I was never much for shoegaze, the sub-genre of alt rock that is all slow, jangly guitars and echoey acoustics. In real time, the songs can range, according to a brief search on Spotify, from about a minute-and-a-half up to 16 minutes, but somehow they all seem to go on forever. The term may have come from the way early guitarists of the ilk spent a lot of time staring down at their distortion pedals. Or possibly from some lead singer who used to tape all his lyric sheets to the floor. Though honestly I’ve always thought of it as music favored by people disinclined to make eye contact.
The expression shoegaze came to mind, though, the other day at the Key West Tropical Forest and Botanical Garden.
We’re late in the songbird migration right now, but the tap still seems to be flowing steadily. Scanning the pond as I crossed the parking lot, there weren’t coots or moorhens, but there was a sextet of turtles – I think red-eared sliders – that swam vaguely toward me, most likely in hopes of a snack.
I didn’t see much when I first came through the gates, just a female common redstart that did a combination of lindy hop and Viennese waltz down the branch of a ficus tree, flashing the yellow spots on her tail. Things were slow as I crossed the bridge in the bright sunlight.
In the hammock on the far side, birds began making themselves known. A prairie warbler popped up like a peppy side character in a musical. Three different northern paulas hunted bugs and berries in the upper canopy of three different trees. A yellow-throated warbler peered down at me from a tree’s lower branches after I pished a few times, assessing me for half a second before realizing the noise was, ugh, just another human.
Three northern mockingbirds were squawking at each other in a tree, in what was either a family dispute or a love triangle. (You can’t tell age with mockers after the first couple months, and they are also sexually monomorphic, so it was hard to have a demographic take on what was going on.)
The first bird that caught my eye at shoegaze level was a rooster lurking in the shadows, not because he was trying to hide, I don’t think, but because that was where the palmetto bugs were more likely to be. And while roosters are about as rare in Key West as tourists honking their scooter horns, you usually didn’t see them in the botanical garden. Most likely this one had hopped the fence from the neighboring golf course.
Farther up the path came a palm warbler. There is nothing rare about a palm warbler. They will become more and more common in the coming weeks, and over the winter about 90% of the small songbirds you see will be palm warblers with their ever-twitching tails. But this was the first one I’d seen since late May. It was tempting to say, welcome back little dude or dudette (they’re also sexually monomorphic), but it wouldn’t have meant much to the bird.
After that was an ovenbird. The name, a rare mononym in North American birds, comes from the fact that early naturalists and ornithologists thought their nests – usually a well-hidden assemblage of twigs and pine needles that is more cave-like than cup-like – looked like round-topped ovens.
The ovenbird’s song is pretty much always described with the mnemonic teacher, teacher, teacher. The account in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “Birds of the World” describes them as “a species more often heard than seen.”
Robert Frost wrote a poem with similar sentiments about the ovenbird that begins, “There is a singer everyone has heard/Loud, a mid-summer and mid-wood bird.” He went on to describe how when the other species were done singing for the summer, the Ovenbird continued on: “The bird would cease and be as other birds/But that he knows in singing not to sing.”
While I’m going to be chewing on the poetic conundrum of “he knows in singing not to sing” for quite a while, it’s clear that both the “Birds of the World” account and the Frost poem were written for more of a northern audience. Living where we do, I see ovenbirds fairly often during the winter months, but I have never heard them sing, as they don’t breed much south of Jacksonville.
The fact that you can see them relatively easily in the Keys in winter is most likely due to the fact that we have limited landmass and further limited habitat within that landmass. I actually saw three at the botanical garden the other day, moving in and out of the dappled sunlight. I’m hoping one or two decide to stay the winter instead of moving farther south.
Ovenbirds actually have a little more pizazz than most warblers. Their plumage is a brown that verges on olive, except for a white belly flecked with dark streaks. They have a pinched head evocative of an old leather football helmet, with an orange streak outlined by two thinner black streaks, all running front to back. That, combined with their white eye rings, gives them the look of an irked scholar.
While most warbler species work varying levels of the tree canopy, ovenbirds spend most of their time walking on the ground, their head bobbing like a chicken’s, occasionally hopping into a bush or onto a low branch.
The bird that was the biggest reward for looking shoe-ward the other morning, though, was the Swainson’s warbler. William Swainson was an English naturalist of the late 1700s/early 1800s, renowned for his illustrations, who has nine different species of birds named after him. The warbler is the smallest. And also possibly the most difficult to see.
The Swainson’s warbler does not have the Q-rating of the ovenbird, but it does have similar ground-dwelling habits. Most serious birders will tell you, any day you see a Swainson’s warbler is by definition a good day.
Their gift is in somehow not getting noticed.
I wouldn’t quite call them drab, but there is not much to catch the eye. From the top they are a rich ruddy brown in the sunlight, a dull brown in the shadows. (They are almost always in the shadows.) From below they are pale, verging on white.
I think it’s their motions that make them so hard to see. Their primary method of feeding is flipping leaves out of the way and searching for beetles, centipedes and spiders. But they are incredibly subtle about it. Everything they do is smooth, inconspicuous.
You can be staring at a Swainson’s for a minute or so before you notice the motion.That’s what happened to me the other morning. I was staring down at the ground, shoegazing, not quite sure why I was staring, before I noticed it, small leaves being lifted out of the way with no drama, no wasted motion – nothing to say look at me.
