It was an early wintry day, much like this one. Gray, cold, and like winter itself: early. A demanding day just starting, in a demanding time of life.
Early rising, a shaved face, a hurried departure in an era when guys rushed out of modest homes while pretty wives were giving breakfast to fussing kids and these guys fired up modest cars and sped off toward jobs where phones were already ringing and bosses would be grumbling and then….SCREECH!!!….it all comes to a stop.
Why! A red light? A police emergency? The forgetting of a wallet and the realization that this trip needs a quick reversal to get it? No. Nothing to do with traffic or forgetfulness.
Everything stops because of a flash of yellow, black, brown and white glimpsed in front of another modest home on that block. But what causes the sudden stop is not modest. It is—you know this, while most guys might not—an Evening Grosbeak.
Okay, those who aren’t two-fisted birdwatchers with a lifelong belligerent interest in ornithology are groaning. They’re thinking that this narrative about a guy running to a mundane job in a mundane life on a mundane November morning was a build-up to a foolish payoff. A freakin’ bird?
Hell, yeah! The guy who rushed to his necessary, sometimes tedious but sometimes kinda fun job if truth be told, knew one thing that a lot of other guys didn’t: An Evening Grosbeak. It’s worth stopping everything to see. Not in a forest of wilderness, evergreens and undergrowth, deadfall, deer and coyote tracks and fresh clean cold wild air…but on a homey side street.
That bird. That bird that’s not a routine sparrow or even a robin who stays in the cold these days, or a famous winter junco—which not everyone knows, but they’re pretty common. No…this is a big, unmistakable, unmissable, badass of a winter visitor, an EVENING GROSBEAK.
And it is not forgotten. Not the bird, not the day back in the day when all this happened, not the screech of brakes, not the willingness to be late for work, not the yellow and brown and black SIZE of that grosbeak, not its big GROSS beak, either.
That all stays. Just another good thing about being and having been and continuing to be a two-fisted birdwatcher.
And now, a million years later, you’re heading into the nearby woods far from that simple street, and without an impatient job waiting…and you’re going to take your two-fisted binocs and you’re going to look for Pine Siskins and other seasonal birds this day has up its sleeve, but especially you’re going to look for that yellow and black and brown and gross-beaked Evening Grosbeak.
Out there in the fields and trees on this cold day you might just see one, but even if you don’t you’ve got one in the bank. And you smile recalling it all. Here’s to winter and the birds of winter!
