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The second after I decided my recent sightings weren't "special" enough to
warrant a post, my inner small voice offered a contrary
opinion. I paid attention. Here's a compilation of a few recent
sightings that document the birds around us, just getting on with the business of living
life.
On Labor Day, Glenn Barlow and I returned to the National Forest Service
trails behind the Sherwood Hills Resort in Wellsville Canyon with the hopes of
seeing the waves of warblers I saw 2 days earlier. The place was embarrassingly dead; in
fact, I decided I should re-name it 'Deadsville'. A small shining moment occurred when we
exited the Lookout Point trail to see an Olive-sided Flycatcher perched in
profile atop a fir spire. The bird
chose two additional fir-skyscraper perches, all in bad light, and
then it flew its peak-headed, big-headed, dusky-feathered self out of our view
without even throwing as much as a "pip-pip" over its shoulder or ordering the
usual brewskis-on-the-double ("Quick! Three beers!"). Rats! Glenn suggested we coax the bird back
with the CD and it worked like a charm.
The flycatcher quietly appeared behind us and to the north. With good light at our backs, we enjoyed inquisitive Olive-sided Flycatcher eye-candy through the telescope at a satisfying close range. The flycatcher was nattily dressed in a dark
vest. The sighting required a birders' high-five. We
high-fived. Glenn and I were ebullient (that word is for you,
Roostertael).
On September 7th, I visited Mantua
Reservoir to check the progress of the grebe colony. The young'uns
are highly mobile and highly vocal. I saw only one little grebe
piggybacking on a
parent. I watched another chick plead for food every time
the Western Grebe parent surfaced. The appearance of the parent turned on
the chick's syrinx like a switch. See parent, beg aggressively. No
see parent, swim silently. The act reminded me of the reception
I get when I arrive home from the grocery store. "Whadja get, Mom?
Huh? Get anything good? Huh? Huh? Huh?" The young
grebe also stretched its head and neck forward and plowed through the
mini-waves, calling all the while it
pulled up to Mom or Dad. The begging call sounded like a cross
between an American Kestrel's, "Killee! Killee! Killee! Killee!" and the similar
cry of many gull species. The parent twice surfaced with a
fish and approached the chick instead of the other way around.
Stuffing a minnow and a pan fish down the
chick's gullet had the same effect as the parental submersion--a momentary
silencing of the chick. As I scanned far out over the water, I saw
parent-chick pairs over every part of the reservoir. I could see many
chicks approaching their parents with beaks agape, head and neck lowered,
plowing through the water. The far-away sound of their begging wafted to
me faintly no matter where I birded
on the dike.
On a dirt spur that leads from the south
dike road to the water's edge, I watched a Western Wood-pewee turn sideways on
its perch and schwack the living daylights out of the large dragonfly the bird
held in its beak. I turned back to the water to see an Osprey suspended in
time and motion over the water in the stiff wind that blew that day. When
the clock and the earth started rotating again, the Osprey veered off out of my
view to fish in another spot. I also saw four butt-bobbing Solitary
Sandpipers in the same scope view in the wide, south-end mud flats. I was
awash in deja vu as I was transported back to a rhetorical query I made
with an August posting--if a Solitary Sandpiper is with another Solitary
Sandpiper, are they both still Solitary Sandpipers? The answer, of
course, is yes, but that they're not solitary Solitary Sandpipers.
And since I was alone and espied them through a scope, that made me a
solitary Solitary Sandpiper-peeper.
Later that same day I hiked a portion of the Deep Creek
Trail that leads to Hawk Watch International's Raptor Watch site in the
Wellsvilles. I flushed the same Ruffed Grouse twice. Those sightings were followed by
the whickering, murmured clucking sounds of one or more grouse moving through
the underbrush. I continued up the trail and another grouse flew out of
the understory beneath an aspen colony. The bird did not explode away; he
was not alarmed; he was not silent. He clucked in the aspen
about 10 feet off the ground as he rearranged the feathers on his breast.
I was motionless as I looked down upon him from higher above on the
trail. This was not really a Ruffed Grouse; it was a Ruffed-up
Grouse. This bird looked like he had been stomped on by Carol Gwynn's
Snowy Egret neighborhood bully or, he
was molting. His ruff feathers were all different lengths and were
both black and brown. Worst of all, his crest was missing individual
feathers and looked like a bad comb-over. He eventually left, ostensibly
for the beauty parlor.
I saw many silent Empidonax flycatchers
fly-catching under the aspens. Several were Cordilleran and I think one
was a Hammond's. By early evening, the light was so gray in the thick
deciduous growth that I couldn't see field marks anymore. One
flycatcher landed on a bare branch only 20 feet above my head, backlit against
the gray sky. It was so close I could see the rictal hairs sticking out
around its face. I never did ID it.
After studying various literature sources at home, I
kicked myself for not studying the tail and beak shapes and lengths when I had
the bird in my sights. Oh, well. Lesson for next time. Had I
ID'd them all, what reason would I have to return? ;^}.
Perhaps my inner small voice was
right. Yes, I saw common Utah birds we can all see in the
right habitat and season. But how often can we watch a Western
Grebe feed its chick a Bluegill, a Ruffed Grouse preen in a tree, or get
close enough to a flycatcher to see--of all things--its whiskers? I
suppose those common sightings were pretty special after all. In fact, I
suppose I'll call them uncommonly good entertainment.
Kris |