Lifers

We all remember our first kiss. Most of us remember our first time behind the wheel. Some remember our first movie. How many remember our first Black-capped Petrel? I do: June 8, 2004, about 40 miles east of Cape Hatteras. A bit smaller than a crow, but with longer, more slender wings, it dipped and swooped across the wave tops, wheeling just above the surface, wing tips barely brushing the water. Elegance wearing grey and white feathers. Flying fish and a waterspout tossed in as icing on the cake.

We all crave the new, something different. This is what drives explorers to stagger on to the next horizon and artists, musicians, and architects to create. Something you have not seen before. Something not within your previous experience. Birders, indeed all naturalists, are no exception. Sure, it may be fun to watch the chickadees and nuthatches at the backyard feeder, but birders quest beyond this to be able to say "this is something I have never witnessed before". Most birders keep lists of their sightings; yard lists, state lists, all sorts of lists. The list all birders keep, if only in their head, is their Life List - the magic list of birds seen for the first time ever -life birds, lifers. The List is what drives hard-core birders, with their fogproof, nitrogen-charged, Zeiss and Nikon optics, to plan whole vacations around the next check mark. North America holds about 500 bird species, more or less. The hard-core travel to the corners of the continent; Newfoundland, Arizona, the Pribilof Islands in Alaska, and the Florida Keys in search of birds that have dribbled in from elsewhere. A few hit 600, a very few, 700, and one or two approach 750+. All for the sake of something not seen before.

I have a mild case of the fever myself. I'm pushing at the 500 mark and find that the more species I see, the harder it is to get the next lifer- the law of diminishing returns. I don't make any special plans; the Pribilofs are just a pipe dream, but I do tend to bird wherever I go. Sometimes I see a lifer under spectacular circumstances, like a White-tailed Tropicbird working the updrafts along the black lava cliffs of Kilauea Volcano.

Sometimes, like last Saturday, it gets a bit less prosaic. Pat and I drove to Delaware just to get away for part of the weekend. We strolled the boardwalk at Bethany Beach, browsed our second-favorite bookstore, and walked the windswept beach at Indian River Inlet. Given the cold and windchill, we didn't last too long and soon were headed south to Ocean City, Maryland. Ocean City Inlet in winter always has birders. Even in filthy weather they are there, with their down parkas and spotting scopes, working the surf and bay. Birders are friendly sorts, especially when they see the binoculars around your neck, marking you as one of the brother(sister)hood. One fellow offered me a look though his scope at a raft of Common Eider ducks beyond the breakers. He also gave detailed directions to find a Thick-billed Murre - an uncommon bird from the Arctic Circle. We went bayside, looking for people packing optics. Sure enough, we saw two and joined them. Ten feet off, bobbing in a small canal, looking for all the world like a bathtub toy, head tucked over its back, dozing and drifting with the tide, sat the Murre. It was something I had never seen before, a lifer. When the planet presents a gift, you respond. I whispered "thanks".

Smithsonian

Way back when, sometime during the late Pleistocene, I worked at the Natural History Museum. Every department had what they called their "Oh My!" collection. This consisted of the most spectacular specimens in their possession, regardless of scientific value (which was often considerable), and tucked off in a corner for showing visiting dignitaries and the like; the late Emporer Hirihito of Japan, an amature shrimp taxonomist was shown the giant crabs and emerald-eyed mantis shrimp in the Crustacean collection. Some clever person thought it would be a good idea to assemble all the Oh Mys into a single exhibition called the "Glories of Nature" just to show the public that bugs, worms, and snails were more than yucky and more than a passing interest to specialists. This collection, or parts of it, is now on permanent display in the Constitution Avenue lobby.

A direct outgrowth of this is the orchid exhibition, held more or less yearly, in which the grand old lady of the Mall outdoes herself with a spectacular display of orchids. An entire hall is decked out with flowering orchids, wild and domestic, from all parts of the world. Pat and I went down to the Mall last Saturday to see this fantastic orchid exhibition which runs through the end of April. Anyone remotely in the area should catch this.

Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, serving to get pollen to other flowers of the same species so more plants can be produced. Plants, being rooted in place, need a third party to move the pollen around. Some, like oaks and maples, use the wind, which is why your nose starts to get funky in early spring and for some unfortunates, keeps on running until late fall when the ragweed has finally stopped blooming. Other plants use insects, hummingbirds or even snails to move the pollen from one interested party to the next, using carbohydrate-rich nectar as a lure and reward.

Orchids are the pole dancers of the plant world. They are showy, come-hither flowers promising all manner of delights, but are mostly empty promise. Few species produce nectar.

