I’m in San Francisco today for work, and I saw my first California bird: a Common Grackle. All I’ve seen of this city so far are the two blocks of Market Street between the hotel and the office, so I was lucky to see anything at all. Best thing is, I’m ahead of Pole for once: she doesn’t have a bird from this state. Thank you, Common Grackle of California.
Category Archives: LIST
new year, little day
For the first day of this new, little-yearless year, we tried to relive the glory of the last day of the last glorious year. In other words, we went to the same place we went to yesterday, the Irving Park Cemetery. We hoped we could see the merlin again, but it wasn’t there, and the only birds we spotted were a flock of ROCK PIGEONS. Earlier, though, Pole saw a MORNING DOVE, and so after only one day, she’s already ahead of me.
A rather drab outing and not worth posting except that it’s the first day of the year. And since this year won’t be crazy compulsive like last year, we’re no longer going to post entries for every bird we see. I’m afraid I’m only crazy compulsive enough to keep the lists up to date. End of transmission.
final day, final bird, final resting places [278]
On this last day of the year we officially failed in our Little Year quest (more after the jump), but we did see a lifer, so that gave us some hope. The bird was a MERLIN, and it was the fourth (!) Little Year bird in a row to be a double lifer. There was a sighting a couple of days ago at Chicago’s Irving Park Cemetery, and we saw the bird right where it was supposed to be: perched in a bare tree near the entrance. It flew away after about five minutes, but we had a decent look at it on this warm, rainy day. We drove around the cemetery trying for another glance, but no luck. However, we did see an large neoclassical building with an odd inscription on its pediment: COLUMBARIUM. It turns out (thank you, Wikipedia) a columbarium is place for the public storage of ash-filled urns. These buildings are said to look a little like dovecots, and columba being Latin for dove, columbarium is Latin for dovecot, and so there you go. The odd thing is that the scientific name for the Merlin is Falco columbarius, and I guess the bird is sort of dovelike. But it’s an odd coincidence all the same. So anyway, I think a dovecot for urns (an urncot? an ashcot?) would be a great place for any birder’s ashes.
cackle cackle [277]
We headed off to Miller Beach in Indiana today to see if we could find the scoters and other such hard-to-find avifauna that people reported seeing yesterday. Of course, we saw squat, because squat is what we see at Miller’s. The beach always has plenty of gulls, but the oft-reported rarities are never there when we are.
The good news, though, is that we stopped at a few places on the south side of Chicago and managed to find a lifer at Calumet Beach: a CACKLING GOOSE. It’s a fairly new species that was split off from the Canada Goose in 2004, and we’ve been scouring flocks of Canadas for years looking for them. They’re supposed to be a little smaller than Canadas, but truth is, they’re a lot smaller. The one we saw looked like a toy Canada goose. So in the end, it was an easy ID. And, as luck would have it, it’s the third little year bird in a row to be a lifer.
after many a summer comes the swan . . . [276]
We went to Horicon Marsh in Wisconsin today, not looking for any lifers (not really), but to see the great mass of Canada geese that supposedly congregate there each fall. The geese are supposed to number in the hundreds of thousands, and we wanted to experience the wildness of a sky black with birds that Audubon and others have described. Of course, we didn’t.