Birding is at its worst when it becomes arbitrary and conceptual, full of what we Buddhists call discursive thought. Consider, for example, my teeth-grinding slog toward my 500th life bird.
Internet queries had kicked up a guy named Chris who was willing to squire me about for a day of birding the legendary mid-coast Delaware refuges and environs. We did so yesterday, a freakishly warm day that seemed to hold such promise. The list of possible lifers was mouth-watering: Short-eared and Snowy Owl, Eurasian Wigeon, Snow Bunting, Lapland Longspur, Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow, Sedge Wren, Clapper Rail, and a just-reported, super-rare Barnacle Goose!
Well, Caesar-like, I will reserve ornate descriptions only for my triumphs. Suffice to say I breezed by the description in the guidebook of these refuges' "lull in January". Even so, many of these species had been reported just days previously, but somehow we bombed on the lot.
Except Snowy Owl.
We started at a place called Port Mahon, along a road that parallels a vast marsh that recently was the site for a reported group of 11 (!) Short-eared Owls hassling a Snowy. A thorough scan produced about a billion acres of short reeds...and a distant harrier. A drive to the end of the road provided the added excitement of one juvenile Great Black-backed Gull.
On the drive out, Chris suddenly yelped and stomped on the brake. There, on a piling not twenty yards to our left, and regarding us with haughty disdain, sat a fabulously gorgeous 1st year female Snowy Owl. With the backdrop of the mists rising off the bay, it will be an indelible memory.
And that, bird #499, had to sustain us for the rest of the day.
I will say that Chris was a perfectly amiable companion, with the ardent zeal of the recent convert, and the little fishing and farming villages in that area are utterly charming. It was a fine day out, even if it ended with scanning thousands of Canada Geese against fading light, at an uncomfortable distance prescribed by private property lines, for an uncooperative Barnacle and what may or may not have been a Northern Shrike; I just think my next visit to the area will be when it's not in quite such a "lull".
Posted by MadMonk at January 14, 2005 12:51 PM