So I had myself a birding bender this weekend, just like I told y’all I was gonna. I’ve had trouble getting psyched up to write the recap, though. Maybe cause I don’t think I can explain how much fun it was… or just because the writing is a lot less fun than the bender-ing. Regardless, it’s high time you heard about this, so I’m just gonna bang it out here. Part of it, anyway.

With the goal of racking up some lifers, I devised an ingenious route through Southern Southern California, aka SoSoCal, meaning everything south of L.A. Not sure if that’s an official term, but if not – BOOM! I just trademarked it. I had nine target species in mind. Here’s how it went down.

SATURDAY

I hit the road at 5:55 am. The sky is pitch black and freeway traffic is tolerable. My target birds slumber, unawares.

6:55 am. Dana Point Nature Interpretive Center. Target: California Gnatcatcher.

This is a pretty spot, a hill blanketed with coastal sage scrub overlooking the ocean. As soon as I’m out of the car I see action in the adjacent yard – House Wren, Orange-crowned Warbler… and within five minutes, a quick glimpse of a male California Gnatcatcher. WTF, so easy! Although… not the most satisfying look. And it would feel wrong to just grab what I came for and bounce after five minutes. So I stay to check the place out a little.

Before I even get to the trail I run into this guy just chillin:

Walking the trail, I hear more gnatcatchers, and see a couple, but they’re moving quickly through dense shrubs, so no pics. Good enough looks though. While I’m at it I snag a few shots of more familiar birds in the gray, early-morning ocean mist.

Good stuff. At 7:45, I’m back on the road.

8:30 am. San Dieguito Lagoon. Target: Pacific Golden-Plover.

There were reports a couple weeks ago of a Pacific Golden-Plover here, and I’m hoping it might still be around. For starters I get confused and wind up at the wrong spot, but there’s decent birding there, including a swarm of handsome Cliff Swallows and a stately Long-billed Curlew. After a couple more wrong turns and a bit more exposure to the uppity town of Del Mar than I care for, I get to the mouth of the lagoon. No sign of the plover; no sign of any shorebirds. Yeah… probably too late in the season for those guys to be hanging around. Oh well. My consolation prize is a nice pair of Redheads (though the light sucks):

One hit, one miss. Back on the road at 9:25.

9:50 am. La Jolla Cove. Target: Wandering Tattler.

Though also a winter bird like the plover, these guys have been reported more recently, and in numbers greater than one, so I like my odds better. This place is crazy for two reasons: 1. It attracts tons of people, and 2. It attracts tons of seals. From like a mile away you can hear the seals barking and moaning and basically being giant disgusting slobs. Maybe the cove is the seal version of Greek Row, who knows. Anyway I walk down the hill toward what I figure is the tattler spot, pausing to crush a few birds on the way:

I get down to where I can see the inner cove well, and sure enough, those suckers are down there. BOOM!

Let's try that again:

They stay out of view a lot of the time, tucked in among the rocks, but I get good enough looks. By now the day is warm and sunny, and I stroll back to my car, soaking it all in. A damn fine day, I think. Though I can barely hear my thoughts above the din of the seals and tourists. Damn seals and tourists.

Back on the road at 10:40.

11:20 am. Tijuana River National Estuarine Reserve. Target: Clapper Rail.

Chances are, I’ve walked or driven by these birds many times as they hid in the reeds. I may have even seen one as a greenhorn back in Florida and misidentified it as a King Rail, who knows. It’s not rare, and it needs to be on my life list already. Fortunately, this place is THE SPOT to see these suckers. On the San Diego Audubon Society website, the first thing they say about the place is, “A high tide should bring out Clapper Rails here, right along the street.” Um… WHAT? Sounds like you have to drive slowly just to avoid running over the mob of rails.