Most produce fragrant oils, luring insects within, and liberally coating them with pollen. The insects, mostly solitary bees, are released only to be fooled yet again to deliver the pollen and fertilize the flower.

Orchids can be found nearly everywhere, I once found a Slender Lady's Tresses blooming in the front yard of a house in Bethany Beach, Delaware, growing in what was practically beach sand. The picture, by the way is not it.

Just a few more pictures from the exhibit:

Predators

The yard is still glazed. The ice crust is thick enough to walk on without breaking through. My dog treads carefully when chasing the squirrels up the trees and over the fence. Before everything froze so solid, I would watch her run through the snow/ice mixture, paws splayed out like small snowshoes, allowing her to keep on top of the surface. Her wolf ancestors did the same thing; her wolf cousins still do. At night, I can hear deer in the woodlot beyond the fenced yard, walking in the snow with a series of quick crunches as their sharp hooves break through the ice. If they do have to run, pursued by a wolf, say, or by a Lab/Collie mix protecting her territory from alien invasion, deer are at a serious disadvantage, speed negated by depth of snow. Xena may be a big puppy at heart and ever ready to play "find the ball" but, at a deeper level, one that she can't even begin to understand, she is pure wolf, hardwired in her DNA to pursue and bring down animals bigger than she is. Of course in the real world, wolves almost never work alone, and don't range along the fence line keeping barbarian hordes of deer and squirrels from overrunning her house; but she can pretend.

We have a Sharp-shinned Hawk working the feeders in my neighborhood. Ecologists call this "trap lining" for the methodical way in which a hawk moves from feeder to feeder along a one or two block area, like an old-time Hudson Bay Company fur trapper checking his sets. The hawk will hang around a feeder until it is either discovered by the local birds, who vanish, or it makes a kill. Sometimes I find a pile of grey and brown feathers under a branch where a hawk plucked and ate a feeder habitue' who was too slow to hear Mr. Darwin calling.

Sharp-shinned Hawks and their larger cousins, Cooper's Hawks and Goshawks, are Accipiters. These are forest birds with short rounded wings for agility and are tough enough to burst through brush and smaller tree branches in hot pursuit of their prey, mostly other birds. They are stealth hunters, stalking quietly from branch to branch until close enough to take a shot at the dicky birds clustered at the feeders. If they miss (usually the case with most predators), they will sit in full view for a few minutes, preening unruffled feathers, as if to tell the world they intended to miss all along. They remind me of my cats who, if they miss a toy or ball or mouse, will sit in the middle of the floor and wash for a minute or two just to show you that it was no big deal.

Accipiters are compact predators; Sharpies equal to a blue jay, Coops not quite the size of a crow. We have had one or the other every winter since we moved in. The one I saw today was immature as evidenced by the incomplete bars across the breast and yellow irises (the eyes turn red at maturity). The eyes are the most striking part - when you look into a hawk's eyes, they look back into yours. I don't know if it was sizing me up as a potential prey item or just writing me off as not a significant factor in its world. I like to think it was acknowledging me as a fellow Alpha predator, sharing the top rung of the food chain. It called a few times and took off, every movement telling me "I know you are there. I don't care. I'm leaving now. I will be back". It mosied down the block to the next house with a bird feeder in the yard and settled in to wait.

Snow day

Today is an official Snow Day in the D.C. area. Last night, the late news anchors were announcing "Wintery Mix in the offing" as though the volcano was ready to explode. I don't think Krakatao got as much coverage. We saw reporters "in the field" i.e., the outer 'burbs, all bundled up as if they were members of Sir Vivian Fuchs' Trans-Antarctic expedition. Snow artfully swirling about them, they described the treacherous driving conditions and the armies of snow removal crews and power company teams, waiting for Armageddon to drop. The unsaid question was: if the conditions are so bad, how did you get there to report them? In all fairness, things were not all that bad where a non-native couldn't negotiate them. Then. Later in the night, when the field reporters were happily home with a hot chocolate or something stronger, the real stuff hit the fan, or at least the pavement.

I'm proud to say that I am one of those drivers who gives the Washington area its bad reputation when it comes to snow. This is a place that shuts down operations when the white stuff gets up to the bottom of your shoes. Schools close or open late, the Federal, State, and local governments go to "liberal leave policy" (someone inform Rush Linbaugh), or, more ominously go to "Code Blue", which is never explained but sounds like the school board is holed up in an "undisclosed location" in a hollowed out, thermonuclear-proof mountain with the Vice President. Maybe they play canasta.

