I’m checking out the freezing woods on a record cold day in the north Chicago burbs. It snowed several inches yesterday and now the cold has set in. Single digits. Below zero wind chill, whatever the hell that means. And it’s a black and white world. Why am I nosing around in it? Well, I said I’d try to find a daily sighting as often as I could and put the results on this blog. So I’m looking in the woods.

I say the world here is black and white because there’s snow everywhere and where there isn’t snow there are trees and bushes. These have bare branches that are so dark brown on this cloudy day that they might as well be black. Black and white. Actually, kind of nice looking, like an art photo.

But if there’s any bird life to report, I’m not seeing it. Then, as though on cue, there are four cardinals in a bush. They don’t fly away as I approach. They’re cold, and there are berries on the bush, freeze-dried berries, but better than nothing I guess. So these birds stay. Two males, two females. A double date. And the males are so wildly out of place from the standpoint of color, that I stop and stare.

I’ve seen a million cardinals. They’re nothing to write home about. Except, at this moment, in this place, they amaze me. I wonder, why are they red? What evolutionary quirk made them that way? The bright red beak, the red crest, the black cheeks just for fun, and everywhere else, red, pure fire-engine red.

The old joke I never quite understood when I was a kid went: what’s black and white and red all over, and the answer according the grown-ups was a newspaper. As a little guy I didn’t get the pun, the double meaning of red/read. How stupid. Both me and the joke. But it came to me again, there in the woods. What’s black and white and red all over, and I thought: this day, and the male cardinals.

Those were the only birds I saw. I know there must have been others but they were laying low and I wasn’t hanging in there long enough to get frost bitten. Still, the cardinals did the job. They made my daily sighting a colorful one. The only redder thing in the woods was my nose.

Saw a new species today. The Snow-covered Goose. Field markings: White on top, brown on the bottom. See, in the Chicago area, our Canada Geese aren’t much into migrating. Today we’re having a blizzard. So our geese are huddled in large packs on the ground in fields and parking lots. They have a good, deep layer of white wet snow on them, but they don’t seem to mind. Many have their heads tucked under their wings, sleeping, staying warm. Maybe hibernating? The Snow-covered Goose. My species of the day.

By contrast, I also saw what I’m pretty sure is a Crimson-crested Woodpecker. Might not be, but we can talk about that. I kind of like the symmetry of the names…Snow-covered, Crimson-crested. But where do you see a woodpecker in a blizzard? Right here. A friend told us to check out a video of a woodpecker fighting a snake. We hear about odd videos all the time, but it’s a snowy, boring day so we went to this link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9mst2pjqn8

Raises age-old issues about eminent domain, doesn’t it? Usually these disputes are solved by who’s bigger. Although sometimes it’s a matter of who got there first. And about how possession is nine tenths of the law. But this is the law of the jungle. And a warm jungle it is, a good place to visit on a day like today. Was it a Crimson-Crested? Could’ve been a Robust Woodpecker. Both are similar South American species. Meanwhile, up north we’ve got our Snow-covered Geese.

As I pulled into the parking lot outside my suburban office building today I heard a funny noise. Squeaky fan belt? I turned off the engine. The noise increased. I looked up and saw a V-formation, hundreds of large birds heading south. Geese, I guess. Makes sense this time of year.

But these geese must be a different breed from the ones around here. Ours are common as House Sparrows and have nested in this parking lot. We see them all winter. You gotta wonder if our local geese even heard of a V-formation.

The birds passing overhead must be wilder geese following ancient instinct. I remember reading that some Native Americans called this time of year a “cohunk,” from the sound geese made flying over. We say honk; the natives said cohunk. Close enough.

But wait a second. Something feels wrong. Take a second look, man! These can’t be geese. The sound is off. I was hearing chirpy calls, not honks, not cohunks. I got my binoculars from the trunk and figured: there goes my workday schedule, heading south with the birds.

I looked up and got excited. In the binoculars I could see that these were not geese. They were cranes. Hundreds of long-necked, long-legged, wide-winged, wild, noisy and flapping Sandhill Cranes. I stayed in that parking lot a long time, racking up a daily sighting I never expected on this day, in this place.

As I watched, some of the V-formations broke apart. The birds circled and lost altitude. Were they looking for a place to land? There’s a preserve nearby with ponds. Maybe they were eyeballing it. But they drifted generally south. A few ragged strings of V-formation started up again, although most birds stayed disorganized.

