Mr. Bird Miss Behaving: When Good Birds Go Bad
They know they are messing with us…you know…birds. After hundreds of years and billions of bird records, well-respected ornithologists have amalgamated and synthesized the data into field guides. From Roger Tory Petersen’s 1934 A Field Guide to the Birds to The Sibley Guide to Birds (2nd Edition, 2014) man has attempted to describe the appearance and behavior of birds. Field guides provide various illustrations of a species to show everything from sex to age, and habitat to distribution. Field guides tell us how to separate a Hammond’s Flycatcher from a Dusky Flycatcher, or an Eastern Meadowlark from a Western.
What field guides don’t tell us is what birds are thinking, and why they go rogue. Just when science gives us comfort in understanding birds (what they look like and where they live) suddenly conventional wisdom flies out the window. Mix in a generous dose of leucism, albinism, and hybridism and you can toss the field guide to the back seat. And what are Harris’s Sparrows thinking when they decide to fly the coup and relative comfort of Nebraska’s Great Plains for the cold-hearted sagebrush of Idaho’s high desert in December. I have a theory.
They are messing with us. And its not just a species or two. From Blue Jays to Eastern Bluebirds, Mockingbirds to Red-shouldered Hawks – they are showing up unannounced like Cousin Eddie in National Lampoon’s Vacation. They know that just when a birder becomes confident in their identification skills, it’s time for an eastern bird to pay a visit. Since they are not coming as some religious splinter sect, but a solitary joker, how do they decide who gets to pull the prank?
I’ve been birding Idaho for 22 years, and until last Sunday, I had never seen a Northern Mockingbird in this western state. Serendipitously navigating downstream of the Minidoka Dam, a “Mocker” perfectly timed his convergence. He posed long enough to be photographed (who would believe me without the photo?), then departed with what I swear was a self-satisfied giggle. Yeah, I see what you did there. Maybe the time has come to write A Field Guide to Birds Gone Bad.