Big Birding Event

This past weekend I attended a fabulous birding event, with two professional "birders" - a DNR bird researcher guy and a lady whose occupation I forgot, but who was also real pro, or, shall I say, fanatic. The whole thing was organized by a woman named Maggie - Maggie is retired, I think, and a conservation activist - among other things, she's fighting against the giant electricity-generating wind turbines - a bit like Don Quixote (that's in one of the most leftist communities you'll ever encounter), because they apparently "take up" an acre of the sky each, and kill a lot of birds.

Anti-Bush and anti-corporation sentiments aside, it was a spectacular day. Nothing like spending a day with a group of birders (and Democrats). I invited my best friend Ann and her husband Chris to come along (all four of us support Ron Paul, I even have a bumper sticker saying the same), and the three of us drove through the increasingly more hill-billy-ated the deeper your got Crawford county, all on a bright (if cold) spring morning. Bright and early too - had to leave my house at 7 am. (Crawford is a poorer county to the south of Vernon, where I live).

The moment we drove up, a lady, who later turned out to be Maggie the organizer, ran to us with the excitement comparable to that of winning a jackpot, while pointing to the nearby bushes and the buzzing sound coming out of there. "It's a clay-colored sparrow!" she exclaimed in utter state of ecstasy, and kept on repeating that it's apparently extremely rare for the area, hence the excitement. (Really, the day I saw a hermit thrush on my West Slope was like that for me - people still give me "Oh wow!" when I tell them that I saw it here).

The best thing about those events is that you know 50% of the attendees - here was Mary, the long time YIHS literature teacher, Harriet - a very active and energetic lady who works both for the Organic Valley and the organic certification agency, while growing starter plants on the side, and the guy who gave a workshop on raising and processing chickens on a farm at the last year's Kickapoo Country Fair - a big propaganda fair put on by the OV, where, by the way, yours truly was asked to give a talk on canning and freezing this coming summer. There was also Lila, one of the people at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve (I think?), and some other people I've seen around before.

We started out by listening to the birds right in the yard, followed by a talk and a power point bird presentation - the focus was on identifying birds by their song above all else - during which time a white-tail male walked right up to the pavilion and grazed shamelessly on our hosts' flower beds, and hardly moved away when I sneaked out to use the bathroom ("shameless bastard," I kept thinking). Later we walked up on top of the ridge of their gorgeous property - a very consciously managed CRP land (the land that is kept free from farming or any other activity - so it can become a mini-reserve), where, for the first time in my life, I saw and heard black-and-white bobolinks and a cooper's hawk in the distance. We then later split into two groups - the "long way" group and the "short way" group. The "long way" group ventured down into the woods all the way down the hill to the Kickapoo river to focus on the deep-woods birds. That was exactly what I wanted to do, because my property is tiny, and completely devoid of any hint of woods, so forget trying to spot warblers!

Boy, did I ever learn a lot- first of all, I finally learned how to (sorta) tell apart the very similar songs of an American robin from that of a rose-breasted grosbeak, and both of them from the sore-throated song of a scarlet tanager. That was also the first time in my life when I heard tanagers, though I couldn't see them at all. Other birds I heard but couldn't see included indigo buntings (as a matter of fact, that day I had seen an indigo bunting, but it was, sadly, dead, which is why I was able to look at it closely - a brilliantly-colored bird!), Tennessee warblers, field sparrows (though I saw one at my feeder before), ovenbirds with their distinct "teacher-teacher-teacher" call, and American redstarts - a black-and-orange warbler, to whom an entire chapter has been dedicated in my favorite book The Land Remembers (written about a Crawford farm practically next door). The ones I both saw and heard included roufous-sided towhee, gray catbird, and a pair of gray-blue (I think that's what they are called) gnatcatchers going in and out of their dome-shaped nest. There were also some others that I can't remember right now. Apparently, this time a year you can get what they called "a warbler neck" from trying to catch a glimpse of a tiny bird up in the treetops right above your head.

One other interesting thing that came out of this excursion was the discovery that both Mary (the lit teacher) and I were Walden fanatics, having both read it as sophomores in college (indeeds it's as sophomoric a book as it gets), which, you remember, was literally THE most influential text in my life after Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, both of which gave me the idea that life takes its most perfect form when lived in close connection with the natural world. And you know how we discovered that? She mentioned that wood thrush (which we didn't hear that day) was Thoreau's favorite bird, and I quoted the exact lines from Walden where he states this very fact.

Anyhow, I learned an enormous amount of new birding information, and experienced things I'd never experience at home. I feel like I know so much more now, and, at the same time, I all too keenly realize the limitations of my small homestead with regard to the range of birds that you can get here - this might be a bluebird paradise, but no matter what you do, there will be no scarlet tanagers or wood thrushes waking you up in the morning here.

And since I simply couldn't get enough, and there was another birding event coming up next weekend, I've signed up to attend that one as well, having invited yet another friend along. This time we are going to birdwatch at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve down in La Farge.