Of course I get there, perfectly timed to catch high tide, and… crickets. No rails, and no birds at all in the little channel where the nice lady in the visitor’s center tells me to look. After a while of seeing nothing encouraging, I drive around the corner to another spot that’s supposed to have them sometimes. It’s a stretch of sidewalk overlooking a wide swath of reedy wetlands, introduced by this sign:

I scan every little channel I can see, peering into the reeds as best I can – nothing. I’m baking in the midday sun, and I sense the onset of that sinking feeling that comes with whiffing on a bird. I try to content myself looking at the one sizable flock in the whole area, a raft of sleeping Ruddy Ducks in the distance with a couple grebes mixed in. Then I notice one of the ducks seems to be swimming purposefully instead of dozing. And its bill looks too long. Hold up. I get the binos on it just in time to watch it reach the other side of the channel, climb out, and dive into the tall reeds – a Clapper Rail. Oh hell yes.

Evidently the locals have seen my kind before... and know a thing or two about classy signs!

Once again I linger a bit hoping for a better look, but I have my bird, so I hit the road at 1:15. I make a quick stop to pick up some badly needed sunblock and a Subway sandwich (subsequently inhaled while driving), and speed off to my next stop.

1:50 pm. Dairy Mart Road Pond. Target: Bell’s Vireo.

Greasy with sunblock, sweat and mustard, and heavy with sandwich, I lumber out onto the pretty, wooded trail next to the pond. After a few minutes watching swallows overhead and hearing a zillion Marsh Wrens singing from the reeds, I hear what sounds kinda like a Bell’s Vireo song. (I’ve been studying, natch.) Approaching the source, I get more and more sure, and then BAM – he’s right in front of me. Amazing! My photos don’t come out well, but I do get a short video. At least you can hear what he sounds like:

I never get more than fifty yards from the car here. A quick scan of the other birds, and I hit the road again around 2:35. I’m leaving the coast now, leaving civilization, heading into the belly of the unforgiving Southeastern California desert. I am a mind-blowing, heart-exploding four-for-five on my targets so far.

And I have a lot more birds to see.

To be continued!

The weekend is here, the wife's away, and spring is in the air, which means there’s only one thing to do: Go on a birding bender. Yep, I’m cutting loose. No responsibilities. No rules. Just right.

I’m sorta tired of hitting the same spots in L.A. over and over, and there’s a decent number of lifers I could find a little farther afield. So I’m heading south, into Orange County, San Diego County, and the great wild nothingness to the east, to see how many of these suckers I can track down in a furious thirty-six hour binge.

Wish me luck! And join me, if you would, in meditating on my list of target species. Visualize each one: My binocular view settles on the bird. The lighting is ideal. My hands are steady, my breathing calm. I absorb the relevant field marks unconsciously; I know this is my bird. I bask in its majesty for a moment.

I lower my binoculars slowly.

I do this.

And I head on down the road.


Targets:

California Gnatcatcher
Pacific Golden-Plover
Wandering Tattler
Clapper Rail
Bell’s Vireo
Tricolored Blackbird
Harris’s Hawk
Le Conte’s Thrasher
Black-tailed Gnatcatcher
... plus a few more remote possibilities I'll have my eyes peeled for

Last night I had the perfect post all set to go – seriously, all I had left to do was click “publish” – when I discovered that my entire diatribe was based on a misunderstanding. I straight-up just had the basic facts wrong, and as a result, the entire, carefully crafted and – trust me – stunningly elegant post had to be scrapped.

Balls.

So, like any self-respecting blogger whose spouse is out of town, I took off my pants, fixed myself a glass of bourbon and a PB&J, and settled in to plot my next move. On the one hand, I lacked the willpower to face the Sisyphean task of starting another post from scratch. But on the other hand, I figured a post related to birds (as opposed to fish) was probably overdue. So here’s what I’ve got.

A couple months ago I got me a dope new camera, the Canon EOS 60D, and a 70-300mm zoom lens. Since then, I’ve been screwing around trying to photograph birds without having any idea what I’m doing – with surprisingly satisfying results. But then I had an epiphany: What’s to stop me from also shooting videos without having any idea what I’m doing?

As far as I can tell, the answer is: nothing. So lately I’ve mixed a little video into my usual regimen of spray-and-pray photography, some of which I’ll share with you below. Now, the videos are a bit shaky – that’s because this is all hand-held. I don’t use a tripod much, because I like to wander around relatively unfettered. I like that I can throw my binoculars around my neck and my camera over my shoulder, and stay nimble while I enjoy the outdoors. You know, in case I need to scale a steep concrete river bank to get the perfect shot. Or run away from street toughs.

