Bird Watcher

In high school and college I didn't particularly care about birds. In graduate school there were some mockingbirds in the area, which was fun because they make such interesting sounds and I'd never encountered them before.

The first time I was really excited about birds was probably only about fifteen years ago, when a family of owls nested in an old tree right next to the creek path. The three babies were adorable, so round and fluffy, and during the day they mostly just stood around on the branches near the nest, so it was easy to get a good look at them. I checked on them frequently. Over time, the fluffy baby feathers were replaced by normal feathers, and then one day the babies were on different branches that they must have flown to, and soon after that the whole family was gone. The parents must have liked that tree, though, because they came back to it the next year and maybe the year after.

A few years after that, my folks got me a little field guide (Birds of Colorado), and a few years after that, a pair of binoculars. I think the presents were more effects of my bird watching than causes, but there was definitely some of both … a nice bit of feedback. In any case, I'm now fully equipped to be a bird watcher.

I imagine there are serious bird watchers who keep track of which birds they've seen and make an effort to see new ones. Maybe being in the right place at the right time requires getting up before dawn and driving for hours to remote places? I wouldn't know, I don't do that. I'm just happy to see ordinary birds doing their ordinary things while I'm out walking or biking around town.

• Sparrows are so cute! I love how they hop around using both feet.
• Finches like to nest at the outdoor mall nearby.
• Chickadees are so cute and so talkative! They often visit the trees outside my apartment.
• Hummingbirds are fun. Often you'll hear them without seeing them.
• Crows and ravens are fun because they're so clever. Also I like how they turn from side to side as they walk, like little tyrannosaurs. Magpies aren't as common, but I'll mention them too because they're basically just fancy crows. Crows are also mentioned in Little Differences.
• Red-tailed hawks like to circle over fields and perch in treetops and other high places.
• Canadian geese are great except for the way they poop everywhere. I probably like them because I'm a silly goose myself. More about geese in a minute!
• Ducks are OK too. I like how they paddle around in the creek.
• Red-winged blackbirds are pretty and have pretty calls, but I've rarely seen them do anything interesting.
• Swallows are so graceful! There are two common kinds: barn swallows that build open nests and cliff swallows that build enclosed nests. There are other characteristics that you can use to tell them apart without seeing a nest, but I can never remember which characteristic goes with which name. To be honest, I can barely remember which kind of nest goes with which name.

Unfortunately, the love isn't universal. There are a couple of ordinary birds that I'm not happy to see.

• Robins are OK, I guess. I don't know why they don't make me happy. I used to enjoy listening to their chirpy songs in the morning in New Jersey.
• Pigeons get on my nerves. They like to nest in the underpasses along the creek path, and not politely out of the way like swallows, but right up in your face. And they're big and slow and stupid.

More about geese! First of all, apparently the preferred name is “Canada geese”. I only say “Canadian geese” because that's how I learned it and I'm stubborn. Rational arguments have nothing to do with it, but here are a couple anyway.

• “Canadian” is right there in the scientific name Branta canadensis.
• If you look at other phrases that contain place names, there's a pretty clear line: for cities and states the unmodified place name is used as an adjective, but for countries the place name gets converted into adjective form. For example, we say “Buffalo wings”, not “Buffalonian wings”, but we also say “French fries”, not “France fries”.

Geese don't seem mischievous like crows, but they're definitely smart. It makes sense … geese spend a lot of time on the ground, and they can't get into the air as quickly and easily as smaller birds, so having a good understanding of what's going on around them is a matter of life and death.

• I enjoy trying to communicate with geese. Mostly I just honk at them to try and put them at ease. I think it works, either because they're convinced I'm just another goose or because they're convinced I'm an idiot. And, once in a while, one of the geese will honk back at me.
• A story about smart geese: Once in a Lifetime.
• I'll tell you another story about smart geese in a moment.

In The Spider Web I mentioned that one summer I watched some geese raise their babies (goslings) at a nearby pond. Well, that's become a regular event now. It was off and on for a few years, mostly off, either because the geese didn't come or because I forgot to look for them, but for the past three years it's been on.

If I ever get serious about communication, it ought to help that I can interact with the same geese more than once, as in the prisoner's dilemma. On the other hand, it's a bad time to try and interact, because the parent geese don't want anyone to come near their babies, not even other geese.

Sometimes I've seen geese having bath time in the pond. This involves several different activities.

• There's generally a lot of splashing around in the water. Wings and feathers are not as fragile as you might think!
• A goose may rear up out of the water and extend and flap vis wings.
• A goose may pitch forward perhaps 30 degrees and dip vis head and neck underwater, then return to level and use the little hollow at the base of vis neck to scoop some water onto vis back.
• A goose may pitch forward and then keep going forward until ve's upside down with vis feet straight up in the air! The goose will then roll sideways to turn back over. This is typically followed by some vigorous splashing.
• Once or twice, I've seen something even funnier. A goose will pitch forward, keep going forward until ve's upside down, and then somehow keep going until ve's done a complete somersault! And, if one goose does this, other geese in the group will do it too. Clearly there's a goose meme at work here. One smart-aleck goose must have invented the idea, then the rest must have learned it from ver. It must be a fairly natural invention, because other people have seen other geese doing the same thing. You can find some videos and so forth if you search for “goose somersault”. That's the other story about smart geese.

Other random thoughts about geese:

• When I was little, my family lived in Rochester, Minnesota. My mom used to save the bread crusts that had been cut from sandwiches in a plastic bread bag, and then every so often we'd go over to Silver Lake and feed the geese. (This was before people knew that bread wasn't good for geese.)
• Geese are also mentioned in Other Bases.

Speaking of birds, I'd also like to say a few things about the book To Mock a Mockingbird. It has some good puzzles. It has a lot of information about combinators … which are neat, but sadly don't seem to have the same kind of practical value as, say, abstract algebra. And, it uses a lot of bird names without reference to real-world characteristics … which is funny because it makes me realize that even now there are some bird names that don't mean anything to me. What are kestrels, thrushes, and nightingales like? I have no idea.

So, like I said, it makes me happy to see birds. Actually, there's more to it than that. It turns out to be a small, easy step from being happy when I see birds to thinking that it's good luck, a good omen, auspicious. Natural evolution of superstition!

I've been talking about ordinary birds, but of course it makes me happy to see unusual birds too. They work even better as omens simply because they're unusual.

Now let me show you a funny thing from the dictionary. The definition of “auspicious” is fairly dull,

1. Attended by favorable circumstances; propitious.
2. Marked by success; prosperous.

but the definition of “auspice” just above it introduces an unexpected element,

2. A portent, omen, or augury, esp. when observed in the actions of birds.
3. Observation of and divination from the actions of birds.

and the etymology explains why it's there.

Lat. auspicium, bird divination < auspex, bird augur : avis, bird + -spex, watcher < specere, to look.

This summer I saw something new at bath time: geese can dive and swim up to 20' underwater! I was watching a family of six, two parents and four nearly full-size kids. They were all floating near the shore, when all of a sudden, three were gone, and the other three were flapping their wings and rushing across the surface. A moment later, the first three popped up nearby. I wasn't even sure what I'd seen, but then a minute later they did the same thing again. Was it just the kids doing it? Had I seen them do any small dives when they were fuzzy yellow babies? I don't know.