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.

I’ve walked through prairies before. I knew that pheasants and other birds of the quail persuasion hunker down until you get close, then fly up into your face, shocking you. I knew this. But it happened anyway. I was making my way through knee-high weeds and BAM, a burst of flapping wings. It was a Ring-Necked Pheasant shooting up and flying away. Before I could calm down, it happened again: ANOTHER big bird flapped out of the same spot in the weeds, shocking me again. But it was no pheasant; it was a Red-Tailed Hawk. The pheasant went left and the hawk went right. Suddenly it was quiet. At my feet there was a scatter of soft feathers and red, shining blood. I guess the hawk was on the pheasant and just digging in when I came along. The pheasant seemed okay; its flight was strong and it disappeared into the distance. The hawk went to a nearby treetop and glowered at me. Tough birds, both of them. I figured I’d helped the pheasant. Then I realized I’d interfered with the hawk’s meal. What was I? Rescuer, or pain in the butt? Neither. I was just another agent of chance.

I was walking my dog near midnight. In the top of a leafless old tree, way up, I saw the unmistakable silhouette of a Great Horned Owl, black against a black sky. I rushed home and came back with a portable searchlight. I shined my light on the owl, getting a good look. It was huge, with brown streaks and had tufts on its head that looked like horns. Its round yellow eyes glared down at me. I thought the bird might take off. Then I remembered reading somewhere that unexpected bright light could cause an owl’s wide-open eyes to lose night vision for a moment, so I clicked it off. The owl had work to do. Owls sometimes eat skunks, and our dog had been skunked earlier in the year. I figured maybe this owl would grab a skunk if it saw one. We needed its vision to be in good shape. I said, “Sorry about the light, bub.” And went home.

I try to go into the wild every day, if only for a short time. I live in a wooded area with a pond out back. There are hardwood forests, scrubby fields and a river nearby with beaver sign—gnaw marks and wood chips. I usually see something interesting. I’ll let you know, right here. Sometimes I might go on a tangent (see last two posts) and rant about some other subject. But we’ll do the daily reporting most of the time. Today I saw a flock of Robins. Now there’s nothing rare about Robins; they’re common. But I always think it’s unusual that they don’t migrate any more. They used to, when I was a kid. By November they’d be gone. Now they congregate in great numbers, especially in the woods. I never realized they were social until I saw this. I’ve seen them in deepest winter. Snow Robins, we call them. And their plumage is paler. Last winter’s surprising stay-over bird was a Great Blue Heron that I saw walking on ice. Another example of gradual climate change, I guess. Tomorrow I’ll look for the little Pied Billed Grebe that turns up on our pond from time to time during migrations, and I’ll let you know what I see.

The year’s almost over and I realize that once again I haven’t seen a Bobolink. In fact, I haven’t seen Bobolinks in years. My spot for Bobolinks was an unspoiled short grass prairie. These birds, with their distinctive warbling calls would hover and circle over their territories. And you could see them hanging onto the sides of weed stalks, black-chested birds in Spring with that unexpected yellow-white nape coloration. Pretty cool. But the powers that be—including well-intentioned nature lovers—decided to turn the wild prairie into a botanic garden. Now it’s just another tamed and sculpted piece of land. It’s nice to look at, with planted gardens, exotic trees and tram rides. And there are some birds hanging around. But no Bobolinks. They’ve bobbed on out of there.

Birds observed at feeders don’t really count. Sorry. Bison seen crossing a road in Yellowstone don’t count. Lions in a Kenyan “game preserve” don’t quite count. You want them to count, but they don’t. They have the taint of the zoo on them. You know this in your gut, right? The Red-Bellied Woodpecker hammering on a dead tree in a wild river valley is spectacular. When it’s eating suet that you put outside your kitchen window it’s like a pet. Or am I missing something?