before you get to the lek, Fred presents his rules. In a growly, nasal voice worthy of a cartoon character, he tells you: keep quiet and keep still. Any noise or movement will spook the birds. The only sounds as you approach the lek are your bones rattling as the spring-less bus heads across the bumpy terrain.

  After an hour of anxious waiting, the lek is bright enough that a few dark shadows appear. The performances are already underway.

  The males strut around, they stomp, they scurry, they bow and shuffle, they jump up and down, and they fight. They puff out their gaudily-coloured throat patches, they erect their head feathers so they look like horns, and they rattle their wings. If you can get close enough, you can hear them cackle and coo.

  While you are all mesmerized and amused by these weird dances, the female prairie chickens hardly seem impressed. But eventually, after a couple of weeks of watching, they’ll find suitable mates.

  After an hour or so, the birds all fly off, and you head back to Fred’s ranch. His cattle dog Bella greets you, and you are ushered into a low shed where his wife Norma has prepared a full ranch breakfast. Bacon, sausages, eggs, toast, dumplings and gravy, juice and coffee. (No beans.) Your group almost feels like cowboys and cowgirls.

  The breakfast room features a stuffed prairie chicken and a large colour photograph for those days when the real live birds don’t show up. But you can’t add a taxidermist’s work to your life list. Nor is the experience quite the same.

  Later on during the day that I was there, Fred hitched his horses up to a buckboard and transported a coffin from a nearby church to the local cemetery. He’ll probably go out the same way. But I hope he has many good years before then—to help protect the prairie chickens and to shepherd birders to the leks.

  Old Jack

  and the Crow with One Leg

  I first met Jack Foster in April 1997 when he phoned me to help identify a bird that he’d spotted at his feeders. I lived down the street, two blocks away. He had videotaped a large dove and wasn’t quite sure what it was; he just knew it was different. And if his guess was right, it shouldn’t be in Manitoba. That’s what made him call me.

  The bird was a Band-tailed Pigeon, only the fifth ever seen in Manitoba. Jack was naturally thrilled to be the first to find this rare bird. It was only then that I discovered his backyard full of feeders. He admitted he wasn’t an expert on birds, but he was enthusiastic enough that I recruited him as a feeder observer for the annual Christmas Bird Count. Thus began a fruitful birding friendship.

  Jack was a small man, maybe five-foot-two, with oversized glasses from the 1970s, a thin comb-over that didn’t fool anyone, and a fashion sense that favoured mismatched plaids. However, Jack was living proof that looks can be deceiving. He was the kind of guy my uncle Pete would have affectionately called a “tough old nutter”—wiry, curious, undaunted.

  His career as an engineer took him to many of the danger zones of Africa and the Middle East. His sense of adventure led him to hand-build and then pilot his own version of a Cessna airplane. When he retired he researched and built precise replicas of various ships he’d read about; he somehow found the original construction plans and scaled them down. No kits for him!

  Jack lived next to a couple that had let their yard run wild. All their weeds and bushes attracted birds; so Jack decided to feed them. Over the years, his feeders attracted more than his fair share of rarities. Whenever he came across a bird he wasn’t sure of, he’d videotape it and phone me. I could never get out of his house very quickly. His tapes were too long and his stories too fascinating.

  Jack had feeders of all descriptions—sunflower seeds, peanut butter, millet, niger seeds, sugar water, oranges, bread, you name it. He fed everything from hummingbirds to starlings, orioles to sparrows. But his favourite stash of food he reserved for a crow with only one leg.

  That crow returned at about the same time every year, like the swallows to Capistrano and the turkey vultures to Hinckley, Ohio. As soon as the bird got back, he’d sit on Jack’s picnic table cawing for food. Jack fed him left over table scraps and dog food. As a special treat, he’d cook up a hot dog, chop it into bite-sized bits, and arrange them in a row on his picnic table. If ever there was a symbiotic relationship, this was it.

  When Jack died, his wife moved into a care home. Their children got rid of the bird feeders at a garage sale and sold the house. The new owners still don’t have any feeders at all, and they’re probably still annoyed at the insistent cawing of a one-legged crow in their backyard. I saw him in the spring following Jack’s death. Somehow, he’d outlived his hardy old pal Jack.

  All over the world people fill and re-fill bird feeders, and they take special delight in noting the birds that frequent them. Some feeder-stockers can even identify specific birds that come at regular, predictable times of day. They even give those birds individual names. (Jack didn’t.) My mother, for instance, fed pieces of bread to a Ring-necked Pheasant that came twice a day our side door. She named it Gus. Why did she do it? Why do people feed birds?

  Birds do take some nourishment from feeders, especially during cold, snowy stretches when their natural foods disappear. But feeders are more for the benefit of the people who
stock them than for the birds that use them. Bird feeders provide a way for people to connect to the outside world, to the natural world. Jack knew that, even though he anthropomorphized that one-legged crow and treated him more like a friend than a wild creature. Birds at your feeders can certainly brighten your darkest day.

  Bob Taylor

  The Funniest Birder Ever

  The Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya is a meat-lover’s paradise. It serves all the usual domestic meats, and, when available, the more exotic game animals, legally obtained “bush meat”: crocodile, camel, wildebeest, ostrich, zebra, guinea fowl, and maybe warthog. We had tasted ostrich (like tough chicken), crocodile (like tougher chicken), and camel (like I don’t know what, maybe leather sandals), when a waiter approached in his black-and-white, zebra-skinned apron. He asked if we’d like to try some zebra. “Yes,” said Bob Taylor, quick as a flash, “but just the dark meat.” We all groaned.

  Several days earlier, he had told us about the time when he and a couple of friends had gotten up early to try to spot some leopards. “But when we found them, they were already spotted,” he said with a straight face. Groan.

  Robert Taylor—Bwana Bob when he led African safaris—did not care if his jokes and puns made us groan as much as laugh. He was a fearless and naturally funny guy.

  Michael J. Fox is a funny actor and a birder. But he is not a funny birder. Comedian Steve Martin is a birder and plays a birder in the amusing movie The Big Year; he’s a funny man. But he is not a funny birder. Bob Taylor was a funny birder.

  On a bird walk with Bob one rainy summer day, we came upon a very bedraggled Blue Jay. Not only was it soaking wet, it was also missing a bunch of feathers, including most of its distinctive crest. “Sad-looking jay,” I remarked. “Looks crestfallen to me,” was Bob’s immediate retort. In Africa, when we spotted a Secretary Bird—like a cross between an egret and an eagle (a large grey bird, five feet tall, with long legs, black above the knee, a long tail, the head of a raptor with an orange facial mask and black plumes like a feathery mullet)—Bob quipped “That bird is too absurd for words”—with emphasis on the rhyme.