Sandhill Cranes. Birds with six-foot wingspans. Heading from northern wilds to southern swamps. Maybe they were slowing down to sightsee as they passed the big city with its cloverleafs and tall buildings. Who knows. But they made me late for work, not that I cared about work at that moment. Hey, Sandhill Cranes. Hundreds of them!

My daily sighting for a bitter cold Saturday in an unusually bleak suburban nature preserve: Coyote scat on the trail. That was it. But I enjoyed my hike because, today, the place had a quiet inactivity that reminded me of authentic wilderness.

I first noticed this deep quiet when visiting the woodlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Along narrow U.S. 2 in the western part of the U.P. near Lake Gogebic, there are endless trees. You could get lost in them forever. There are wolf packs, plenty of bears and almost certainly Eastern cougars. Bald Eagles and Ospreys are pretty common; so are Pileated Woodpeckers.

But when I first hiked around up there, I saw none of them. Ironic. Because in a few acres near Chicago there’s much to be seen. I guess this is easy to explain. In vast wild land, animals can disperse and be scarce.

The impression you get in authentic wilderness, whether it’s the U.P., Yellowstone, Muir Woods in northern California, the Grand Canyon or the Everglades…. is one of ear-shattering quiet, a feeling of “nothing happening.” But if you’re patient, if you wait by a stream and hang around all day, you’ll see wildlife. You’ll get ticks inside your clothes, but that’s the price you pay.

In the U.P. I saw two Bald Eagles working on a nest. I saw porcupines close enough not to touch. And although I never saw bears I did see garbage cans they messed with near my little motel. I saw Pileated Woodpeckers and a red fox that was more silver than red. Foxes near Chicago are just as much fox I guess, but the U.P.’s fox seemed more rugged.

Anyway, today in the cold suburban woods, there was that same “nothing happening” thing going on, the same deep uncompromising quiet. It was like being a thousand miles from home. Felt good and wild. That was worth noting; that was a pretty okay daily sighting.

That, and the coyote scat. I was glad I saw the scat because when my wife asked “what did you see today,” I couldn’t answer, “I didn’t see shit.” Because, I did.

Maybe I’ll see an owl tonight when I walk the dog. Probably not. I’ve seen them silhouetted against the sky in bare trees, but not often. My chances are pretty slim, even though the moon’s full and throws a lot of light. Meanwhile, there’s a Clark’s Nutcracker right in front of me.

It’s on my wall. I remember taking that shot with a long lens. The bird fills the frame, with evergreen branches blurred behind it. Long black bill. Gray and black plumage. In my book, a pretty rare bird. And I found him in a place that’s rare, too, at least for me: The high, snowy Rockies in Colorado. We were on a back trail, seeing Mountain Bluebirds, Steller’s Jays, Gray Jays, Ravens, Magpies; the birding was good. Then, right above me, this Clark’s Nutcracker. Snap. I made an 8×10 and framed it.

On this cold, birdless day in the Chicago suburbs I saw it on my wall for the first time in….I don’t know, years. Funny, it’s right there every day but has become part of the invisible background of life. I don’t see wallpaper, either. Today, the nutcracker jumped off the wall at me. I remembered that day in the Rockies when I took the photo. I’d been hoping to see a mountain lion there. I’d heard they were all over the place. I had seen bighorn sheep, full-curl rams, close up. So I figured almost anything was possible.

I went into a store on the mountain top where tourists buy postcards. I asked the guy behind the counter if there were lions around and he walked me to the back door, opened it and pointed to a rock twenty or thirty yards away. He said, damn, it’s gone. Then he went on to describe how a big mountain lion had been sunning himself there, just that morning. I figured, what a put-on. I laughed at how much of a rube I’d probably seemed to this local tough guy and how obviously he was playing with me. Yeah, yeah, I said.

Still, I walked back to the rock, and in the snow around it there were prints, big lion-size ones with their distinctive pug marks. Maybe the guy had been telling the truth. When I see my photo of the Clark’s Nutcracker I think about almost seeing a mountain lion. This happens every time. Too bad I almost never notice the photo. Except today, when it was my daily sighting.

I didn’t go looking for birds today. Got stuck in an office. At least there was a window. And on the other side of the glass, trees and low bushes. Our corporate campuses are well landscaped.

