I’m not an avid birdwatcher, probably because I couldn’t
pick an avid bird out of a lineup. Where
I grew up, we had pigeons and that’s about it.
Many an idle minute was spent in my youth taunting them with any
inedible object I could find. I’d toss
it near a herd of them (or bevy or coven or whatever) and then watch them
compete for who could be first to find out that it tastes like a cigarette butt
(later I would find out that this works great with seagulls, too.) Also, you could run toward a pride of pigeons
(or warren or whatever) and see how many would just run and how many would
actually fly (six is the answer). I
never figured out what their purpose was, although I suspect they filled a
critical need for pigeon poop.
I’ve lived in the country now for over 27 years and have
seen hundreds of different species in that time. Okay, maybe it’s only ten or twenty, but it’s
a lot more than one. I bought feeders
and a birdbath, I bought “The North American Field Guide to Birds” and out of the thousands of different species I’ve
seen, I can easily now recognize at least six or eight of them. As I write this, I’m thinking that book wasn’t
a very good investment. My birds almost
never look exactly like the picture.
Sometimes you have to narrow it down within a broader class like brown
ones, then use size and the fact that they’re only found in Arizona to whittle
it down. I settle for close enough.
So we have grackles, crows, blue jays, finches (gold and
not), cardinals, mourning doves, pileated woodpeckers (absolute positive id on
these), “Woody”-type woodpeckers, robins, wrens, hummingbirds and those little
bastards that won’t stand still long enough to get a good look at them. I don’t see well enough to pick up the
features that would confirm a species, like bands on the legs, spots on the
underside or a third wing. So I get
close with the book’s help, but then I realize that mine has a yellow beak and
the book shows a black one, or mine is about 5 inches long and the book says
36. Close enough, I tell myself. Maybe it’s a female, I tell myself. I can talk myself into just about anything.
I’m just now realizing that I haven’t gotten to the point of
all of this, but please know that most of what of I’ve already told you is
totally irrelevant to the central theme, which by now the sleuths among you
have probably figured out. I just saw a
bird up fairly close that I’ve never seen before!
But before I get to the point, which I didn’t really do in
the last paragraph, I must digress a little.
In my earlier list I intentionally failed to mention turkeys and
vultures (the turkey kind of vulture as well as the dead body kind of vulture)
because these birds show up on my deck or in the backyard trees exactly never
and almost never, respectively. So why
bring them up now, you ask? Because I
see them all the time as I move about my town and the surrounding area. Quite often while driving, I’ll spot a large
bird soaring high above, and again owing to my remarkable vision, I don’t know
if they’re vultures or falcons or hawks.
Which gets me finally back to the point.
I was sitting in my kitchen enjoying a cup of freshly brewed
coffee from our brand new Keurig Vue coffee maker, which we bought to replace a
regular Keurig coffee maker. We bought
the Vue version for several very sound reasons.
The Vue cups are recyclable – you just peel back the foil and the little
pod comes with it sometimes. Sometimes
the pod breaks and wet coffee grinds go all over the floor, which I have to
clean up right away because my wife just vacuumed. Also the Vue cups don’t come in as many
varieties as regular K-cups, but they cost a lot more. I think it’s cool. It takes up more counter space than the old
one, and it’s a lot noisier. These two
factors alone will enable our guests to very quickly see just how cool we
are. I digress again.
Okay, so I’m sitting there and this massive bird lands on a
large branch of a tree right there in my back yard. It has to be close to two feet tall, has a golden
breast and black, brown and white wings.
It doesn’t have a large beak and the beak is yellowish, but it kind of
looks like a hawk to me (what do I know?)
So Google it is. I go to Images
and type “hawk”. I’ve found that you don’t
need to capitalize, but you do need the correct spelling, since a one-letter
mistake will get you tons of pictures that will get you arrested should you
save any of them. This is true
regardless of what you’re searching for.
The best thing you can do is to Google “dictionary” first and check the
spelling (print this and save it, since I already verified the correct spelling
of “dictionary”). But I digress.
Among the images is one picture that is very, very
close. It’s a “Red Shouldered Hawk”
common to the Northeast, the right size and coloring (except for the beak) and
since it didn’t make any noise in the almost 6 minutes it hung around, I couldn’t
verify that is made a “kee-aah” noise (all of this identifying information came
from the page that came up when I clicked on the picture. Strangely, when I clicked on a sound clip of
this hawk’s call, it didn’t sound much like “kee-aah” at all, it was more like
a bird noise.) I just needed to clear up
the beak color thing. Scrolling through
about a thousand more pictures, I finally found another picture and this one
had a yellowish beak. Ta-Da! By the way, I couldn't find the book without actually getting up.
I just saw a Red Shouldered Hawk. I am cool.
