Black-chinned Sparrow

Sandhill CranesI like a bird that announces itself: the Vermilion Flycatcher that I saw on my last morning in Tucson or the Acorn Woodpecker with its familiar cackle and flaming red head. The more subtle birds become, but are not as immediately loveable. I learned on this trip to Arizona that the flycatchers that don’t vocalize are maddening—did the tail flick up or down? It matters. Sparrows also fall into this category of work to love. You have to pay attention to the details. The mustard eye line. The streaking on the chest—is it fine or splotchy? The rufous patch on the wing.  On this trip, I was ready to give sparrows all of my attention.

Learning my ducksJanuary 18, 2012, my friend Deb and I drove from her place in Bisbee, north to Whitewater, a series of ponds and grasses, an oasis in the desert. The Sandhill Cranes were landing at Whitewater. This is an event. A large bus was parked in the lot as people walked out to peer at the mass of elegant, tall gray birds with their red crowns. Watching Sandhill Cranes land and take off is a dizzying experience. They flail toward the earth, all legs and wings; at times they seem to stall mid-flight, plummeting to earth. At the same time, others launch toward the air, two birds on a near-collision course. But here’s the thing: you never see two birds collide.

We walked out a breakwater and saw the silhouettes of two roosting Great Horned Owls (satisfying an unending need for owls). A Greater Yellowlegs waded in the water and a Killdeer called as it flew by. There were lots of ducks to enjoy in the impoundments around the cranes. We ate lunch and perfected our duck identifications: there was a Cinnamon Teal with its elegant cinnamon colored head, there were Gadwall, with their black butts, and Pintails with long necks, a white stripe snaking up from the chest. There were rumors of a Sora, which a small army of cheerful photographers waited to document.  

The sun beat down on us in the exposed grasslands. Mid-afternoon I was tired so we headed toward home. I was dreaming of a nap.

“Want to go look for the Black-chinned Sparrow?” Deb asked.

I felt my heart flutter.

“We could walk up M Canyon and look for one,” she said, her eye trained on the road.

I pointed to a red-tailed hawk on a pole, peering out at the vast desert, raw with overgrazing.

M Canyon isn’t really M Canyon, but I don’t want to tell anyone where this is. It’s a secret spot, the sort of place locals keep to themselves.

“Of course,” I said.

We drove to the end of the Canyon and set out, passing a range of make shift homes. A copper-colored dog joined us on our walk, cheerfully bounding ahead, then rejoining us as if we had always belonged to each other. There were stone walls flanking the trail and amidst the grasses mesquite trees. We saw a few Vesper Sparrows in the bushes, but not much else. We pushed on into the Canyon, where it became fantastically quiet. Not a bird in sight. We enjoyed the sense of calm, the shifting, dropping light, the cooler temperatures after a hot day in the sun. But I was starting to feel discouraged.

We headed back downhill to the point we had last seen a bird. We stood. We pished. We gazed into desert brush, at rocky small cliffs.

“There it is,” Deb said with confidence.

I put my bins to my eyes. And there perched the elegant compact gray bird, with a faint black splotch on its chin, announcing itself to the world: Black-chinned Sparrow.

Sycamore Canyon

winding dirt road into Sycamore CanyonThe Guide to birding around Tucson writes of Sycamore Canyon: “Sycamore Canyon has been called the most interesting and also the most difficult birding area in Arizona.…It is rugged, remote and can be a route for smuggling people and illegal drugs…There is no trail, only the streambed; the route is strenuous.”

So of course I want to go. It’s my third day in Tucson and I had spent the day before in Catalina State Park, a place I hiked regularly when I lived in Tucson and a place that is far from remote or rugged. Families with children crawled their way up the wide sandy paths, and played by the stream that trickles through the valley. I had found lots of wonderful, new for me birds there: the Green-Tailed Towhee, the Pyrrhuloxia (known to locals as a Pyro), and an unidentifiable Hummingbird perched atop an ocotillo. I now wanted away from the crowds. Sycamore would be an adventure.

My friends Deb and Larry picked me up for the hour and a half drive to Sycamore. They are rock climbing friends, biking friends, hiking friends. We’ve had a few adventures and mis-adventures together.  When I first met Deb her arms and legs were bruised and scratched from bushwacking into a cliff to climb. I knew right away that someone so intrepid would be a friend. Lucky for me, in the same years in which I have become obsessed with birds, so has Deb. And she had time to show me some special spots while I was in Tucson.

The turn off of Route 19, which flies south from Tucson into Mexico, took us to the long, winding dirt road to the canyon trailhead. The sky hovered gray above us, not the usual blue-sky I was hoping for. But the moody sky added to the fantastic, empty landscape. It stretched in all directions, no towns in sight. When I begin to feel cramped in my life on the east coast, it is such landscapes that I call to mind, to assure me we have not trampled every last piece of our planet.

