Hunt & Peck: Birding at Farm, Spring 2024
After a storm, but not a bad one. Then how can I call it a storm? Strength of a contrail, speed of a jet. Comes now raspy titmouse, jolting cardinal, jesting mouse, huffing grouse. Peeping frog, dancing calf. Clouds sweeping by like grass hushed by wind. Put your worry in a basket, send it down the stream. Share only your best intentions.
OK, I didn’t see or hear a grouse but everything else is real. There have been two thunderstorms in two days, pink pinch of redbud threading through the trees. I’m out in the middle of Missouri, Miller County, cattle country. Hill and rock and sky. Eponymous phoebe is working on her nest, like clockwork this time of year, plenty of moss and mud to bolster what’s left of last year’s cupola still attached to the back porch of this very old farmhouse. Cowbird quartz, blackbirds in the branches singing after March rain. I’m alone, I’m alive. I’m a stone, I’m a hive.
Chickadee finch cardinal junco unidentified insulated nest high up in a redcedar. Singsong daydream, binoculars around my neck, go for a walk, hunt and peck. Small warbler, not bright yellow. Flitter, quiet, size of a gnatcatcher, olive-ish, streaked white gray and yellow. Phoebe pumping her tail and singing, classic flycatcher crest in silhouette.
Low-flying clouds moving quick, another round of storm in the pick. Woodpecker chuckle, dove on the buckle. It’s weird, it’s weird, it’s weird, claims the cardinal. Birdie, birdie, birdie, birdie. Frog whir, phoebe rhyme. Come along yon cuckoo, knock again your rain-worn chime. A red-bellied bird, its beak undeterred, this year’s March is early to verde.
Speckled breast, sparrow-sized, marking on its eyes, eyebrow brown, slight collar, gray and brown, a bird I’ve never seen. I go to the phone, spell broken, but I must know. Merlin app knows all, I call. Nelson’s Sparrow, perhaps. Check the map yessir it migrates right through Missouri. Now arriving, a raucous caucus of crows. Grinder crank, ratchet shank. The titmouse has its noisebox booming. Bluebird top of the tree pleasing palette electric blue head and back giving way to chestnut brown throat and breast that fades into the buff cream beige of its belly.
A white-browed wren, a whistling flock of waxwings buzzing, twelve or thirteen of them gone before I can get a look at their wings and tails dipped in red and yellow paint. Yesterday when I got here I surprised a bald vulture sitting along the banks of this spring-fed creek known as The Little Tavern. Which flows into the Big Tavern, which flows into the Osage River, which flows into the Missouri, and then on down the line.
The Merlin app identification of birds by sound is potent! I have never used it before. Where have I been all my life? Canada Goose, Carolina Chickadee, Tufted Titmouse, Field Sparrow, Cedar Waxwing, Eastern Phoebe, American Crow, Dark-Eyed Junco, Song Sparrow, and a Blue Jay all espied by app in a minute and a half.
Then American Robin, Brown-Headed Cowbird, Mourning Dove, American Goldfinch, Red-Bellied Woodpecker. But the app has to be wrong when it suggests the presence of a Black-Wingd Stilt. Not likely in these parts. But I did hear the sound attributed to the stilt. It came from across the dirt road, from the glade over there, where water sometimes runs, an upper creek channel, some other water bird is over there calling out. I hear it but I don’t know it. Let the app keep running, roll the tape, close the case. But as I wait, the bird goes silent.
Fee-bee, fee-dint. He did, she didn’t. That’s the phoebe. Next Carolina Wren, its nest tucked into the scoop of a shovel stowed tight in the upper crisscross planks of the machine shed. Chimney, chim-uh-knee, chim-uh-nee, chim-a-nee chew. Another walk around the land and more birds found. Bird sound spelunking with a phone and an app. I must say, I’ve always found it difficult to distinguish between Northern Cardinal and Carolina Wren. Some cardinals sound like wrens and vice versa. Very similar tone and music. Same temperature. Warm and bubbly.
First across the field and then up above the house, two screaming Red-Shouldered Hawks, the loudest of any of the birds today. Like babies crying, plaintive, invasive, drowning the other birds out. One note, an alarm, a pleading, over and over again. But before that the pretty deep whistle of a meadowlark. The simple check-chuck of a Northern Flicker, a call I have wrongly been ascribing to the Red Bellied Woodpecker. I saw this flicker before I heard it. Pointy beak, black V-neck collar, gold in flight when it opens itself up, cotton ball rump, awesome bird.
Every year I forget about the Field Sparrows here in the spring. Theirs is a prominent, whimsical call. High up. Heard, not seen. Something spinning. A top. Or a coin spinning on a table, starting up, spinning fast, peaking then slowing down, sputtering out, dropping, done. The Field Sparrow has returned anew! Wow, I could do this all day, and I think I will. Glad I brought the mobile battery charger. This field recording is addictive, pleasurable. Giving into my phone in the best possible way. The latest assay yields a Fox Sparrow. Which could be the odd sparrow I saw earlier. Or that was a Song Sparrow, a bird I have known since my earliest days of birding, three decades ago, can it be? The look and the call is similar. The Song Sparrow’s call is an unwinding, then a rewinding. Wind it up, spin it apart.
This notebook is about to run out. I brought it out here with me knowing I had four pages left. I thought to myself, Hey, if I actually fill it up, run it out, then great. And I have. Writing almost entirely about, and for the birds, transcribing, amanuensis, what they sounded like in their heyday, when I was lucky enough to come along.
