The second bird of the new year was an osprey, a proper bird, singing his piercing ultra-falsetto song of love somewhere over the new astroturf at Bayview Park. I caught sight of him in the gap between the neighbor’s roof and the lower branches of our mahogany. Then I caught sight of his paramour, or maybe his rival – because immediately after the second osprey, a third osprey entered the mix over the astroturf.
Ospreys are sexually monomorphic. You can’t just look at one and tell if it is male or female. Females can be 15% to 20% larger than the males, but it’s not something you can really gauge while they are flying around, doing their own version of an operatic love triangle, though you might be able to tell if they were standing next to each other.
I went back to my book. Half an hour later I heard an American kestrel klee-kleeing around over the astroturf, the calls coming off more like a dramatic monologue.
And honestly, I can’t remember any birds of the new year in the days after that. I must have seen some – turkey vultures, a northern mockingbird, a mourning dove – because some days it’s harder not to see them than to see them. But I have no recollection of anything. I guess I was in a kind of a fog of reading and work, no doubt underscored by the low thrum of existential dread. And I was neglecting to spend time outside during some of the nicest weather of the year.
The new year is a reset time for a lot of things. For birders who keep lists, you get to start a new list. Some just want to see how one year compares to the next. Some want to see a greater number of birds than they did the previous year. Some want to see more birds than anyone else. Some want to set a challenge – see how many birds they can photograph or digiscope, see how many birds they can see in their state or home county. Some want to see how many birds they can photograph or digiscope in their own state or county.
I’ve actually tried keeping an annual list here and there, generally out of a sense of obligation, with a vague sense that you’re not a real birder if you don’t keep a list. But I’ve never kept at it. Same with eBird. I know people who have literally entered thousands of eBird lists. Multiple ones every day. And it must give them some kind of dopamine hit, some kind of sense of accomplishment. But it never works for me.
I like doing the Christmas Bird Count every year, and totaling up what I (and my group) saw.
And I’ve gone out with Mark Whiteside on occasion to go Power Birding™ – his term – where you see how many birds you can count in, like, three hours. But I can only dabble in numeracy.
Lists are not anathema to what I like about birding, but they are not what I like about birding. I just get disinterested in them. They always end up being just another unfinished project.
Birds tend to connect me to the world around me, and to the concept of how much I don’t know about the world, how much deep mystery is out there. And by out there I mean, well, everywhere outside the house. (And if we leave the French doors open, sometimes within the house.)
Sometimes, like I did last week, you just forget what interests you in the world. I’ve always liked that line in John Irving’s “Hotel New Hampshire” — “You’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.” Sometimes you have to remind yourself.
Which is a long way of saying I was feeling kind of desperate when I headed down to the end of White Street in the last light of the day, as if I’d lost time, because I felt the strong need to see, well, something.
The idea in my head was to catch sight of a duo of yellow-bellied sapsuckers that we’d seen during the Christmas Bird Count, working a couple of trees behind the dog park. But they weren’t there.
I thought about White Street Pier, but it looked jam-packed with humans out there, and that just would not do. So I went to Rest Beach, just to the east, and parked in a lot seemingly full of older men reading newspapers in the front seats of their cars, periodically looking up to take in the ocean.
The light was so gorgeous even the laughing gulls looked good. But they were laughing gulls, not a species that is ever going to light much of a spark in me.
Then I saw the willet.
Willets are about a third the heft of laughing gulls, but close to their height. They are on the larger end of the shorebird lineup, long-legged, long-billed and usually either just kind of grayish or brownish. Which makes them seem kind of dull until they spread their wings and you see the underside, a sharp black with a broad, contrasting white stripe running from wingpit to wingtip, making them look a little racy, as if they have a clandestine life you’re never going to know much about.
The name willet, which I’m legally obliged to point out is one of the few mononyms in North America avian nomenclature, comes from their multisyllabic flight call, which is supposed to sound like someone saying the phrase “pilly-will-willet,” though it’s never sounded that way to me. It always sounds to me more like someone frenetically yelling “I’m gonna panic! I’m gonna panic” so fast you can’t quite make out the individual words.
This bird was not panicking, though. It was casually working the shoreline, stabbing down toward its toes every few steps to snatch up some diminutive crustaceans. I took some photos, watched for a while, breathed a little easier. I stayed until I couldn’t take the no-see-ums any more.
In the parking lot I ran into charter boat captain extraordinaire Stan Miles walking back from the other end of the beach with a pole in his hand.
I asked him if fishing was also what he did in his off time. He said he went whenever he could, that he’d just come back from a trip to Melbourne, where he’d fished from the beach every night. He’d rigged a homemade scoop to dig sand fleas out of the sand so he could carefully bait them onto hooks. He said he caught seven species of fish one night doing that.
Get obsessed, stay obsessed.
I took a few more shots of a second willet further down the beach, the surrounding water all rippled in purple and peach. Then the no-see-ums got bad again and I headed home.