I was sitting at my desk absorbed in something corporate, and outside my window there was a commotion at the edge of my consciousness. It didn’t fully register. Then there was more. Bits of shadow. And noise. It broke my concentration and I looked.

A bunch of Starlings. No big deal. I went back to my computer. Then the fuss grew and I had to look again. Not just a few intrusive Starlings, but a whole lot. (By the way, that would be a pretty good alternative name for this bird: The Intrusive Starling).

I’m not interested in Starlings. I guess it’s because they’re common, urban, and because they’re an introduced Eurasian species. If the word on the street about them is correct, a hundred were released in New York’s Central Park in the 1890s for no better reason than some guy wanted the birds mentioned by Shakespeare to be here in America. Okay…..

Anyway, the Starlings that were released for Shakespearean reasons multiplied into a troublesome two hundred million or so, and they’re everywhere in the country now. To me, a satisfying sighting is a Pine Grosbeak or Snow Bunting. Starlings are just avian static, I thought.

Back to the window. It was getting more interesting. There were Starlings everywhere. Hitchcock was playing out there, not Shakespeare. The trees and bushes were black with Starlings. For some reason, the birds would rise up as a group and roll around the sky for a moment, then settle back. All, right outside my window.

I thought: Okay, I won’t write off the day as birdless. I see you guys. And I thought, maybe Starlings are worth seeing. Not just for sheer numbers. But because they’re interesting, close up. They were shining in the light, iridescent, and some had bright, whitish spots. Cool birds, after all.

I think I saw some Brewer’s Blackbirds in with them, and definitely some Grackles. I wasn’t sure about the Brewer’s Blackbirds—they’re hard to identify. But I was sure about one thing. I didn’t go to the birds today; they came to me.

Today I saw one of those long-tailed bird-catching hawks again, either a Cooper’s or Sharp-shinned. Anyway, an “accipiter” as it’s called in more formal circles. It zoomed past but I knew it instantly: Accipiter.

This kind of bird always reminds me of a classic psych experiment done in the late 1930s by a guy named Lorenz, and if you’ve heard about it, skip this post. But if you haven’t, it’s kind of interesting.

The guy suspended a cross-shaped cutout over a bunch of newly hatched geese, propelling it as though it were flying. Like a kid’s model airplane. If the cross moved with the long part in the rear, the baby birds got agitated and tried to hide. But if the same cross moved over them backwards, with the long part in front, they were cool.

The cross’s side bars appear as wings. The long part looks like an accipiter’s tail. Danger. But, again, if this same shape moves in the opposite direction, the long part’s in front of the wings and looks like the neck of a goose. No danger.

The goslings’ reaction to this experiment suggested that some responses in animals are hard-wired. Not everything is learned. Instinct exists. Nature versus nurture and all that, with nature coming out on top.

Since that original experiment, there have been attempts to discredit it, and some studies have added varying interpretations. But it’s likely that young birds do in fact have an inborn fear of the predatory silhouette, whether guys in lab coats discovered it or not.

When I see the flash of an accipiter against the sky, I have an instant response, too. I think of the Lorenz experiment, just like I did today.

I went into remote country looking for something uncommon. I had been seeing the usual birds near my neighborhood. Red-bellied Woodpeckers, Red and White-breasted Nuthatches, Cardinals, Cooper’s and Red-tailed Hawks. Good to see, but not uncommon. So I figured I’d get away from homes and malls. I wanted to walk into some real woods, maybe find a river. It’s fun to start with a goal and I had two. One realistic, one not. A Belted Kingfisher and a Bald Eagle.

I found an expanse of old woods, and there was a river, too. But no Kingfishers. Eagles? Forget it. Even birds I called “usual” near home, nuthatches and woodpeckers, were nowhere to be seen. Still, it was enjoyable to get into the wild. The only bit of civilization was a visitor’s center where you could pick up a map and get warm. They had a feeder out back.

In the feeder were three big, gray pigeons gobbling seeds. The feeder was too small for them, and wobbled. These birds are “Rock Doves” but everyone calls them pigeons. City birds. Birds of train platforms, fire escapes, rooftops and downtown parks where people throw crumbs. Pigeons can be a nuisance. They clutter Saint Mark’s in Venice and sit on Nelson’s head in London.

