I usually keep these to 1,000-1,500 words. This is 2,600 with lots of pictures, the majority I took. If not, I say where they’re from. A big, greasy personal essay, as says in “Bodies of Water.” Birds—winged prisms through which I view life and the world—can lead to big, greasy stuff.
An IBA provided a great day of birding. Common Black Hawk, Summer Tanager, Vermillion Flycatcher. Heard but didn’t see a Bell’s Vireo.
Where I bird, there are ticks. A long-lasting tick-bite consequence taught me ticks are no joke. Alpha-gal syndrome from a Lone Star tick. Six years and counting. In my experience, alpha-gal has led to more questions than answers. It causes anaphylaxis in some. In me it doesn’t. Yale Medicine explains, “some people are again able to eat meat and other alpha-gal-containing products without an allergic reaction.” Mayo Clinic adds it can take a year or two for that to happen—if it happens. Hasn’t happened for me. Why not? A test earlier this year found my levels are still 80 times too high. I was given an epipen, which I forget to bring places. I’m just cautious.
My reactions haven’t been severe, I also haven’t risked meat for years. Some react to dairy, I do not. Longevity in exchange for a milder case is a fair trade.
Cutting out meat is also good for the environment—an indirect positive. “You love being outside?” Nature asked. “Let’s have you do something for me. One of my ticks will burrow into your calf, you’ll abstain from eating meat.”
It was nice to throw tick caution to the wind1 and wander through tall grass after a Bell’s Vireo.
I went off-trail looking for the singing bird. Audubon describes its song as “jumbled clinking.” The Cornell Lab describes it as: “cheedle cheedle chee? cheedle cheedle chew!—easily remembered [as] a rising question followed by a definitive answer.”
I am grateful to have five senses Nature readily appeals to. Touch? Graze ferns. Smell? Plants, sea breeze. Sight? Seascape, mountains, a Great Blue Heron. Taste? Grapes, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, salt air on the tongue. Sound? Rose-breasted Grosbeak or Bell’s Vireo.
Readily as Nature appeals to the senses, she can be withholding—particularly when you’re birding. When you only hear a bird, luxuriate in its disembodied melodies.
Pleased as I am with my big year, it’s only where it is because I’ve birded in half a dozen states.
In November last year I wrote big years can happen at the expense of other parts of life. In The Big Year, the character Bostick (Owen Wilson) sees the most birds. It costs him his marriage. The other characters (Steve Martin and Jack Black) see fewer birds but agree: Bostick “got more birds, but we got more…everything.”
I don’t have a marriage to ruin, but have birded when it might not’ve been prudent. Of course I want to see as many birds as possible, but the reason I wanted to do a year was “everything” more than birds.
With my penchant for assigning meaning to birds, you can imagine the meaning I assigned this—a self-prescribed antidote to many things, celebration. When I decided I’d do one, I wanted to do one. Years with geographical limitations are more respectable than I’ll just keep count wherever I go, but this fit the prescription.
As I count birds, I think of Jim Harrison’s “Counting Birds.”
Some men count women or cars they've owned, their shirts— long sleeved and short sleeved— or shoes, but I have my birds
Harrison concludes:
On my deathbed I'll write this secret number on a slip of paper and pass it to my wife and two daughters. It will be a hot evening in June and they might be glancing out the window at the thunderstorm's approach from the west. Looking past their eyes and a dead fly on the window screen I'll wonder if there's a bird waiting for me in the onrushing clouds. O birds, I'll sing to myself, you've carried me along on this bloody voyage, carry me now into that cloud into the marvel of this final night.
He calls his number “precise / and astonishing, my only secret.” Mine isn’t necessarily astonishing, but I feel good about it. It is a secret. An open book about most things, I’ll keep this under my hat.
It makes the number sweeter—just for me, like the year itself. Despite whatever else, I’ve seen [redacted] species, months to go. If this year is about “everything,” whether I’ve seen 150 or 350 doesn’t matter.
Am I happy? Not what I intended to write about, but to write about birds is to write about happiness. Things make me happy each day—experiences, birds, a butterfly.
Counterintuitively, if I think I’m happy, I react: What business do you have being happy when [reason to be unhappy] and [another reason]? If I think I’m not happy, I react: Don’t be ungrateful. I think of what makes me happy, ways I’m lucky. Thinking I’m not happy makes me enumerate reasons I should be.
We are always works in progress in some way. Find joy in the process of becoming.
People don’t read here for reflective blabber. Rock & Hawk’s selling points are birds and ferns, the odd butterfly. Authorial introspection? No, but this is about birds and ferns—their role in my life, in my introspective blabber.
It isn’t difficult to look for reasons to be unhappy. If you’re looking for reasons to be unhappy, stop and think about what you’re doing. There’s your reason. Be unhappy you’re devoting energy to being unhappy. Catch yourself and change your tune.
