My husband and I are bird nerds…we love watching them, chasing them, picturing them. I read Ivan Doig’s Winter Brothers as I toured the Canadian Rockies this summer, and he talks about the importance of birds:

“I live in this suburb for its privacy, the way it empties itself during the workday–people evaporated off to office, school, supermarket–and delivers the valley to me and the birds and backyard cats. I suppose I could get by without the cats, or trade them for other interesting wanderers, maybe coyotes or foxes, but a birdless world, the air permanently fallow, is unthinkable. To be without birds would be to suffer a kind of color blindness, a glaucoma gauzing over one of the planet’s special brightnesses. Bushtits must bounce again out there on the thin ends of birch branches like monks riding bell ropes. A fretful nest-building robin–we always have one or two nattering in the trees at either end of the house–must gather and gather dry spears of grass until the beautiful bristles out like tomcat whiskers. Towhees, chickadees, flickers, juncoes. (All the creatures of this planet that do not know they have splendid names.) Occasional flashing hummingbirds; seasonal grosebeaks who arrive in the driveway and, masked like society burglars, munch on seeds amid the gravel. Besides Carol and the pulse of words across paper there exist few everyday necessaries in my life, but birds are among them” (p. 56).

We had a great time watching birds in Canada: an unusual woodpecker led to a clearing filled with cedar waxwings. Later, we found yellow warblers and gray jays. On our last day, we spent two or three hours following a family of common mergansers swimming and frolicking in the rapids on a river while an osprey with at least one chick cried from its test on a dead tree above the rushing water. Awesome birds…yet, clearly not what people come for. As we sat watching the waxwings in the clearing, a woman poked her head in the car window.

“What are you watching?” she asked politely. I explained that it was birds, and it was exciting because they were in their breeding plumage. The usually subdued Yellow-rumped warbler that we saw in the winter was YELLOW! In particular, his throat positively glowed. She smiled at me in that kind, caring way we save for imbeciles and walked back to her car. I could hear here say in a rather neutral but clearly disappointed tone, “It’s birds…in their breeding plumage.” The van pulled out quickly onto the road, leaving us to bird watch alone.

I would contend that while it is pretty awesome to glimpse a gray wolf in the wild, that is actually much easier and much luckier. You’re either there when the wolf wanders down the highway or you aren’t. And, if you see it, there is no question that it is a wolf. Birds, however, are neither lucky nor easy. I suppose there is some luck if you see something unusual, but the fact is that there are birds around all the time. You just need to stop and start looking. When we did it at the property, we immediately saw several unusual birds. Were we lucky? Sort of because these were birds that were passing through on their way to other places. But mostly we were patient. What about the challenge? Birds are not always readily identifiable…it takes some know how to look at the beak, the feet, any special marking on the head or feathers.

Here’s a great picture of a Clark’s Nutcracker in Jasper National Park at Edith Cavell Mountain.