Purple sandpiper.
Overnight there came a dusting of snow. I mean a true dusting—a fine powder on everything, as if there’s been an accident at some gigantic flour mill or the neighborhood volcano had a case of mild indigestion.
We have no neighborhood volcanoes, of course, although I have felt the rumblings of a couple tiny earthquakes in my thirty years here. Thirty years in Maine, this year. Which also happens to mean three decades of true birding for me, because it wasn’t until I’d moved 2,200 miles from Central Texas, where I grew up, that I paid much attention to wild birds that weren’t either outlandishly huge, colorful, or vociferous—or that flitted right in front of where I happened to be looking at the time. But the change in latitude meant learning strange views and smells and sounds and weather and trees casting shadows in angular sunlight. I always loved Nature, but love became passion upon my arrival at the 44th parallel.
Black guillemot.
Come to think of it, I didn’t start my life list until the end of 1980, when I got a field guide for Christmas. So my first active birding didn’t occur until the winter and spring of 1981. Everything on wings, every call from the wood around the tidal cove, caught my seeking senses. Come May and the arrival of wood-warblers, you could find me crashing through the undergrowth in mad dashes to track down the tiny sources of those wondrously crazy collections of notes and buzzes coming from high in the budding trees. Within a year of starting The List, I’d counted 172 species.
I haven’t counted nearly that many since. In all those busy intervening years I’ve become an accidental birder, more or less. Oh, I’ve come to know the natives well, have learned their secret habits. And occasionally I’ll spot a bird I can’t remember seeing before and come to find out I’d added it to my list decades ago—as happened today when I saw a tiny, impossibly graceful gull flying out to sea off the Rockland Breakwater. Turns out I’d first listed Bonaparte’s gull at 9:15 a.m. on Friday, 03 October 1981, at Long Cove, Saint George, Maine. A perching pair.
So I suppose I’ve been a true bird-lister for only 29 years. But that’s still long enough for my mustache and temples to gather a dusting of snow.
And because we birders are obsessed with lists, here are mine for today:
Common loon.
Rockland Breakwater list (05 January 2010)
Red-breasted merganser
Common goldeneye
Herring gull
Bufflehead
Long-tailed duck (also voice)
Common eider
Common loon
Black guillemot (also voice*)
Purple sandpiper
Bonaparte’s gull
Great cormorant
American crow
Mallard
*A first for me
Elsewhere (05 January 2010)
American crow
Herring gull
Ring-billed gull
Rock pigeon
Purple sandpiper at high tide.
2010 Birds (in order of appearance)
1. American crow
2. Ring-billed gull
3. Black-capped chickadee
4. Mourning dove
5. Herring gull
6. European starling
7. Red-breasted merganser
8. Common goldeneye
9. Bufflehead
10. Long-tailed duck
11. Common eider
12. Common loon
13. Black guillemot
14. Purple sandpiper
15. Bonaparte’s gull
16. Double-crested cormorant
17. Mallard
18. Rock pigeon
High tide at the Rockland Breakwater.
