It’s a gray day with snow patches. Figured I’d stay out of the woods. They’ve been quiet, with nothing much to reveal.
I had other things to do. Like go to a construction site for work-related reasons. I walk around where there are bulldozers. They’re cutting up land that was once a cornfield. No great loss. There are strip malls nearby.
The mud’s red and sludgy. My shoes’ll never be the same. Then I see something not work-related. A brownish bird, too big to be a sparrow, too narrow to be a female starling. It’s on the ground so it’s not a waxwing. Maybe a lady Cardinal? No, it’s neckless.
But forget its looks. The main thing is its wacky behavior: It flies into the sky, vertically, then circles and drops back. And does it again. Way up. Five or six hundred feet. Flits around, then dives back.
I saw something like this in a field guide and remembered. I went back to my car for binoculars, thinking, “You horny little bugger.”
Right I am. I knew what this bird was. It had horns, okay, just as I expected. A Horned Lark. You don’t always see the horns. They’re just pointy feathers. But they come out of a black pattern around the lark’s head, curving into horn-like tufts.
This is the only American lark. Don’t think our Meadowlarks are larks; they’re blackbirds. Why are they called larks? Hey, why are Robins called Robins when they’re not Robins but thrushes? Bird names can make you crazy.
I could see the Horned Lark’s horns when it landed. And through the binoculars I could see its yellow and brown pattern. Yeah, a Horned Lark. First one. I had the certainty that if I’d gone into the wild today, I’d have come up empty. But amid road graders and gravel trucks there was an unusual sighting.
The thing about birding is that this is not unusual. Birds are where they want to be, not where you think they should be.
The hard hats on the site were looking at me. I put the binoculars away and got on with the day. An ordinary wintry day. But I remembered it. I saw a Horned Lark.
