Cheep thrills

Yesterday was the Christmas Bird Count, and I went along. As I mentioned in my Dec. 6 post, I'm a total beginner in the bird-watching world, so I wasn't at all sure how it would go. I told myself that I'd be happy if the day ended with my having been impact-neutral; i.e., having caused no chaos or havoc amongst the "real" birders or rendering their statistics useless.

I needn't have worried. I had a wonderful time! I was in a team of four, led by Mike Lawler, who, in my opinion, should be the designated newcomer-shepherd-in-perpetuity. He was patient, good-natured, easy-going, a great teacher and seemingly happy to have me along. And the best part was that we were covering an area extremely familiar to me, as it's a favorite bicycling route, one I've ridden numberless times. But I never saw it like I saw it yesterday. It's one thing to look at a cliffside or pasture, even at a slowish pace, and quite another to stand quietly and look at the ground underneath a pile of branches—I never knew there were so many birds out there. (I usually think of them as being only flying from one place to another, not hopping around under the shrubs.)

It was pretty amusing, though, at least to me. For instance:

Mike: Hear that? It's a [insert name of any bird smaller and quieter than a crow].
Me: Uh . . . no.
or
Mike: Those markings around the eyes mean it's a [insert name of interesting bird]. Did you see them?
Me: We-l-l-l . . . no.

Clearly, if I'm going to do any birding at all, I'm going to have to a) train my eyes to see more and/or get new glasses, and b) get hearing aids. Luckily, I was the designated recorder, my job being to note on the species list what we saw and how many of them, so nobody was relying on my impaired senses. (The printed list presented its own challenges, as it was arranged according to some convention known to people who do this all the time and based on some arbitrary ordering of species, not, as I would have preferred, alphabetically. I spent a lot of time searching frantically for the name of some bird or other and hoping I'd find it before somebody called out yet another species.) It was wonderful fun, though, and I was utterly absorbed in it, like you are when you're doing something new and interesting. It was cold, but it didn't matter. I didn't think about anything that didn't have to do with finding and recording birds.

And we did see some good ones. Here are some of them:

This is a phainopepla, a bird I'd never heard of until yesterday. Isn't he important-looking? I love his impertinent crest.

This guy is a ferruginous hawk, the only one seen yesterday by all the teams out on the count. Again, a bird I knew nothing of until yesterday.

And this lovely creature is a lark sparrow. Until yesterday, I had no idea there were so many different kinds of sparrows. Or that they are as large as they are. I learned a lot.