So they’re a little shaky. But they’ll give you a very small taste of the abundant bird life in Greater L.A. Enjoy?

Like most birding bloggers, if I could pick one thing to be known for, I'd pick: fish videos. To that end, I doubled-down on my Thursday carp captures by grabbing a couple more clips yesterday.

I didn't actually see it happen, but I think this fish stranded itself, jumping out of the water to catch a bug or something (whatever fish jump for) and landing on concrete. Talk about an "oh shit" moment. I noticed it flopping around, catching some impressive air, but lacking direction. I hustled over and caught this quick shot as it was losing steam.

I guess this is some kind of trout. (If you know fish, help me out with the deets?) Like most things aquatic in L.A., it's not a natural occurence; these guys are stocked by the California Department of Fish & Game. Anyway, I know the suspense is killing you: No, I did not let the poor bastard die on the dock. With my hot new kicks from New Balance, I pushed it gently back into the water.... where it proceeded to float slowly, upside-down, up to the surface. Uhhhh.....

Well, then this happened:

Vaya con dios, little trout.

The L.A. River is one of those fascinating things I keep meaning to learn more about but never quite get around to, like Spanish, or ironing. Here it is, running through and named after the second-largest city in the U.S., like it’s some kind of big deal. But the first time you actually see it, part of you dies. It kinda seems like a sick joke to even call it a river, since for most of its length, it’s a narrow, shallow trickle through a concrete bed. Yes, concrete. Wide, sloping banks of graffitied concrete, bleak enough to fit nicely into any near-future urban dystopia you might encounter.

But sometimes you learn stuff without trying. Yesterday I was scoping out my favorite birding patch along the river when I saw some splashing in my peripheral. Thinking it might be a duck, I spun around with impressive speed to get my binos on it. But… well, it weren’t no duck. WTF? Some sort of horrid sea creature… possibly a young kraken.

Or, OK… on closer inspection, it turned out to be a fish. And there were others. In water that couldn’t be more than two inches deep, these fat fish were fighting their way upstream…. to spawn?

So I’m no wildlife biologist, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all the relevant episodes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America (hilarious website BTW), and this type of thing is supposed to happen in Alaska. You take one of those sketchy-ass biplanes with a salty old pilot who doesn’t let on how scared he is about the storm that’s coming, but then he lands you safely and wishes you good luck, and you hike for ten days to get to the perfect spot where Grizzly Bears and Bald Eagles are all over the place, eating just the eyeballs off millions of dying post-coital salmon. That’s just how it works.

This trickle through a trash heap, in the shadow of a major, gridlocked freeway, surely could not be the setting for one of nature’s great spectacles. But it was. (Sort of.)

Back home, a quick bit of googling confirmed that this was a real thing (cool blog BTW). The fish were non-native carp, and from the sound of it, some of them actually succeed in making it to a lake upstream. God knows it ain’t easy. Out of the dozen or so fish that I watched, a couple of them seemed to just give up and head back downstream on purpose.

Well, you gotta know your limits. Other clichés illustrated by these fish include “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” You see, the degraded river is the lemons, and spawning is the lemonade. My not seeing any blog-worthy birds is also lemons, and blogging about spawning and trash-rivers is lemonade. You, lucky reader, are the customer at my lemonade stand, only I’m giving the lemonade away for free. And if you think taking free lemonade from a random dude in Los Angeles is a good life choice…. well, I’ve got a gorgeous river to show you sometime.

This weekend, during the scan of my Facebook news feed that I do compulsively every five minutes like most of you (why deny it?), one update in particular caught my eye:

Low blows? Crazy people? This sounded awfully exciting for a birding blog. So I clicked through to the story, and what a story it was: “National Audubon Society Caves to the Cat Crazies.” Mind you, the National Audubon Society (NAS) is one of the oldest, largest, and most revered conservation organizations in the country. Bashing them is like bashing… I don’t know… Johnny Appleseed or something. It’s rather shocking.

So what’s got the birders in a tizzy? Well, I am not a journalist, but as far as I can tell it went something like this:

1.  Freelance writer Ted Williams wrote a column about the environmental problems caused by feral cats. Rejecting the popular management strategy of “trap-neuter-release” (TNR), Williams proposed instead that cats be trapped and euthanized.

