Sonya and Sugata: Bird by Bird

Sugata’s 400 mm telephoto lens, bought in January, almost haphazardly on Craigslist started our journey into bird-watching. The lens brought us closer to the crows, sparrows, robins, and gulls of our Portland neighborhood. We spent a weekend watching raptors and water birds at Sauvie Island with friends and the Audubon society, then went back the next day for quieter bird watching. Clouds of Snow geese settled on the ponds; flocks of Sandhill Cranes gargled gently above us. Kestrels, Redtail Hawks, Bald Eagles we saw. We went to the waterfront for Cormorants and Canada Geese, found Red-wing Blackbirds around Oaks Bottom Pond. The names of birds seemed to magically appear in my brain. I’d hear a trilling bird on a hike in the Columbia Gorge, see a flash of yellow, and the word “Meadowlark” would pop into my head. When I observed a gray bird with long tail feathers in Memphis making all kinds of calls, “Mockingbird” seemed right. I’ve had many satisfying moments confirming these epiphanies by checking online. As Sugata and I have continued travelling, we’ve run into previously unknown birds: the Summer Tanager, the American Goldfinch, the Indigo Bunting. I’ve been leafing through our copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America to match birds with pictures. Our most exotic bird to date is a Yellow-crowned Night Heron we found in the Wapanocca National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas.

What sometimes troubles me is hearing gorgeous bird calls and not knowing how to match the song to the kind of bird. While I can look up “yellow bird” on google and find an image that leads me to the name, current technology does not allow me to match a bird-song to a bird. It strikes me how visually centered we are. How the words we use for visual description are far more numerous than our words for aural description. I’m sure that somewhere, there exists a bird-watcher app on some fancy-dancy phone for matching song to bird. I don’t really need one. I see how dependent people are becoming on those little hand-held devices for EVERYTHING already. Also I wonder about so much knowledge being so easily accessed and how that relates to my brain development or rather the lack of it. With so much information, so easily available at hand, there is little reason to remember anything. I also wonder about how such convenience will affect the amount of effort I am willing to put into learning. It may be slightly harder to research all of the birds in the area and to learn their songs. But the resistance and the effort, may work toward motivating me to retain what I learn. Maybe it is time for me to move beyond my limited knowledge of bird call pronunciations (a chicken says “cluck, cluck,” and a rooster says “cock-a-doodle-doo.”) According to Sibley, the American Goldfinch says: “toWEE toWEE toWEEto tweer tweer tweer ti ti ti ti.”

I’ll sign off now. Pictures to follow.

Kon-ka-reeeee!