How did these city birds find a feeder way out in the sticks? I remembered having a similar question about the American White Pelicans I saw on Yellowstone Lake in Wyoming. Sure, the lake was big, but c’mon, it’s in land-locked Wyoming. How did the first pelicans find it?  And how did three pigeons know it would pay to leave the big city for a remote spot in the woods? If anyone has an answer, please tell.  In any case, I left thinking that I never did see something uncommon. Then it hit: What could be more uncommon than those common pigeons in that remote forest?

Today, instead of walking in a wild place, I went into a dismal place. But it was the right thing, the only thing, to do. I spent part of the day with family members visiting an aging relative. This aging relative is a graceful and funny old woman who has lived so long that she now has to reside on what can only be called a dead end street. This dead end street is a big institutional building, a grim and medieval place of wheelchairs, walkers, oxygen tubes, medicinal smells and resignation. It’s a tunnel with no light at the end. But it’s a reality that can’t be avoided, especially on a holiday weekend when family sees family.

So what does this have to do with two-fisted bird watching and our attempt to record daily sightings? Not much, I guess. Except there was a hairy moment in the parking lot and it caused the mood to turn on a dime.

We were leaving after our visit, quiet and sorry about the unavoidable circumstances of nursing homes and those being nursed. At the edge of the parking lot, there was a fence dividing the nursing home’s property from a large cemetery. The land of the dead neighboring the land of the near dead. A coincidence, maybe. Or just a convenience. You see how the mood can get dark in such a place?

In a tree along the fence a bright white movement caught my eye. I looked, all bird-watching senses alert. I remembered seeing white spots in trees once as I drove through the streets of Juneau, Alaska and they turned out to be the heads of Bald Eagles. So many eagles. They were Juneau’s pigeons.

The white I saw in the parking lot tree moved again. I located it quickly in the sunshine. It was the bright parts of a large black and white woodpecker, a spunky bird that was pecking away at dead bark and moving up, down and around the tree, always staying in full view. I said “Hey, look, a Hairy Woodpecker.” For the moment, the others let the word “hairy” alone, and they looked at the bird. I said, “See the little red dot on its head? Cool.” They all thought it was cool. One wise guy in the family said, “How do you know it’s a woodpecker” and I answered, “Cuz it’s peckin’ wood.” And we laughed.

It was patterned like the more common Downy Woodpecker, but was quite a bit bigger, maybe 9 or 10-inches, almost the size of a Red-headed or Red-bellied Woodpecker, and with a long bill. Clearly a Hairy. Why’s it called a Hairy Woodpecker? I figured I had to look that up. Maybe because hair’s more than down and this is more bird than a Downy Woodpecker. Seems logical. One of us said “I don’t see any hair,” and we laughed again, as we watched the bird pecking away, looking bright and clean and alive in the sunlight.

It was a gloomy day, pure November in the Midwest. The sky was low and heavy with gray clouds. There was a brisk wind and slight mist. Trees were mostly leafless. I was hiking in a nature preserve, getting away from work and people. The cold wouldn’t let you get comfortable; you had to pay attention to it, and you had to pay attention to the wind. So you forgot your own problems. But if you had any, the gray day made a good background for them. Birds? Nothing doing. I’d seen a crow flying in the distance, but there were no birds here. Just the misty wind and the solitude. I’d seen more birds on the drive over, Red-tailed Hawks sitting on poles along the highway. Starlings flying in a pack like a school of fish, going nowhere. Not much else. Around my house there would be Juncos and Cardinals. But here in the wild, nothing. Then it all changed. Just when you think you’ve got things figured out, that you know the name of the game, that the day and your mood are in synch, just then, nature throws you a surprise. There was a cyclone fence at the edge of the preserve. It looked odd; it had a bluish tinge. The openings in the wire were plugged with something. What the….? I got my binocs up and took a look. Fifty, maybe more, Eastern Bluebirds were all over the fence, perched in the openings. Some were bright blue, some grayish blue, the difference between males and females. Some were flying around while others were sitting, puffed up against the cold wind. Some where on the ground. There was a lot of bluebird action along that fence. A whole flock, with their orange and white fronts and blue backs, completely out of place in the gray world I’d accepted. I found myself smiling. I hadn’t been smiling before seeing the Eastern Bluebirds. You never know when a wild place will throw you a curve.

