Day 12, Four Ducks on a Pond

 ”There are those damn white birds,” he said, pointing them out on the painting.They were egrets, ubiquitous in the Low Country, and no landscape is complete without them. He does get tired of them, but he’ll add them in if the buyer insists. (He runs an art and map gallery, selling four generations worth of his family’s artwork, and his toddler son is bidding fair to join the artistic tribe.) 

Certain birds are iconic. Even if you aren’t a birdwatcher, you can usually identify them. Usually.  I need the Merlin app to help me, and when I went on the Audubon tour at Mt Tabor, I kept asking “What’s that lovely bird call?” It was always a robin. 

Many birds are obvious, though. New Mexico has its roadrunner and every spring we wait for the migratory hummingbirds to arrive. The former has a rattle for its call, and the latter a shrill Doppler whistle. So, like the crow and the jay, they are easy to ID. Robins are another easy bird, and I grew up excitedly spotting the bright red plumage of Illinois’ state bird, the cardinal. (I’ve since discovered that the Northern Cardinal is claimed as the state bird by seven states. Does that make it more or less iconic?)

On my travels, I spend a lot of time listening for birds. The house in Beaufort has dozens of beautiful calls, and I still thrill to the nightly hoots of the barred owls calling back and forth. I fill the feeders in NM, and ID the finches and juncos, who are regular visitors. B feeds the hummers in Portland, and keeps the cat inside on early spring.mornings to save the nesting bird population (although he brought in a wren carcass to her disgust.)

Still, despite not being a birdwatcher per se, I do have some bird-related travel wishes. I want to go back to Lundy Island and watch the puffins nesting on the far promontory. I want to go to the Galapagos and see Galapagos penguins and then go to the South Pole to see the rest of the tribe. (I still remember the time someone called the reference line to settle a bet: are penguins only on the South Pole. That’s when I discovered that there are penguins north of the equator, on Galapagos, but that’s as far north as they go. Sadly the bet was about the poles: and no, there are no penguins on the North Pole. It was a tough sell.) I want to see the storks crossing the Bosporus. I want to go to Iceland for the Night of the Pufflings.

But I don’t really need to travel afar. There are so many bird sanctuaries. One hot summer I saw buzzards roosting in old metal towers at Malheur Wildlife Refuge. One January I saw cranes hanging out at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, although the Javalena racing across the field was more interesting. Even in well-populated areas, one can find sanctuaries. On a trip to New York, I checked out the birdwatching journal at the Central Park boathouse. When I lived in Albuquerque I regularly visited the Rio Grande Nature Center, which attracted the migratory waterfowl and the regular Teal ducks, Canada Geese, and Blue Herons, and the sun-worshiping turtles piled up on the log by the window. When I lived in Portland, I checked out the Osprey nests at Oaks Bottom along the bicycle path. Just a few years ago, Buffleheads floated serenely on the Mt Tabor reservoir. 

In fact, I’ve taken it for granted that birds will always be part of the landscape. It’s hard to believe that this ubiquitous.winged population is at risk. But it is. Mt Tabor reservoir has been emptied and may never be refilled. Climate change and pollution and developments are destroying habitats. Domestic predators make inroads.  And it may be that, some day four ducks on a pond will be an unusual sight, not an iconic one.