Bird of Passage: May 2025
When you’re out birding, is there a whole category of birds that you just sort of… ignore?
When you’re out birding, is there a whole category of birds that you just sort of… ignore? Like they’re around, and you know there’s probably more than one species around, but they look similar enough and you’re bad enough at identifying them that you just sort of skip right over them? Maybe gulls? Shorebirds? Or maybe it’s just me; I’m definitely guilty of being a Bad Birder sometimes.
Swallows, I have to admit, sometimes slip through this crack for me. I know tree swallows, of course—my first real field ornithology experience was with tree swallows, as a volunteer nest box monitor for Long Point Bird Observatory the summer after my sophomore year of college. And I know barn swallows, and I adore violet-green swallows, specialties of the western U.S. that I am now privileged to see all the time. But the rest of them kind of blur together in my brain as “other swallows.”
Well, recently I was birding at the local reservoir, and an uncountable number of swallows were zipping back and forth over the water’s surface. It was a beautiful morning, and I was riding high from having just seen my first western kingbirds of the year, and I decided… what the heck. Let’s figure out which swallow species are out there.
First problem: are all those bluish-greenish guys tree swallows or violet-green swallows? I spent a long time trying to follow birds with my binoculars as they darted frenetically back and forth, puzzling over field marks like how much white was in their cheeks, and then finally an actual violet-green swallow zoomed past and wowee, it was immediately clear that all the previous swallows I’d been looking at were tree swallows. Violet-green swallows are just dazzling.
Okay, now the other swallows. They were brown. Just brown (with white underneath). I pulled out my phone and consulted the Merlin app, and it turns out that the only just-plain-brown swallow with no distinguishing field marks is the northern rough-winged swallow. Bank swallows, the other possible culprit, at least have a distinguishing brown band across their chest. This is one of those facts that I know I’ve learned before but have never been able to commit to memory. Maybe this time it will stick.
And… there, something different! For a split second, a swallow with a buffy rump flitted through my field of view. I consulted Merlin again and… score! A cliff swallow!
Meanwhile there were buffleheads and ruddy ducks bobbing on the lake and no fewer than three (!) ospreys hunting along the far shore. The wind rustled in the vegetation. A woodpecker tapped quietly as it foraged in the tree next to me. There, with the plants and the birds, I took a moment to breathe. Stopping to puzzle over swallows had reminded me to slow down at a hectic time of year.
I hope you’re taking time to breathe, too. And if you do have a category of birds that you’re guilty of ignoring because you can never remember how to identify them, tell me in a reply or comment; I’d love to know that I’m not alone!
Words About Birds
I wrote a piece for Audubon about a recent paper that showed that there’s a bias in ornithology research toward studying aesthetically appealing bird species over drab ones. The researchers looked at how many papers had been published on each of 293 North American songbird species in the past 55 years and found the birds that ranked in the top ten percent for visual appeal (based on color, contrast, and other characteristics) were studied three times as often as those in the lowest ten percent. This could mean we’re overlooking conservation threats to the “boring” birds out there.
Not by me: I liked this story from Living Bird (the Cornell Lab of Ornithology magazine) on how critical tree cavities excavated by woodpeckers are for a whole range of bird species. Researchers have even mapped “nest webs” to track how these high-value pieces of real estate pass from one avian owner to another over time. Outside North America, though, woodpecker cavities are less important, because forests are dominated by tree types that are more likely to form cavities on their own.
This one’s just for fun: Apparently hummingbirds’ nectar diet means that they pee a ton?! According to this Audubon story, their guts are super efficient at extracting the sugar from their liquid diet, and then, unlike most birds, they expel a near-constant stream of liquid waste. Who knew!
Finally: With more than ten thousand species of birds in the world, there’s always a new one to learn about, and before this month I had never heard of the crested honey buzzard. These Asian raptors apparently specialize in eating the developing pupae of stinging insects (but won’t pass up an opportunity to eat some honeycomb as well). They have a bunch of cool adaptations to protect themselves from stings, which you can read about at bioGraphic!
Book Recommendation of the Month
Sea Change by Gina Chung. I admit, I’ve been reading more novels and less nonfiction lately, so here’s a novel I enjoyed recently. Set in the near future as climate change is advancing, it follows a Korean-American woman named Ro who’s dealing with family, friend, and boyfriend drama (her boyfriend has just joined a privately-organized Mars colony mission…!) and who works at an aquarium where she’s befriended one of the residents, an unusually large and intelligent octopus named Dolores.
Events & Miscellany
I have multiple in-person speaking events coming up this month! Will I see you at one? I was also recently featured on the New Books Network podcast, which was really fun (even though Flight Paths isn’t exactly new at this point, ha ha).
May 10: World Migratory Bird Day talk at Seward Park Audubon Center (Seattle, WA)
May 17: Detroit Lakes Festival of Birds keynote (Detroit Lakes, MN)
I would definitely have to say shorebirds as the group I throw up my hands in trying to identify. From dunlin and sanderlings to the many different plovers I can get obsessed with looking for small identifying details. I recently spent some time at Summer Lake in central Oregon and had to include willets and curlew, dowitchers and snipe on my list of “what are they” sightings.
Along this same line of thinking I wrote last year about how often I catch myself saying “it’s only a sparrow or only a robin”. I think this is how we become desensitized and I compared it in a post to school shootings and how we dismiss the absolute horror because we see/hear of them so frequently. It may be a stretch to compare the two but it helped me understand what happens when we see something so frequently. It loses depth and impact and I am determined not to let that happen in my world.
It's juvy gulls for me. When I lived in Point Reyes I used to go out with a couple birders who would get in arguments about the age, species, and hybridization status of the various gray splotchy teenage Larus gulls we were looking at, and I'd just throw up my hands and go watch the Sanderlings instead!
Oh goodness, yes, and I'm guilty of ignoring adult gulls too. I always say that Heermann's gulls are my favorite just because they look so different from all the other gulls.