The first step to feeling good is permitting yourself to feel good. There are ten thousand reasons any of us could feel less-than-good at any moment. If something arises and puts those out of mind, lean into it.
I’ve leaned into birds. When I feel myself revoking permission to feel good, I remember: but I have my birds.
Life won’t stay as it is. It’ll get better, worse, worse still, better again.
writes: “Change does always happen. We need to remember that. Nothing stays static. Everything changes, we change.”I was always pessimistic. There were times I’d look around and think: rock bottom. Then things got worse. Okay this is rock bottom. Worse again. Now, rock bottom.
None of those were rock bottom. Things had been discreetly moving in positive directions all along. The common denominator was me believing it was rock bottom. We can’t prevent change, nor should we try.
I used to consider 2021 the best year of my life. For me of that time, it was. Me of that time was different than me of this one. “Nothing stays static. Everything changes, we change.” The task of being alive is to make every moment best it can be for that version of you. Those versions change, as will your definition of a good moment.
I will always have my birds, but even that isn’t the same. I don’t love them any less, but notice my aperture changing. Walking in a place with birds, I’ll stop for a butterfly, crouch by a fern. If I miss a bird, that’s okay.
I used to dismiss New York fern. “A perfectly good fern I have no tolerance for.” It shared a name with a place I didn’t like, so I wrote it off. New York fern is now among my favorites. Sensitive remains number one. Change is good when you go from foolishly dismissing Thelypteris noveboracensis to appreciating it.
If my brain was a cul-de-sac, birds would own 85% of the homes. I don’t bring the same fervidity to ferns, but my New York fern affinity led down a fun rabbit hole. How to tell it, Thelypteris noveboracensis, from hay-scented, Dennstaedtia punctilobula?
Hay-scented tapers to the tip but not to the base, where pinnae are broad. It has “triangular fronds.” New York is “elliptic, tapering to both ends, lowest pinnae very small (less than 1 cm long),” says my guide.
Hay-scented’s leaflets are also “divided into 10-20 ‘subleaflets.’” These “subpinna” are lobed, “leaflets upon leaflets upon leaflets,” hence the fern’s “lacy, wispy appearance.” New York fern has no “final subdivision…the leaflets upon leaflets are not lobed.”
Much as I love New York fern, birds own most real estate in my head. Remembering that Bell’s Vireo made me think of other birds and where I saw them.
Gila and Ladder-backed Woodpeckers, Lazuli Bunting, Lucy’s Warbler, Black-chinned Hummingbird, Common Black Hawk, Black-headed Grosbeak. My goal was the woodpeckers.
Didn’t see a Ladder-backed until the end of the outing. Goal accomplished, I celebrated with a woodpecker shirt.2 It features some species I haven’t seen yet, but doesn’t have some I have.
The Ladder-backed search felt like deja vu of the Nuttall’s—not because they look and sound similar, but they do. Ladder-backed calls are explained as peak; Nuttall’s, pit. Both had the overarching feeling of I should’ve seen one by now. Eventually I did.
A Lazuli Bunting is alarmingly blue. I encountered one, far off. If it’d been less blue I’d have missed it. Would’ve taken a picture, but fully zoomed it was still no good.
When I take pictures of birds, I ask: Will I want to delete this? If the answer is yes, I don’t take it. Before, I would’ve held the shutter down for dozens and ended up with tons of subpar images I’d sentimentally refuse to delete. Memories of a Lazuli Bunting are better than bad photos.
Cinnamon Teal, Verdin, Yellow Warbler, Ruddy Duck, White-crowned Sparrow. I saw a Verdin immediately. Months later, at the American Museum of Natural History, it was nice to see one in a diorama and think back to seeing one alive.
The Cinnamon Teal was my target species. Thought I saw one years ago but was incorrect. Blue-winged Teal. Cinnamons are “very similar to other teal species, especially Blue-winged Teal.” There was a pond-side viewing area at the wetlands. When I walked out I spooked a drake.
A distinct duck. Green speculum, red eye, powdery blue shoulder in flight. I couldn’t get the camera up to capture it flying away. That was fine. I wanted to see a Cinnamon Teal; I saw a Cinnamon Teal. Seeing a bird I want to see brings joy, photo or no photo.
Malibu Creek State Park & Malibu Lagoon/State Beach:
The day started at the beach. Brown Pelicans galore, Heermann’s Gulls. Elegant Terns, Gadwall, Bonaparte’s Gulls, Barn and Cliff Swallows.
At the park: Acorn Woodpeckers, Lesser Goldfinch, Hutton’s Vireo, California & Spotted Towhees. Unidentified accipiter (we’ll say Cooper’s Hawk). Got pictures of a singing House Wren. Cassin’s Kingbird, Blue Grosbeak, Western Bluebird, Bullock’s & Hooded Orioles. California sister—makes me think of mine. She lives there; I have a California sister.
Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon), California Scrub Jay, California Towhee, coyote, Northern Mockingbird, Wrentit, Anna’s Hummingbird, Bewick’s Wren. House Wrens stole the show. Wrens sing wonderfully. Carolinas are insistent. House Wrens, effervescent. Winter Wrens more calming than House Wrens. There are lots of other wrens—Canyon, Marsh, Bewick’s, Sedge, Rock—so I’ll stop.
The star of Griffith Park Bird Sanctuary was not a bird. I was looking for a Yellow-breasted Chat. Then: coyote just looking at me. Who is this person? Why do they have that object against their face? We’re visitors in the home of wildlife.
Nuttall’s Woodpecker was the goal. I wish I’d spent more time exploring the trails. There were bobcat tracks, I got a good look at some pollinators—and lots of hummingbirds at the feeders when you entered. Lesser Goldfinch, Orange-crowned Warbler. I saw a Nuttall’s twice. As with the Ladder-backed the best encounter came as I was leaving. Are the birds bidding me a kind farewell or urging me to go back?
California Condor, Brewer’s Blackbirds. Both thrilling, one easier to find than the other. Common Raven, Juniper Titmouse, Violet-green Swallow, Say’s Phoebe, Pinyon Jay, Mountain Chickadee (third chickadee species of the year).
White-throated Swift. Western Tanager, Canyon Wren, Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay, Ash-throated Flycatcher, Black-throated Gray Warbler, Painted Lady Butterfly. It’s hard to focus purely on birding when the Grand Canyon is right there.
Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge & Louisiana at large:
The Red-cockaded Woodpecker is bird of the year. The bird flirted with extinction, but I got to see it. American Bird Conservancy writes:
The dapper Red-cockaded Woodpecker was once a common sight throughout the mighty longleaf pine forests of the Southeastern United States. Today, only about 15,000 individuals remain…the Red-cockaded Woodpecker requires habitats maintained by periodic natural burns.
I also saw Swamp Sparrow, Sedge Wren, Brown-headed Nuthatch, Sora, Barred Owl, Northern Parula, King Rail. White-eyed & Blue-headed Vireos, White Ibis, Western Cattle Egrets, Common Gallinule, Great Crested Flycatcher, American Coots. Wood Duck, Northern Flicker, Marsh Wren, Black-bellied Whistling Duck, Blue-winged Teal, Pied-billed Grebe, Little Blue Herons, Laughing & Bonaparte’s Gulls. Palamedes Swallowtail & Monarch Butterflies.
If you made it to the end, thank you. This was long.
How to conclude? Ticks, happiness, change, birds, ferns, birds again—covered lots of ground. My big year isn’t over. I’ve birded at times I shouldn’t have, but am glad. Nobody does a big year just because. I didn’t, so I’m happy it’s going well.
I guess the takeaway here is things change. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes hard ones. Sometimes hard ways reveal themselves to be good. If you have a reliable source of positivity or happiness, do it.
Prioritize joy. Easier said, but you’ll be glad you did.
They do have ticks in Arizona, but not like in New England.
The woodpecker shirt gets worn when I want something to go well. I’ve had woodpecker success after all. I’m superstitious with clothes. Some garments I’ve refused to wear, or still do. I refused to wear a bird shirt I wore on a day that didn’t go how I’d hoped. When I started wearing it again, I’d think here we go whenever I put it on.
I’m currently reading ‘The Bird Way’ by Jennifer Ackerman, & deeply appreciate your photos & descriptions of some of the bird’s you’ve captured/seen. I’ve also had some special encounters with several bird species in my life! Winged-messengers. It was neat to see photos of the one’s I’ve been reading about that are not indigenous to my area.
Also, coyotes are indeed magical & an incredible part of the natural world. A couple of years ago my Queensland Heeler & a young female coyote formed an unlikely friendship on our early morning beach walks. She even sought us out one morning when we didn’t make it down to the beach, but we were walking by a local farm that runs parallel to the beach cliffs. I did a deep dive on learning as much as I could about coyotes during that time, & it warms my heart to see them revered. I’ll need to post about our coyote chronicles sometime!
I also appreciated the deeper dive into considering/challenging perspective during difficult times…it was a gentle reminder to keep broadening our vantage point & remembering that everything (including us) is always changing…ever ebbing & flowing. Thank you for a timely read!
A stunning collection of images and descriptions James. So many species to appreciate. I have never seen a Cinnamon Teal before - that is one striking bird. I like your point as well on the encounter with the Coyote: "We’re visitors in the home of wildlife" This is such an important point and something I try to keep in mind on my hikes as well. I figure it's a privilege I'm afforded to be in Nature. Thanks for sharing some amazing photos and descriptions and information.