One of the
many nice things about our peripatetic life has been the discovery of new
birds, not exotic to the locals, but hitherto (thitherto?) unknown to us. If I
had to pick the top three such birds of the last decade, I think they would be
the Bufflehead (Olympia), the Hoopoe (Cairo) and the Carolina Wren (Triangle).
We used to
see these distinctive sea ducks all over the Puget Sound, but particularly on
Cooper Point, near the OG’s pre-school. It was fun to watch their frenetic
diving, and they hold a special place in the family lore, as Worldwide helped
the OG’s class make paper maché
buffleheads for the only-in-Olympia Procession of the Species Parade. In fact, as part of the
never-ending clean-up, G-Lo returned a somewhat worse-for-wear head to us when
she was here for Alice last month. It has, ahem, gone on to “nourish the life of significant soil,” but the memory lives on.
These
dramatically colored, crowned and billed birds were everywhere in Egypt,
picking over the grass in search of insects. In four years, I never got tired
of watching them.
These little
guys are extremely common around our house. They don’t visit the feeder that
much, as they prefer insects in leaf litter or tree trunks, all of which we
have in abundance. They also have the charming habit of wandering on to our
screened porch every so often, and taking a couple of hours to find the hole by
the screen door that they came in through.
What sealed
their place in the ornithological pantheon was a discovery that I made this
morning. There is a fair amount of noisemaking in the early daylight hours,
including a loud repetitive call so distinctive that I’ve often scanned the
area trying to determine its source. Well today, I was out on the porch waiting
for a phone call when I heard the familiar sound. I spotted the singer on a
fencepost near the compost bin and grabbed the binoculars for a closer look. It
was the selfsame bird.
Not trusting my eyes, and unable to believe that such a small fry (sparrow size) could be so loud, I rummaged around to find our Petersen’s guide. One of my favourite things about
the invaluable reference is its onamonapoetic rendering of bird calls,
which I’ve often thought of as one of the best writer jobs ever. Turning to the
Carolina Wren entry, I found the following: “Voice: A clear 3-syllabled chant. Tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea.
“ Yep. That’s it. Remarkable bird; not
as dramatic as the others, but nonetheless worthy of an encomium. Sort of like Chapel
Hill.
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