I saw Wild Turkeys but I’m not sure they count. This turkey question has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. Pure coincidence. I was on the Interstate, barreling through southern Wisconsin. In a distant field there were a flock of turkeys. Black, skinny, wild-looking. Their profile, their shape, their behavior made them unmistakable. One problem: they were a quarter mile away, and I was going 70. I wasn’t sure they counted as a sighting. There was glass, steel, concrete, truck exhaust and lots of open space between them and me. I wanted to count them. After years of bird watching I’d never been able to put Wild Turkeys on my list. But did they count? Once, in Yellowstone I saw a grizzly bear with two cubs. But I was on a high mountain road and the bears were in a valley miles below. I’d never have noticed if there weren’t a few people looking at them through scopes. In my binoculars they were small dark specks. Can I say I saw Grizzlies? I honestly don’t think so. In Alaska I saw Pigeon Guillemots, exotic sea birds of the North Pacific. But they were on a cliff and I was on a boat. I knew they were Guillemots, but they were too far away for me to feel that we were in the same place at the same time. Was it a sighting? All this came back—the bears, the Guillemots—as I sped past turkeys in a Wisconsin field. I guess serious birders have a protocol to determine when a sighting counts and when it doesn’t. I only have myself to please. And I gotta be honest: I’m not pleased when I see a bird for the first time as I’m going 70 and the bird’s a quarter mile away. The wild turkey gets a half-hearted, penciled-in spot on my list.

I was hoping not to see birds. This is unusual. I was out of town, far from home, and when I travel, I check out the local birds. But there I was, face pressed against the window, thinking, “birds, don’t be there.” What’s the deal with that? I was on a plane speeding down a runway at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York. I’d been in Manhattan all week (the reason for a gap in our “daily sightings” blog) and was heading home. As we left the gate, I remembered the plane that took off last January from LaGuardia and sucked a bunch of geese or starlings or who knows what, into its engines. The engines stopped running and the plane had to ditch in the Hudson River. It was a heroic act of piloting by the now-famous captain, “Sully” Sullenberger. You know the story, everyone survived, no need to elaborate. News coverage at the time pointed out that there’s no way planes can avoid rare and random bird hits. So there we were, same airport, same runway, same kind of plane, same time of day. I was a bird watcher, okay, watching hard for flocks of geese, flocks of anything. There were a few Herring Gulls in the distance, but nothing threatening. We rolled down the runway and lifted above LaGuardia without a problem. The plane was cramped and crowded, running two hours late, and had a couple of sneezing passengers. But there were no birds. That was good news.

You might’ve noticed. We have this “Hidden Bird Contest.” Our first two hidden birds, a Red-eyed Vireo and a Black Skimmer, were found by visitors to our site and these people had their names put into a drawing, blah, blah…anyway two winners got sweatshirts. You can read about this contest on our “Hidden Bird Contest” page. Now there’s a third bird that’s hidden. I wish I didn’t know where it was. People tell me it can be fun to go birding on this website. Like hunting around in the outdoors for a rare bird, but without leaving your keyboard. This hidden bird is the Painted Bunting. An improbably colorful male with patches of hot red, blue, green and purple. Probably the most colorful bird in America, maybe the world. To announce the new hidden bird contest we found a photo of an eyeball with these colors reflected in it. Sheer luck. Then we discover that this bird has been hidden in a place (sorry, can’t say where. It’d spoil the fun) that lines it up next to this photo. So it looks like the eye is reflecting the bird. Brilliant…but utterly unintended. If you haven’t found the Bunting yet, I guess we just gave you a bit of a clue, but not too much of a clue. You’ve still got a labyrinth of sorts to explore before your eye gets all colorful like that.

This happened a week ago. Whatever I saw, it’s gone now. I’ve been back. It hasn’t. But I keep wondering what it was. Here are the facts. I was walking through a meadow of knee-high dead grass. In the distance there are woods with mostly bare trees. It’s early November. Gray and cool. I saw a flock of starlings, some juncos, un-migrating robins, nothing special. A crow flew overhead, far away. There was a blue jay in one of the trees. They used to be more common, but West Nile decimated their population in our area a few years ago. Nice to see a blue jay, always. As I moved further on the trail I saw a flock of cedar waxwings in a small tree. They’re drab and don’t look like bird-book waxwings at first, but give them a second look and you’ll see the crest and slight coloring. Then I saw a bird I couldn’t place. It looked like a sparrow or possibly a big, late, fall warbler. It had a bit of yellow on its side. Don’t get excited, I know a siskin when I see one. This wasn’t. It also had orange on its face, and a black cap. The beak wasn’t fat or thin.  It flew in a jerky pattern and landed on a weed not far from where it started. Orange-red on the sides of its face, maybe some white, too, and a black cap; yellow markings on the side. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a siskin that flew through a paintball war or something. In any case, it’s long gone. But what was it?  Anybody have any ideas?