And then we passed a cluster of trailers with white and green Border Patrol trucks parked outside.

"I remember this part of the southwest," I said. "I always found it troubling."

"And it's gotten worse," Larry said. From the east coast, what is happening in Arizona is news I read of in the Times. But here with the border so close, what is news hovers in the air.

No cars were parked at the trailhead. We launched into the canyon, which runs south, six miles to the Mexico border. We saw remains of people moving north, like empty water bottles or clothes tucked under a bush. These tokens lent an edge to how I looked at the land. We were out for a fun hike, and that felt like a luxury as I thought about the history of this border land.

The first part of the hike was lush, studded with fascinating rock formations. We spied a few birds along this more open, grassy section: Spotted Towhee,  and  a Ruby-crowned Kinglet. But once we entered deeper into the canyon the birds vanished. Red rock pinnacles rose from the earth, and the clouds started to drift off, leaving patches of blue sky. We walked a few miles hopping the stream and clambering down rocks (though I never found any of this strenuous) until we arrived at a small pool of water. We stopped to picnic, and lounge in the sun. We could have pushed on further—but why walk if you can’t see birds?

We retraced our steps. As we approached our car, a bird flitted in the bushes. Deb and I stood, our binoculars to our eyes looking for an eyebrow, an eye ring, a defining mark to help us identify the sparrow. I sensed a movement above us, on the plateau that runs along the streambed. I pulled my bins from my eyes to see a border patrol agent in a green uniform, a large black automatic weapon strapped to his shoulder. He stood still, smiled and nodded.

“We’re birding.” In my nervousness—guns make me nervous--I explained the obvious.

“I know,” he said. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

And I wondered what the world would be like if he said that to everyone he met in this canyon.

I put my binoculars to my eyes to look at the plain gray chest of the bird, the white eye-ring, the rufous crown.

“It’s a Rufous-crowned sparrow,” Deb reported.

Lists

With Connie, heading up Black DomeI have four notebooks that float through my life and all contain lists. Students to meet with. Food to buy. Bills to pay. Letters to write.  Grants to apply for.  I love these lists for the sheer satisfaction of crossing something off. But it’s a rare list that is completed. There is always an item or two that lingers, that gets transferred to the next list.  Eventually I will decide I never will apply for that writer’s colony or never will write that letter and it gets forgotten.

And then there are the other lists in my life. The list of climbs I have scaled—this exists only in my mind. The list of mountains I have climbed in the Catskills. There are 35 over 3,500 feet and getting up all of them is a vague goal of mine. But I can never keep track of what I’ve done and so that list is both incomplete and inaccurate. The list of birds I have seen. This is a list that birders take seriously.  But once again my keeping track is haphazard. Some days I come home from birding and carefully highlight the new bird in my Sibley’s and mark the date and place. But often I forget. I get home and make tea and go on with my busy life. Somehow I think I would be a better person if I could keep these lists; keeping track of my climbs, my mountains, my birds would be tending to my life. And that attention would make me more focused, more attentive to detail. Would life be neater if these lists were in order?

When, two weeks ago, someone posted on a birding listserv that they had found a Gray-crowned Rosy-finch on the summit of Black Dome mountain two of my lists collided. I had never seen a Gray-crowned Rosy-finch  but I had climbed Black Dome a few winters ago with my friend Teri. The bird list trumped—it would be thrilling to add this bird to my list, a bird that had never before been seen in New York State and is rarely seen east of the Rockies--and off I went with a few friends, including Connie Sciutto, known to many as Killer Connie or the Godmother of Catskill hiking. She hikes several times a week and has completed the grid of Catskill climbs—twice.

A few days before, eight birders had trudged to the summit of the mountain in an attempt to re-find the bird. They were all expert birders and what they came up with was a robin on the summit. This big “dip,” as a birder would say, didn’t discourage me. I would find the bird.

The road into the trail head winds through the isolated and rather quaint town of Maplecrest. In these remote towns I wonder how people make their living. Some are farming, but most houses stand lonely, seemingly braced to weather a Catskill winter. The road out of town passed by an image of hurricane Irene-related destruction: houses stood cock-eyed near the creek that had expanded to four times its usual width. The pile up of boulders and trees was frightening to see, the force palpable months later. The rising, rushing water had killed one elderly woman in Maplecrest.  Many of these Catskill towns are still reeling from the storm—rebuilding bridges, roads, and houses.