2.  The Orlando Sentinel – the same paper from which I learned, as a youngster growing up in Central Florida, of such world-obliterating events as the ’88 defeat of Michael Dukakis and the ’96 defection of Shaquille O’Neal to the Lakers – printed Williams’s piece (since revised). (Looking at the Sentinel’s sad website today, the dreary font squeezed in between huge, flashing ads, you’d think they hadn’t touched it since Shaq left town.) Importantly, the Sentinel listed Williams as “editor-at-large for Audubon magazine.” (That was technically true, though the cat piece had nothing to do with Audubon.)

3.  A whole lot of people got pissed, and they let the National Audubon Society know about it.

4.  NAS responded by announcing they had suspended Williams’s work for Audubon magazine and would remove him from the masthead “pending further review.”

Enter the birding-bloggers. They leapt to Williams’s defense, led by the biggest birding blog of them all, 10,000 Birds. One of the site’s managers (owners? head bloggers?), Corey Finger, called the NAS reaction “sad, stupid, and short-sighted,” and wondered whether a Williams-less Audubon magazine would be worth reading. And yes, he dropped that bomb – “cat crazies” – evoking (for me, anyway) a traitorous mob, hell-bent on subjugating humanity to some sort of feline despot. Angry comments from both sides piled up on the blog, as well as on the many Facebook shares of it. The stakes were high – some truly emphatic posts earned dozens of “likes.” Another top birding blogger and personality, Sharon “Birdchick” Stiteler, chimed in with an emergency podcast on the subject. Overall, her language was somewhat less inflammatory than that of Mr. Finger, but in her own folksy way she, too, came down hard on the NAS.

In short, it seems the blogging luminaries are of one mind on this subject:  NAS “caved.” They missed a golden opportunity to stand up to the ignorant bullies who advocate for trap-neuter-release. They threw their man Ted under the proverbial bus full of cat crazies. Of course, what you’ll want to know next is, “Where does Birding for Humans stand on all this?”

Well, here are some things about me: I am a birder. I own and love a cat. My cat does not go outdoors, but he sometimes kills crickets that wander into my apartment. He usually eats them.

I am not a member of the National Audubon Society. I think? I have been one at times. I respect their right to choose the people with whom they want to work, even if their choice is made out of fear of “cat crazies.” But I do think that seems kind of… lame. I think the phrase “cat crazies” is probably best left out of any serious debate, unless accompanied by quotes, air quotes, or at least an apologetic facial expression.

I don’t know whether euthanizing feral cats is a good thing overall, but I think it should be judged mainly on its effectiveness at conserving native wildlife – not on how cute cats are or whether they did anything to deserve death. Animals die, including people. I don’t like it any more than Woody Allen does, but that doesn’t change anything. If I have to choose between wild, native birds and feral cats, I choose the birds. If I had to choose between wild, native cats and feral birds, I would choose the cats, even though I can’t go for a walk in the mountains without being 90% sure a mountain lion is going to eat me, or possibly just kill me for fun. I’m not sure which would be worse.

And there you have it. The point, if there were a point, would be that the birding blogosphere is a serious place – like, apeshit serious. If President Reagan had been into birds, and born like a thousand years later, he would be blogging right now about the “evil empire” of cat people.

Holy shit – has anybody thought of shooting missiles at the cats yet?

Today I am feeling my oats, thanks to a great personal birding triumph. For months I’ve kept an eye out for these suckers, following up on the occasional reports that trickle in from around Greater L.A., only to meet with disappointment. Yesterday, it finally happened: I saw my first ever Lawrence’s Goldfinches. 

And yes, I got some pics. I wasn’t able to crush them like I’d hoped (“crush,” in the usage of at least one birding blogger, meaning something like “to get awesome photos of”) – but they will do. These are goddamn gorgeous birds and I defy you not to be charmed by them.

They were chilling at the Altadena Golf Course, where according to the friendly residents of adjacent Morada Place (who readily chatted me up), they return year after year. This despite being notoriously “erratic” and having “no loyalty to [their] breeding areas” (see here). Well, none of that matters now, because my earthly trials are over, insofar as they relate to this bird.