Snow around here is not like the snow you had when you were a kid. Snow, by definition, is ice crystals, always hexagonal due to the physics of H2O. When it falls, it lays flat, and packs up. This is fairly straightforward stuff for shoveling and for driving. What we get here is ice. It looks like snow in that both are white and cold, but the similarity pretty much stops there. Try walking in this stuff - real snow crunches down with the satisfying sound of someone squeezing a box of cornstarch (try it, it's what the old radio shows used to use for the sound of someone walking in snow). The stuff we have today splashes away from your shoes like slow motion water. It is not composed of flat snow flakes, but rounded ice pellets. It's like walking in soft beach sand and leaves you breathless after fifty feet.

I know people from elsewhere (read North) who scoff at our puerile efforts at driving in this "wintery mix", thinking it is just snow. Once they notice whatever it is freezing on their windshields as the back end starts to drift, they become fervent converts to D.C. driving. Unless they are field reporters.

Winter has finally arrived with a capital W. After a couple of weeks of downright balmy temperatures in January ("when is it going to snow?") we now get highs in the twenties and nightly lows in the single digits. I guess it could be worse; those poor suckers in upstate New York are buried under ten feet of the white stuff, with more to come. At one point, snow was falling at the rate of three inches per hour...that's extreme even by Alaska standards, although it gets colder in the Antarctic. (It very seldom snows in the Antarctic, it being an official desert and all; blizzards there are just ancient snow being blown around by 100 mph winds.) Up here in Virginia, it is cold enough to stiffen your ungloved fingers and for people originally from Wisconsin (nearly everyone in the D.C. area is originally from some place else) to remark "Damn, it's cold!" If someone born on the tundra says it, it must be true.

Huntley Meadows is a freshwater marsh not far from the city of Alexandria. The magazine Birder's World lists it as one of the nation's birding hotspots. On past visits I have seen such rarities and downright weirds as Mississippi Kites (a hawk like bird that usually stays in its namesake state) and Bald Ibis, a Texas speciality. Yesterday, the whole place was frozen solid, except for a spot just below the beaver dam which serves to create the marsh itself. The open water was crowded with Greenwing Teal and Northern Shovelers. Their frantic paddling is probably what keeps the water open, along with constant dipping for something to eat over shallow bottom that has been gone over a hundred time before. No herons, no hawks except a lonely red tailed passing overhead with no real prospects of snagging lunch.

A small flock of crows, a bird who always seems to find enough to eat, made sport of the hawk, flying parallel with it and swooping close enough to make it roll over in mid flight and present its talons. Crows are quicker and more aerobatic than red tails and both of them know it. The crows taunt the hawk for as long as it pleases them and the hawk puts up with it for as long as it can stand it until the hawk, with accelerated wing flaps, puts on a burst of speed and leaves the crows' territory. The crows, laughing victoriously, take a victory lap, receding into the distant haze until only their raucous voices are left.

Maiden Voyage

So, kick the chocks out from under the wheels, grease the skidways, break that champagne bottle on the prow, and stand aside. Watch out for the icebergs.

This will be an occasional event, focusing mostly on local (D.C. area) natural history and whatever else happens to fall into my head at the time. The handle comes from my daughter, bless her heart, who calls me a "Renaissance Neanderthal adrift on a sea of technology". Her favorite jab is "Daddy! Evolve!" Like Lynyrd Skynyrd says, "I know a little and I can guess the rest."

An Andy Rooney (the old carmudgeon on 60 Minutes) moment; did you ever notice that when a parking lot starts to get full, people seem to loose whatever common sense they started out with? Case in point: tonight my wife, daughter, and I went to my son's high school to see him act in the student-directed one-act plays. The one-acts are a yearly school tradition and he has been in them since freshman days. The county, in its infinite wisdom, scheduled a basketball game for the same place, same time, same channel. Thus the lot, iffy at the best of times, was chock full. I dropped the family off at the door and joined the rest of the curbside crawl, in the forlorn hope that I would happen upon someone leaving and vulture into their spot. I began noticing cars, seemingly abandoned, willy-nilly and higgeldy-piggeldy all over the lot. It seems that after a pass or two, the drivers just stopped in their tracks and shut down. Maybe they didn't want to miss the tipoff or the first flicker of the house lights. Did I miss something in Driver's Ed? "So, to summarize today's lecture on parking, if you can't find a parking spot, just turn off your car wherever you are and walk away. Nothing bad will happen. In fact, the police expect this and will not give you a ticket." The best one was a white Mustang square in the middle of the entrance to the parking lot...I'm willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt. No one in their right mind would willingly park a car in the middle of that road - let's hope he had catastrophic engine trouble and just stepped into the school to call AAA. Let's hope it cost a mint to fix.