birdspot

I have traveled 5,537 miles in 60 days, birded 6 states, seen 289 trip species, gotten 8 lifers, and have met and seen an unquantifiable number of amazing people. Happy New Year!!!

To everyone, old friends and new, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude that I have had such rare opportunities to know you and be a part of your lives.

Olive Sparrows are not exactly what I have previously assumed them to be. They are largish and distinctly, er, rotund. Their bills are also longer than I had realized. Except for exquisite and subtle coloration they are actually kind of dumpy. They hop around in their pseudo-troglodytic manner, cocking their tails and darting in and out and generally behaving in a less retiring manner than I might expect. I have seen them before, but usually only in that dense vegetation kind of way, and now I am finding them hilarious. What are you, I wonder. Bizarre towhee wren ovenbird sparrow thing. Their song reminds me a bit of a Wrentit, which is another odd one. Even odder, perhaps, but I digress.

Olive Sparrow sketches, ink on paper.

Common Pauraque sketches, ink on paper.

The Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival ended, taking with it new friends and birding company and its hum of vendors and activities, vaporizing in a palpable whoosh. Its impact remained (and will continue throughout the year), as the Valley returned to its own hum and rhythms.

I stood near a levee near the Rio Grande, fully alone after four happy, hectic weeks, with the characteristic smoke plumes of burning crop residues on the horizon. Beyond the fields and mesquite and the silhouettes of flying cormorants (3 Double-crested, 1 Neotropic), the river wound, out of sight and inaccessible. There were two White-tailed Kites following one another, flying like gullish raptors (or raptorish gulls?). Mexico was so close, calling me to cross.

I was in a foul mood. I had spent eight hours sitting, hanging around, and generally feeling like a twitchy idiot, hoping to see a Rufous-backed Robin at the NABA Butterfly gardens in Mission, TX. Excepting the lovely Ruddy Ground Dove at Estero Llano at the beginning of my stay, this was the only species being reported that I had never seen before. At about 9 am I had a quick glimpse of two robins/thrushes – shadowy bits of robin-like shapes – way back in the tangle, but not enough to definitively call Rufous-backed. The bird was not seen that day, except a couple minutes earlier, a bit farther up the path, and then only briefly and by one person. Logic dictates that that was probably what I saw, but deductive reasoning is nothing in an empirical world, so for all intents and purposes I saw nothing. I knew it would probably resurface again, maybe the next day, when I would not be there. Beyond this irritation, a nagging issue festered in my mind. That issue was Mexico.

I glared out at a border of water I could neither see nor hear. I have visited the Rio Grande Valley a number of times, often walking along this river, working very hard to find new birds, these “rarities”, and have loved all of it. Blue Mockingbirds, Gray-crowned Yellowthroat, Rufous-capped Warbler, Golden-crowned Warbler, White-throated Thrush, Roadside Hawk, Crimson-collared Grosbeaks, Rose-throated Becards, White-collared Seedeaters: these are some of my most treasured visual moments. I dipped terribly on Blue Bunting, but that was all right, then, so why so thoroughly pissed off, now?

How odd, such deep fury, gathering under that gentle hazy sky. I hated birds, and birdwatching, and stupid little drawings of birds that every last one of my former colleagues probably felt sorry for me over, and while I was at it I hated everyone who got to stay on their path and keep painting and their teaching positions and their spouses and do normal things like have children and laze in the sun eating raspberries and shellfish, hearing the world out of both ears while drinking wine and not dreading their next visit to the dermatologist…perhaps you see where all this was going…and for that matter, cheers to the institutions that cemented a culture of painting that exalts free and liberal use of highly toxic solvents in crowded, under-ventilated spaces, full of drones who think it is really cool to be a painter.

My most crystalline, special hatred sprang forth for that very first day I held a paintbrush, loaded with oil paint, when the paint told me what to do and a twenty year love flowed from there, an unquestioned love that moved from wrist and fingers through to ferrule and gently splayed bristles, running along a track of pigment and binder, soft on one edge of a stroke and thick on the other. The paint whispered to me then as Mexico whispers to me now: Leave everything else behind.

The first day alone on a solo year-long project is perhaps not the optimal moment to collapse into a pathetic heap of histrionic self pity. The facts are there; I am not without reason to do so, but I made a vow that afternoon to not lose my mind on this trip. I dumped my grief at that amazing river and left indulgence in its flood plain, though I held on to a bit of my newly found anger. A movement caught the corner of my vision, and I was on it, bins up, without thinking. A Common Pauraque had lifted up from the road and into the dusk. To Mexico: please wait for me.