When I arrived, a pair of birders was just leaving, having struck out on the goldfinch. Slightly discouraging, but I didn’t mind the idea of hanging around for a while; the weather was amazingly awesome. The couple drove off, and two minutes later I had the birds. MY birds. I stayed around for about an hour, basking in the SoCal sun and the glory of my long-sought victory. While I was at it, I did my best to crush this dapper male Western Bluebird, using my high-end camera and very low-end skills.

Suffice it to say it was a damn fine day. And it feels like a harbinger. Spring is nigh, which means the birds are plentiful and it’s high time to be outdoors. In fact, I have travel plans that could make this my biggest birding year yet. STAY TUNED.

Although I’m never not birding, my birding takes many different forms, some of which are sadder and lamer than others. Lately it’s mostly taken the form of lying around my apartment, trying to identify whatever birds fly past my window while I watch Downton Abbey. Shocking, I know – that a man who spends his days in the testosterone-drenched world of birding might settle in for some British household intrigue at night. What can I say? I’m a man's man's man. Seriously though, I haven’t finished Season Three yet, and if you spoil it for me I swear to God I will feed you arsenic pie.

The causes for this lameness are mysterious and manifold, but I suppose Laziness plays a role in there somewhere. Come to think of it, yeah, it definitely plays the lead role. It is the Jennifer Lawrence of the Lame Birding Playbook. Boredom plays a role, too – maybe De Niro’s. Responsibility is Jackie Weaver; Distraction is Chris Tucker. (In birding, as in my Silver Linings Playbook-inspired fantasies, there is no Bradley Cooper.)

So I’ve been in a funk. Big deal! If Hollywood has taught me anything, it’s that women are for looking at. But if it’s taught me anything that’s not awful, it’s that sometimes life “knocks you down,” and it’s very important to “get back up.” So this weekend I got back up, literally and figuratively, and left my home in search of birds. As an added incentive, I decided to join bird walks provided by local Audubon Society chapters, so that I’d have not only birds but also people – well, birders – to watch.

On Saturday, I drove across the suburban wasteland east of L.A. to check out L.A. Audubon’s tour of Bonelli Regional Park in San Dimas. Heading inland around here is interesting because you sometimes find weird desert birds or plains birds or eastern birds that don’t often show up in L.A. proper. Since all this habitat lies within the generous boundaries of L.A. County, it can help you run up a massive county bird list (if you’re into that sort of thing). I even harbored hopes of picking up a lifer here – the California Gnatcatcher, which is uncommon but “regularly seen” on the Audubon group’s trips.

It was a small group – our leader Rod Higbie, three others, and me. The others all claimed to be over sixty, but they didn't act like it. Plus, two of them were pretty experienced birders, which means you have more eyes capable of picking out good birds, and less… well… dead weight. (Note to beginning birders: I swear, I mean that in the nicest possible way.) So it was a nimble and skilled group that set out into the coastal sage scrub of Bonelli Park.

The weather and the birding were both great. (In other words, it was Southern California.) We turned up a few of those scarce-in-L.A. birds, like Cactus Wren, Rufous Hummingbird, and a Bald Eagle soaring high above the lake. Of course, I’d forgotten my camera, so I have photos of exactly none of these birds, and we failed to find a California Gnatcatcher, so there were no lifers for me. But I have no complaints. We saw lots of cool stuff, and besides, it felt really good just to be out there.

Then on Sunday, I went on San Fernando Valley Audubon’s monthly walk at Sepulveda Basin Wildlife Reserve. This time I was accompanied by my friend Dylan, who’s not especially into birding but is a good sport and interested in everything. It’s a good thing, because otherwise this walk was less interesting than Saturday’s. For starters, the setting: The reserve is nestled between freeways, buzzed by landing planes, and haunted by miscreants. (I gather all sorts of mild criminal mischief goes down here.) Besides that, it was recently the victim of some rather draconian “vegetation management” by the Army Corps of Engineers. The place has its charms, but “scenic” is not the first word that comes to mind.