At the trailhead we layered on our clothes, which we then systematically took off as we started to climb. This winter, we can agree, has been spookily mild and there was but a dusting of snow on the ground. Still, it was slick and when I went down the first time I put on my micro-spikes to help me climb. At a saddle, our group parted ways, some heading for the summit of Blackhead (a peak some needed), while my friend Mary and I went for the summit of Black Dome. “Don’t worry, I’ll be quiet,” Mary promised. We had been chatting away up the hill, but I had kept an ear cocked for any sounds. All I got was silence, and a few Black-capped Chickadees.

The summit of Black Dome seemed a mini-boreal forest with stunted conifers and a few mountain ash bearing red berries. We walked the sheltered path along the summit; like many Catskill Peaks there’s no great sense of expansive view at the summit, just a long relatively flat path that traversed the summit and then headed down the south side. The wind was ferocious, but in the shelter of the trees we kept fairly warm.

The summit was eerily silent.  We walked slowly, pished from time to time, listened, looked. If the bird wasn’t here, where might it have gone? And then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bird fly into a spruce tree. “I saw it too,” Mary (not a birder) confirmed. She stood on the path while I walked through thick bushes toward the tree. The bird flushed and Mary pointed to where it had vanished. We compared notes on size and color—it had to be the bird!--and I felt my blood tingle with a just miss.

We settled in to eat some lunch, hoping the bird might return. But after twenty minutes of loitering we were cold and the woods were silent.

Soon, we headed downhill. I had added nothing to my lists, not a new bird or a new peak. Yet when we arrived at the car I felt that familiar elation of a day spent outdoors, of cold and exercise and wind making my blood flow, my ideas warm.

My bird list will remain messy and incomplete, like all of my lists.  Perhaps in fact that is the nature of a list, to be a process, to be unfinished, to always have more I want to see or do or experience. What I can say is there are no regrets as there is nothing like a day spent among trees, my senses alert, looking but not finding a rare bird.

First Bird of the Year (FBOY)

The birders standing around with scopes and binoculars at the small park that borders the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge are discussing the first bird of the  year, putting their wishes out over the grass fields. “I hope it’s not a Tufted Titmouse,” one says and everyone laughs.

What everyone fails to notice is that the last—or near last—bird of the year is pretty spectacular. Take your pick—in front of us are soaring about a dozen Northern Harriers, their sleek fast bodies just above the grass line as they hunt near dusk. There’s the dark morph and the light morph Rough-legged Hawk, both impressive perched in a tree. And then, what we are all here to see: the Short-eared Owls, large floppy wings taking them to the far reaches of the grasslands. They perch in the trees, ghosts in the twilight, then take flight, like oversized moths, the flight jagged; if you tried to catch one you would miss.

Peter and I loiter at the grasslands—it is warm out, in the fifties, so loitering is possible (past years I’ve frozen waiting for the owls). This natural area is wide and beautiful. If you squint, you can imagine you are somewhere in the Midwest, where fields trail on for miles. This was a airfield, used for military training. In the past year the state has ripped up the asphalt landing strips and seeded the area with grass and wild flowers. Even with the asphalt it was a place that the owls migrated to in winter. In the long grass must be a wonderful store of mice or voles. 

As the sun sets, an owl swoops near to us, its eyes visible in its disc-like face. It’s a phantom from the other side, a ghost from the past. We stand for a while taking in the sight of the owl, the cold and hunger push us back toward the car. When we arrive at the small parking lot, an enormous flock of Canada Geese honk their way overhead, heading for a night’s roost.

The first bird of the year is symbolic, sets the tone for the year to come. It’s a sign of good luck, perhaps. Peter and I both want the first bird to be an owl. So Peter sets a baby monitor on his front porch and we fall asleep hoping a hoot will wake us. What does wake us near dawn are coyotes howling.

January 1, I’m hesitant to go outside. “What if my first bird is a Tufted Titmouse?” I joke.

“Just plug your ears,” Peter suggests.

When I step outside the first thing I hear is the distinct caw of a Crow. Though some would rather that the crow not be their first bird, this crow cheers me. Crows are magnificent birds, smart and with a complex family arrangement. They are common enough, but still special: big and black and bold.

Our visitor from the past; photo Peter SchoenbergerWe are driving out to explore vast fields, lost empty land in the city of Kingston. Peter’s first bird flits in front of the car: Junco, that gray and white visitor from the north. Ok, so this isn’t a Barred Owl. Or, like last year, the Great Horned Owl. But not a Tufted Titmouse.

“At least I can be happy that my last bird of the year was a Short-eared Owl,” I muse as we hurtle down the road into our day.

“No it’s not,” Peter says. “Canada Geese.”

He’s right, of course. Keeping me honest for the New Year.