Lyanda Haupt - Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds
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- Year:2011
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Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds is a collection of seventeen thoughtful essays on birds capture the sense of wonder and connection people have for these marvelous creatures. Naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, an ornithology teacher and researcher, examines the amazing talents and personalities of the most common of birds. She muses on the tarnished reputation of the starling, the sexed-up antics of male woodpeckers, and the mysterious behavior and startling population explosion of crows in her hometown. Through the eye and voice of this talented writer, birds provide a fascinating point of cont. Read more...
Abstract: Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds is a collection of seventeen thoughtful essays on birds capture the sense of wonder and connection people have for these marvelous creatures. Naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, an ornithology teacher and researcher, examines the amazing talents and personalities of the most common of birds. She muses on the tarnished reputation of the starling, the sexed-up antics of male woodpeckers, and the mysterious behavior and startling population explosion of crows in her hometown. Through the eye and voice of this talented writer, birds provide a fascinating point of cont
Abstract: Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds is a collection of seventeen thoughtful essays on birds capture the sense of wonder and connection people have for these marvelous creatures. Naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt, an ornithology teacher and researcher, examines the amazing talents and personalities of the most common of birds. She muses on the tarnished reputation of the starling, the sexed-up antics of male woodpeckers, and the mysterious behavior and startling population explosion of crows in her hometown. Through the eye and voice of this talented writer, birds provide a fascinating point of cont
Lyanda Haupt: author's other books
Who wrote Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Lyanda Haupt
Grainne Cleary
Mark E. Hauber
Tim Flach
LYANDA LYNN HAUPT
Lyanda Lynn Haupt
E. M. Nicholson
Lyanda Lynn Haupt
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Table of Contents
For my parents, Jerry and Irene
with love and gratitude
Introduction
One day when I was in fourth grade my class took a field trip to the University of Washingtons arboretum. In a tree next to our walking trail, I saw a small gathering of autumn birds.
Look, I whispered to Mrs. Rae, our teacher, Evening Grosbeaks. She gave me a strange look. See? I pointed. Evening Grosbeaks.
Our family saw grosbeaks in our backyard at home all the time. A field guide to birds sat on the table by sliding glass doors that led to a small patio surrounded by trees: mountain ash, maples, and Douglas firs. My younger sister and I would find the paintings in the book that matched the grosbeaks and other birds that frequented this miniature forest, try to tell the males from the females.
Mrs. Rae queried our trip leader, one of the arboretums volunteer docents. What are those birds?
Oh, those are Evening Grosbeaks, the guide instructed, and over the rest of the students giggles (gross-beakwe were fourth-graders, after all), she gave a little lesson, explaining how the birds use their thick bills to eat seeds.
How did you know that? Mrs. Rae squinted at me when we resumed walking, and I hardly knew what to say. How did she not know? I have always remembered that day, the day I discovered that it is not necessarily normal to know a birds name.
At home that evening I watched the grosbeaks from a quiet haunt in the grass. With binoculars I could see the gold on the male birds flanks, which even in the shadowy dusk held a glow, and looked terribly soft. Naturally, I did not know then that twenty years later an Evening Grosbeak I was banding would bite my right index finger down to the bone, requiring a tetanus shot from a grumpy nurse. But back in the fourth grade I had a strange sense, though I could not have expressed it at the time, that this bird was mine. The grosbeak and I had a solitary understanding, a relationship that when Id left for school that morning had been ordinary, but now, I knew, was set apart. I watched and watched.
Birds will give you a window, if you allow them. They will show you secrets from another world, fresh vision that, though avian, can accompany you home and alter your life. They will do this for you, even if you dont know them by namethough such knowing is a thoughtful gesture. They will do this for you if you watch them.
First Bird
There is a game birders play on New Years Day called Bird of the Year. The very first bird you see on the first day of the new year is your theme bird for the next 365 days. It might seem a curious custom, but people who watch birds regularly are always contriving ways to keep themselves interested. This is one of those ways. You are given the possibility of creating something extraordinary a Year of the Osprey, Year of the Pileated Woodpecker, Year of the Trumpeter Swan. This game is an inspiration to place yourself in natural circumstances that will yield a heavenly bird, blessing your year, your perspective, your imagination, your spirit. New year, first bird.
This year my fresh little baby, just four weeks old, is tucked softly between my husband and me in bed early New Years morning. I can hear them breathingTom, Claire, Ani the cat, Isabel the Australian Shepherdall asleep. As my babys only food source, I am stuck to this snug winter cottage where she lies wrapped and dreaming in flannel. There will be, this New Years Day, no sneaking off to some fabulously promising birdish locale.
I consider our cozy home in a suburb of Seattle. In spite of our proximity to the city, we see incredible birds hereBald Eagles, Great Blue Herons, a Coopers Hawk one day, a Band-Tailed Pigeon. Even the common birds we see every day have some fine avian qualitiesthe intelligence of the Stellers Jays, the seeming cheerful industriousness of the Black-capped Chickadee, the limitless sociability of the Bushtit. None of these would be too shabby as a theme bird for my first year of motherhood. I pull on Toms robe, sneak quietly out the side door, and look up expectantly.
In light of the dark shadow perched on our fence, I quickly decide to make up a few addenda to the Bird of the Year rules. The first bird you see after 7 A.M. is Bird of the Year. The first bird you see after your loved ones wake up. The first native bird... I am usually quite good at lying to myself, but even for me this would be just too blatant. Here before me sits a bird that ecologists refer to as sky-rat. Year of the European Starling it is.
The starling was introduced to North America in the late nineteenth century by an acclimatization society hoping to populate the new world with every bird mentioned in the Shakespearean canon. This is one of those Bird Myths that is actually true. The societys leader, Eugene Schieffelin, possessed two passionsornithology and Shakespeare. He combed the plays and sonnets, turning up a single, unmemorable line in part 1 of Henry IV: Ill have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer. This obscure and hapless mention was enough to fuel Schieffelins resolve.
First attempts to transport the starling failed, but in 1890 one hundred birds survived travel by sea from Europe, were released in New Yorks Central Park, and established a small population. By 1940 there were few places left in North America where the starling had not been observed. The Northwest was one of them.
Its fascinating to read the early literature on the birdlife of this region. In Ralph Hoffmans 1927 account covering all Pacific Northwest birds, starlings are not even mentioned. Its an idyll in time that seems so far and impossible now, yet it has been only a matter of decades. Reports of winter starlings began to appear in Seattle in 1949, and the first locally observed rearing of young was recorded in 1962, two years before I was born. Now there are tens of thousands of starlings here. Autumn flocks blacken the evening skies, and even starling haters find their cloudlike movements astonishing, if not beautiful, as they swarm precisely in dusky arcs.
The native breeding range of the European Starling covers Europe, a good portion of Eurasia, the British Isles and Scandinavia, and the Middle East. Their winter range stretches to north Africa. Besides North America, regions colonized in recent times by population expansion include South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and its surrounding islands, Jamaica, and parts of the West Indies. Even so, it is estimated that roughly one-third of the world population of European Starlings resides here, in North America. Two hundred million individual birds have sprung from the handful that were released in Central Park just a century ago.
There is no doubt that the habitat changes wrought by European settlement, and continuing today with relentless suburban sprawl, have contributed to the starlings success in this country. While it may have been a fruitful colonizer in any case, it is doubtful that the increase in starling numbers and range would have been so vast without rapid landscape changes creating the sorts of expanses on which it thrives. Starlings love mown grass and grazed fields, the warm and sheltered roosts that human habitations offer. They avoid only a few types of landscapemostly deep forests and deserts, the kinds of places that humans tend not to live.
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