Then there were the people. Don’t get me wrong, they seemed very nice. But there were a lot of them, and they lacked focus. When you have twenty-some-odd nice folks lollygagging through the park making chitchat, birds often get scared away before you can maneuver into viewing position. Many probably go undetected. It’s OK – I’m not so obsessed with the birds that I can’t appreciate the social aspect of these things, to a degree. It’s just that when you’re with such a diffuse group, it’s a different kind of birding. Different... and a little less awesome.

But I don't mean to dwell on the negative. Overall, it was another good experience. Dylan and I got nice looks at some birds I don’t see all the time, like Spotted Towhee and Golden-crowned Sparrow, and filled the time in-between with pleasant conversation. In different ways, it was as affirming and motivating as the trip to prettier, birdier Bonelli Park. Bottom line: I was back.

When the morning reached the point of diminishing returns, we peeled off from the ragtag assemblage and headed home to resume important non-birding activities. In my case, that meant joining the Mrs. for furniture shopping, followed by more lounging and Downton Abbey watching. Because a balanced, happy life includes a lot of venturing out in search of birds, yes – but it also includes a healthy dose of "Jennifer Lawrence." Metaphorically.

Well, if you followed the saga of my time at the Space Coast Birding & Wildlife Festival, you can well imagine that I was spent after that. So I stopped to smell the roses. I took a break from hardcore blogging and deck-boot wearing, and returned to my usual, everyday style of birding.

I'm still kinda busy catching up on the rest of life - apparently Beyoncé did some stuff? - but of course I'm always birding. And these days I'm nearly always toting my spiffy new Canon EOS 60D, too. So, in lieu of a real post, I give you my favorite pics from the last week. All were taken back home in Los Angeles County. Man, it feels weird to say that.

Enjoy!

If Day Three was a doubleheader, with one field trip in the morning and one in the afternoon, Day Four was a marathon – a single trip that started at 5:30am and ended at 5:15pm. It was tiring enough to keep me from caring that I’m mixing my sports metaphors. It was also my last hurrah, for though the festival was to rage on for another day, I’d planned to peel off and spend that day with family. So this was it for me.

I tried to get to HQ a little early, but the old-timers still beat me, and I was again relegated to the back of the bus. Fortunately, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting in front of me, a nice lady from Delaware. We compared smartphone birding apps and swapped stories about some of the cooler birds and weirder people from our previous trips. It made the time pass. After as quick a bathroom stop as a bus full of senior citizens can make, we got to our destination, the Lake Apopka Restoration Area. 

It was foggy and cold, but we ambled along in high spirits, led by a typically sharp and good-natured bunch of fellows: Gian Basili of the Saint Johns River Water Management District, and Wes Biggs and Dave Goodwin, both of Florida Nature Tours. After a quick stop at the marsh, they took us to see a Great Horned Owl nest.

We all ooh’d and aah’d appropriately over this rare sight, but before long, a few folks got restless and wandered off to see what else they could find. Good that they did, for they stumbled onto a hotbed of bird activity. Warblers, vireos, kinglets, woodpeckers… these birds were practically “dripping off the trees” (as exuberant birders are fond of saying). It was tough to leave that spot, but of course, the tour must go on.

Our next stop was a lake covered with waterfowl. It was here that some of the more distinctive personalities in the group became evident. We were using spotting scopes to get close-up views of the ducks, and when someone would call out a new species they’d found, reactions varied. There was one old guy, let’s call him Bob, who made it clear he was working on a trip list – in other words, his focus was entirely on checking off as many species as possible for the day. When someone called out a Wood Duck, he proclaimed that he “needed that,” marched over to that scope, cutting the line of people waiting to use it (perhaps unknowingly, but heedlessly), looked through it just long enough to register that it was a Wood Duck, and marched off contentedly to check it off and forget about it. No savoring, no real watching – just listing.

Then there was a little old lady who demanded a lot of help. Curiously, she wanted to see everything through her scope, spurning offers from others who already had their own scopes trained on the birds she was trying to find. When I’d located the flock’s lone Green-winged Teal, she wanted me to find it in her scope for her, but quickly grew impatient when I struggled to pick it out of the sea of ducks. Judging by her attitude, you’d think she had hired me as an expert guide. Great, lady. How bout you find your own damn birds?

