My best birding moment–perhaps my only really good one–came in Sedona, Ariz., as I stood on a trail next to Rock Creek, waiting for our guide to locate some birds for us. I was staring off into space, as usual, when I locked eyes with a very large owl. I hissed, “That is one giant bird!” Our guide came running and looked at me with amazement. I was the blind dog who somehow found a bone. Then she exclaimed, “It’s a Mexican spotted owl! Very rare in these parts!”
A day later I was asking a ranger about bird-watching spots in Sedona. “You should go down to Rock Creek,” she said. “Somebody saw a Mexican spotted owl yesterday!”
On the basis of that, I can declare: I am somebody!
Why do people watch birds, anyway? Well, clearly, they’re not going to watch themselves. But I do it for a lot of reasons. First of all, birds are the descendants of dinosaurs–or vice versa–which I know from watching the Jurassic Park movies. Birds are velociraptors with wings; there’s no telling what they might do next!
Also, they have cool names. Consider the Lapland Longspur. Or the Bohemian Waxwing. Or the Blue-throated Mountain Gem. You can see each of these birds in our fine state. You just have to stare through binoculars until your eyes bleed.
Which is what half a dozen of your neighbors and I were doing last Saturday, as we gathered in Rolland Moore Park in Fort Collins, to do our part for the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. It’s just like our national census, only with citizens who fly around, hide in shrubbery, and duck under the water while you’re trying to count them.
As soon as I left my warm car that morning, I spotted a decoy coyote on the park’s ballfields. Not everybody loves Canada geese–especially outfielders. Stepping in poop is a synonym for luck, but it doesn’t work that way in baseball.
We hadn’t been bird-counting for more than three minutes when I spotted a pair of lusty mallards attempting to make even more mallards in the chilly waters of Spring Creek. If that ain’t love, what is? No wonder that species succeeds so well.
We continued our walk in the park, and shouted out improbable IDs of far-distant avians. That’s when one of my fellow bird counters shared a concept called “bird desire.” No, not the kind Mr. and Mrs. Mallard demonstrated. Instead, it is the eagerness of every birder to see something rare–for instance, a Mexican Spotted Owl, to cite one awesomely impressive example. I tried to turn black crows into golden eagles, and leaves into Red-breasted Nuthatches. But hope is the thing with feathers, as the famous ornithologist Emily Dickenson told us.
We weren’t the only hopeful people out there, either. At least a dozen times, people stopped our birding group with the impertinent question: “Have you seen anything good?” Good how? Is a Cooper’s Hawk good? A Downy Woodpecker? Nobody seemed particularly impressed with our high-flying haul, even though we clocked thirty species with our eagle eyes.
Even our group had to discipline itself not to say things like, “Oh, it’s just a common house finch.” Momma Finch didn’t feel that way when her egg hatched, and we shouldn’t either.
In fact, if you’re looking for a life lesson along with your bird count, this is it: There’s beauty everywhere. The slower you go, the closer you look, the more you see. A brush pile is a bird jewel box, the sky, their boundless ocean. And birds know a kind of freedom we humans can only dream about…unless we visit DIA. Even then we have to drive past Blucifer, the haunted stallion who stares with red eyes, reminding us that flying ain’t natural for the likes of us. But the birds do it, and our imaginations can take flight as well, if we just pay attention.
Late in the day we walked along Spring Creek again, and I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Mallard once more. Their beaks were curved into satisfied smiles. There will be more mallards during next year’s count, if the fake coyotes don’t get them.