My sighting today was wild. Right out of a nature documentary. In the weeds to my right I saw something brownish moving. I thought maybe it was a coyote or fox. Then big wings adjusted themselves, forming a tent-like shape. A large Red-Tailed Hawk was on top of something, covering it.

(When the full moon is overhead, it looks small and when it’s on the horizon it looks huge. This is a famous optical illusion. The same thing applies to hawks. On the ground, the bird was massive; looking way bigger than it does when circling above.)

As I watched, its wide wings opened, extended, and scooped air under them, raising the heavy bird up and out of there, pure muscle and big-feather power. A small animal dangled from the hawk’s beak, moving, still alive. I think it was a field mouse. It had a long thin tail.

The hawk flew to a tree. I figured that within the cover of branches, the bird would tear its prey into quickly swallowed chunks. Then it would sit and digest. Or maybe it would resume the hunt. The hawk was big and the mouse was small.

An interesting sighting. But it didn’t happen in the woods or open prairie. It happened in the roadside foliage next to my car as I waited for a red light near stores, traffic and lots of concrete. That was the really wild thing about it.

Today, this gray, early November day, I went into the woods and where trees meet an overgrown meadow, I saw a Lazuli Bunting. Blue on top, white and orange in front. Sitting in a bush. Huh. A Lazuli Bunting. Now that’s something to report.

But the truth is…..c’mon, you know the truth, right?…..it wasn’t a Lazuli Bunting. It was an Eastern Bluebird. A late hanger-on, since cold’s coming and the Bluebirds head south around now. (Although I’ve seen a few over the winter, in recent years). So why’d I call it a Lazuli Bunting?

Once, a few months ago, I heard a guy in a bird club talking about a Lazuli Bunting in that meadow. I worked my way over there, alone, and all I saw was an Eastern Bluebird. But I couldn’t really blame the guy. Look in a bird book or on a bird website. It’s an honest mistake. Forget, for the moment, that the Lazuli Bunting’s a western bird, and that it’s skinnier, and that it’s got wing bars. Forget all that and imagine you see it on a bush, and you’ve got a book that groups blue colored birds, and you get excited. Hey, Lazuli Bunting, tell everyone. Yeah—probably not.

So when I see an Eastern Bluebird in this old familiar meadow I say, hmmm, the Bunting’s back. My private joke. But sometimes I think—what if the joke’s on me? Could that bird club guy have been right? What if his bird was a thousand miles out of its range? What if it happened to be sitting where our Eastern Bluebirds sit? What if it really was a Lazuli Bunting? And what if it stays around sometimes, this lost western bird, well into November. What if? Anyway, I saw it today.

People ask: do you really go in the woods every day? Will you report what you see there? Is this blog like the one we saw in that movie about the woman who cooked a different recipe every day and reported on it? Is it like the body builder’s blog that describes his routines every day and let’s you watch his muscles grow? Is it like that? People ask: Are you going to give us a vicarious bird sighting every day? Answer: I’m going to try. Then they say: okay, what did you see today? Answer: a Dark-eyed Junco. But I call it a Slate-colored Junco. That’s what it was called before taxonomists clarified, revised, updated and improved the naming of this bird. There’s enough room in the woods for people to use whatever names they like. (Even when we were told to call our Baltimore Orioles “Northern Orioles,” a while back, I ignored the name change. Good thing: they changed it back!) Anyway, that’s what I saw today. A Junco. You might ask: One lousy bird? Why bother telling us? Well, no. I saw others. But this is the daily sighting I enjoyed most. This little winter visitor reminds me that the seasons are changing, will change, have always changed. It’s reliable. I like that about the Junco, Dark-eyed or Slate colored.

There’s a bird hawk in my neighborhood. It keeps an eye on the feeders. It keeps an eye on me. When I look at it, it takes off and flies low through the trees without hitting anything. From its viewpoint, the terrain must look like something out of a Star Wars space battle. The bird hawk zooms over, under and around branches with no problem.