But even those two were generally friendly, like everyone else. I also started talking with a couple ladies who were stuck in the back of the bus with me, and we sort of became buds as the day went on. So that was nice.

We took a break to eat the sack lunch provided by the festival, and while others rested, I went looking for birds. I managed to hear a Barred Owl calling in the distance – the only one anyone heard or saw that day, and thus good for a precious checkmark on the trip list. (When I told Bob about it, he offered to play a recording of the owl’s call on his portable audio device to try and lure it closer. Then he offered his racist theory of what had happened to the two portable audio devices he had previously owned and misplaced. Heh. Awkward.)

The afternoon was spent chasing specific birds, following up on recent reports of rarities in the area. First, the Florida Scrub-Jay: one turned up after a few minutes, calling loudly and coming in close. It was undoubtedly a lifer for many, though far from it for me. Still, they’re always nice to see. 

Then there was the Say’s Phoebe, which not only gave us good views, but as an added bonus, was on a farm where adorable kids were hanging out. They showed us their pony and a newborn calf! (Tragically, I seem to have forgotten that I had a camera with me at this point.) The Western Kingbird was a piece of cake, and after a few minutes of holding out, the Ash-throated Flycatcher likewise gave itself up to the greedy eyes of the group.

Finally, as we were well behind schedule, Gian declared that we would take just five minutes to look for the Red-breasted Nuthatches. So, at the prescribed location, those of us who were physically able marched into the woods, blasting a recording of a Red-breasted Nuthatch call. After a couple false alarms – Downy Woodpecker, Pine Warbler – boom! Two or three of the little buggers showed up, performing their usual acrobatics high in the pines. We cheered and got back on the bus for the long ride back to HQ.

Upon counting the checkmarks, someone realized our total was seven species less than that of the previous day’s group. So naturally it became our mission to see eight more species before arriving back at HQ. A bit silly, IMHO, but it did give us something to do during the ride. (I would’ve rather slept, but it was once again way too cold for that, thanks to the ridiculous air conditioning that was now blasting me.)

We became absurdly interested in seeing boring city birds like pigeons and starlings, as we needed them for our list. We saw a House Sparrow, and a pigeon, and a Loggerhead Shrike, and it was looking like we might get it done. Then there was a roar from the front of the bus – a rare Crested Caracara was flying over the road! That was actually awesome – maybe the fourth or fifth time I’d ever seen this crazy-looking bird. And as we rolled into Titusville, we finally saw our starling, bird of the day #108. Hallelujah, we had done it. Victory was ours.

And that was pretty much a wrap on yours truly. I took a quick look into the trade hall to see if I’d be inspired to talk to anyone or shop for anything, but I wasn’t. Back in the lobby, I snagged a festival t-shirt for my special lady and another for me. I felt good; I had an extra bounce in my step. I’d gained a new appreciation for the area I grew up in, improved my birding skills, and sort of re-affirmed my love for birding. I was excited to take my new knowledge and perspective back into the world, as it were.

Walking out toward my car, I saw what I thought was an adult Bald Eagle circling in the warm late-afternoon light. After a few seconds of staring, though, I realized it was some sort of motorized toy, like a remote-control airplane. It must’ve been deliberately painted in the colors of an eagle, though I’m not sure why, or who was operating it. Oh well. I shrugged and kept walking, as I still had an hour’s drive to my sister’s place ahead of me. Driving out, I saw the friendly ladies from the back of the bus, and we exchanged warm smiles and well-wishes through my open window. 

The way out took me past the front of the building, and my very last experience of the festival was the two old men that I braked for as they crossed the road to go inside. They looked up at the “eagle” and smiled. The older one was so taken that he stopped in his tracks, still in front of my car, and pointed at the fake bird, saying “Isn’t that nice!” His companion replied, “You gotta walk, Artie!”, but as I pulled into the opposite lane to go around him, he just stood there smiling, looking right at me, as if to clue me in – as if expecting – and we were all birders there, after all – that I’d want to stop and see what he was looking at, to share in the wonder of a wild bird’s presence.

I returned his smile, but I didn’t look back. I knew he would soon suffer the same small disappointment that I had suffered. And I drove off into that old, familiar sunset and felt glad anyway, and I figured that Artie probably would too.