Bird of Passage: February 2024
Sometimes I feel sheepish about the fact that I’m not really as serious of a birder as people seem to expect me to be, based on the fact that I write about birds for a living.
I like birding, but I can go weeks at a time without birding and not be bothered by it (well, maybe not in spring…). I’m not much of a lister, I don’t even try to identify gulls and shorebirds most of the time, and I struggle to use eBird consistently because I get sick of counting starlings. The organizers of bird festivals I’m speaking at keep asking if I’d like to also lead a field trip while I’m there, and the answer is no, you really don’t want me leading a trip. Not if you want participants to actually, you know, see and identify a lot of birds.
But I’ve recently come to embrace my actual birding superpower. Because although I may not really be a birdwatching nerd, what I am instead is an ornithology nerd. And no, they’re not the same thing.
This became clear to me last fall while out on a bird walk with my local Audubon chapter. We’d paused to enjoy a pair of Varied Thrushes—American Robins’ stunning cousins, which visit our valley in the non-breeding season—and as we continued down the trail, a member of the group commented, “I’ve always wondered how they make their song, with those two notes at the same time.” (Most accounts of Varied Thrush song describe it as a “single pitch,” but you can often hear dissonant overtones in there.)
“Well…” Truly, I hate coming off as a know-it-all, but I did in fact know how birds do this and he seemed genuinely curious. “A bird’s vocal organ is actually way down at the base of its windpipe, where it splits to go into the two lungs, and they can control the two sides of it separately to produce two pitches at the same time.”
“Really?! I never knew that!”
“Yeah…” Feeling sheepish, I added, “I may not know nearly as much as [prominent local birder] about bird ID, but I do know a lot about, well, ornithology.”
“Oh?” Others on the walk started piping up with burning questions of their own. Is it true that birds can’t smell? (Absolutely not.) Can birds see color? (Yes, better than we can.) For the first time, I felt like I was adding value to one of these weekly bird walks, instead of just tagging along.
If you want to talk about the finer points of bird ID, I can’t help you. But if you want a continuous stream of useless but interesting bird biology facts? I’m your girl. Now if only I could get myself to stop volunteering bird facts while socializing with non-birders…
Words About Birds
For the winter issue of Living Bird, I wrote a feature about how Great Gray Owls overcome “acoustic mirages” when hunting voles under a thick blanket of snow. Snow can distort sound passing through it in weird ways, and owls hunting by sound have to adjust for this. I love the story behind this research project: One of the collaborators was an owl expert who’d always been curious about how they perceive sound, the other was an expert in the biology of sound who'd always wanted to study owls, and a nature documentary film crew serendipitously brought them together.
Also! I somehow missed that my latest contribution to BirdNote aired in late December. The island of Cuba is home to a unique population of Northern Bobwhites… but how they got there has always been a bit of a mystery. Recent genetic work shows that they’re descended from birds introduced from two other populations at two different times. First, indigenous people brought them from Mexico to Cuba between the 12th and 16th centuries; then, around 300 years ago or less, Spanish colonists introduced more bobwhites from what’s now the southeastern U.S. It’s a nice bit of scientific detective work.
Moving on to things not written by me, the American Birding Association announced their Bird of the Year for 2024, and it’s the Golden-winged Warbler. This is a fascinating choice! Golden-winged Warblers are declining and are gradually being replaced by their close cousins the Blue-winged Warblers in many areas, but research has shown that these two birds differ by only a few genes, all involved in plumage color. One could argue that they aren’t even really distinct species, and if that’s the case, is it really a loss if Golden-wings are hybridized out of existence by Blue-wings? Maybe it is… but it’s interesting to contemplate.
Good news or bad news for Ivory-billed Woodpecker believers? A new analysis took a close look at which “lost” species are most likely to be rediscovered and identified some key factors. According to the researchers, the maybe-extinct species that are most likely to still be out there somewhere are those that haven’t been searched for thoroughly because they’re small and uncharismatic (point against Ivory-bills, which are big and flash and have been the subject of intensive searches for years) and those that live in hard-to-survey places like wetlands (point in favor of supposedly swam-dwelling Ivory-bills). Time will tell, I guess!
Finally, you know how I mentioned above that birds see color better than we do? Birds can actually see UV light that’s invisible to human eyes, and scientist recently developed a special camera system to get a peek at how UV-perceiving animals like birds might see the world. It’s fun to look through these images and try to imagine experiencing the world as another species might. Fun fact: in most bird species where males and females look the same to us, they actually have different UV markings and, therefore, look different to each other!
Book Recommendation of the Month
Better Living Through Birding: Notes From a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper. If the name Christian Cooper doesn’t ring a bell, this is the Black birder about whom a white woman made a false 9-1-1 call after he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park in spring 2020. His book isn’t just about birding; it’s about all of his experiences as a gay Black nerd, a rich, thoughtful, exuberant memoir about being different and finding one’s place in the world. (As someone who shares Cooper’s love of nerd culture, I really enjoyed the sections about his time working for Marvel Comics!) Highly recommend.
[Bonus: Check out my review of Jen Ackerman’s What an Owl Knows, published last month on the American Birding Association website!]
Events + Miscellany
February 22: Virtual book event for Thoreau Farm
February 29: Virtual book talk for the Somerset County Library System of New Jersey
Are you in Massachusetts? I’ll be speaking in person at the annual Mass Audubon Birders Meeting in Worcester, MA, on April 21! Details to come.
Also: I won an award! I’m honored to have received the Northwest Science Writers Association’s 2023 “Best of the Northwest” award for institutional science writing, for a feature on Mountain Chickadee cognition that I wrote for Living Bird, the magazine of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.