The problem belongs to the other birds. They’re food on the wing for the bird hawk. It’ll take them out of the air as they fly. Or it’ll come up behind them as they sit near a feeder. And they’ll be gone without a peep.

It’s a bird-eat-bird world, and the bird hawk doesn’t care about much else. It certainly doesn’t care about what we call it, taxonomically speaking. Yeah, you’ve probably been wondering why a two-fisted bird watcher has been using a vague term like “bird hawk.” Well, it’s a good term. Descriptive and fail safe.

See, this is probably a Sharp-Shinned Hawk. How it got that name is another avian-naming curiosity. It doesn’t sit still long enough for you look at its shins, and who knows what sharp ones would look like anyway? But it might be a Cooper’s Hawk.

You knew that, right? It’s one or the other. Sharp-Shinned or Cooper’s. I’m not sure which, though, and make no apologies. These two hawks are notoriously hard to tell apart. (My gut tells me Sharp-Shinned, and there are weak field markings to support this, but nothing conclusive.) The Cornell Lab of Ornithology even has a page on their website dedicated to figuring out the differences between these two hawks.

But why bother. It’s a bird hawk and it lives around here. It doesn’t know the name we call it. It doesn’t know my name, either, although it does know that I make it nervous when I stare, so it takes off. But it never goes far. We’ll cross paths again, probably tomorrow, this bird hawk and I. Whatever it’s called.

This didn’t happen today in the woods. But I thought about it today in the woods. I always think about it. It happened in a suburban forest near a river basin one rainy spring. I’d seen American Redstarts, Green Herons, Wood Ducks, nothing too unusual, but colorful. There was a Northern Waterthrush, Ovenbird, and I’d heard a Belted Kingfisher up river. I stopped to look up at some Red-Headed Woodpeckers, one male and some brown-headed juveniles. The river seemed loud but I paid no attention. I moved a step, and the noise increased. I still paid no attention. Then my heel slipped into a depression. I caught my balance and looked down. Whoa: the noise I’d been hearing was coming from a storm sewer opening. Its lid had been removed and sat in the weeds, rusty and heavy-looking. I stared into the hole. A round-walled shaft, wide enough to swallow a person. At the bottom, ten feet down, was a current of racing, splashing water. It moved from a hole on one side and shot into a hole on the other side. Anything that dropped in would be carried away. I was standing on the lip of this thing. I backed away. But for a bit of luck, I’d have dropped in while looking up at woodpeckers. On hitting bottom, I’d have been swept into a tunnel of water. Drowned, and nobody’d know. I wrestled the rusted manhole cover onto its side, rolled it over and let it drop into position, sealing the hole. I left the woods. I’d seen some colorful birds and didn’t get swept away. Two good things. Now I try to keep ground-aware as I walk in the woods. Maybe you will too, okay?

I saw a Turkey Vulture on Halloween. I don’t know if it was heading south. Vultures will hang around our area well into winter, at least that’s been my observation. Migration, for a lot of birds these days—herons, for example—doesn’t seem to be the hard-wired obligation it once was. I watched the vulture wheeling around up there and thought of a deceased writer who said he’d like to come back as one of these birds. The writer was Ed Abbey. He wrote the somewhat famous “Desert Solitaire” and other books that are fun because the guy was a curmudgeon. (Sounds like a kind of duck, you know? Curmudgeon). And he had a way of appreciating wild things. For example, he didn’t mind sharing his trailer with a rattlesnake when he lived in the desert. Many people would say they’d want to come back as something more glamorous than a bald, carrion-eating bird. But when you think about it, the Turkey Vulture has a good life. It soars on wide wings all day. It sees well, and when it finds something to eat, it doesn’t have to inflict panic or pain; the prey’s already dead. The vulture just plunges in, digests with pleasure and helps clean up the place. Then it’s another day in the sky, above it all, enjoying the scenery. If a Turkey Vulture ever thought of re-incarnation I doubt he’d want to come back as a writer. I think he’d want to come back as another vulture. Keep a good thing going. There are a lot of Turkey Vultures, and I see one or two every week. If I’m driving I slide my sunroof open so I can look up at the bird. I think: is that the ghost of Abbey up there? I may not remember everything the guy wrote, but I can’t forget his choice of re-incarnation.