The Reluctant Twitcher (6 page)

Of course, it doesn't always work this way. Some birds are pish-resistant and require prolonged pishing; others are simply unpishable.

Often it is a matter of technique. I am not a good pisher. On occasion I have pished a pishable bird long and steadily only to have it hang tough in the bushes, refusing even to twitch. Then some really skilled pisher, like Dean Ware, comes along, utters one little pish, and the bird, stunned by my level of incompetence, pops up as if it were on a string. Ware's pishing, squeaking, and whistling are so irritating that no bird can resist; you only hope the bird comes up quickly. Volume and timbre enter into it. Sometimes the quietest little pish is all it takes; other times it can take half a pint of saliva and a beach towel. You have to be ready to experiment and hope your handlers are not there to observe.

In some cases you have to go farther than pishing. I am not talking about well-lobbed stones and mad, kicking rushes into the undergrowth. The ABA no longer sanctions such techniques. I'm talking about hand-kissing. Your own is least dangerous, depending, of course, on how long you have known the person beside you. You simply place your lips on the back of your hand (some purists insist on the back of the knuckles of the second and middle fingers — never the ring finger), purse your lips, and suck air in through your teeth. It can drive 'em wild. Other times it leaves them cold, forcing you to fall back on extreme measures such as screech-owl imitation, a technique to be used only circumspectly in the presence of non-birders, particularly those with medical degrees.

Not everyone can do screech-owl imitations. You need hyperactive salivary glands and the ability to roll your tongue and blow over the spit while holding your lips in a special position. Some can manage the trill; few do a good whinny.

I tried to learn. Oh, yes, I tried. Don't think I didn't. But like the soft
r
in Russian, I was never able to learn the sound. At the Russian School at Middlebury College in 1965, the world's greatest soft
r
expert was called in to teach me how to make a soft
r
. You need the back of your tongue low, the centre arched upwards against the hard palate, and the tip pressed against the lower front teeth; I think the sides are supposed to flutter or something. Anyway, the phonetics specialist attempted to teach me using Popsicle sticks to force my recalcitrant tongue into the correct position. When all was ready, he said, “Okay. Say
r
.”

I said “Gaa,” just before my gag reflex kicked in and I got a mouthful of splinters from the crushed Popsicle sticks. He was able to retract his fingers just in time. After several weeks we gave up on this approach. I had no more success with the screech-owl trill, though I tried everything. A pity; it can be very effective. I have had modest success with the Saw-whet Owl death screech, but it just isn't the same.

Photo by
Sam Barone
.

Mourning Warbler (male). Kirkfield. Such stunning skulkers are seldom
seen like this.

The best I ever heard was a fellow named Mike Runtz, though it must be admitted, Dan Bone is no slouch.

We were birding at Pelee and it was slow — real slow, as they say. A Mourning Warbler in Tilden's Woods sang once and shut up. Mike pished him out. He kept on pishing. Nothing more. Then a bit of seductive knuckle kissing produced a White-throated Sparrow and a bit of rustling. Suddenly, Runtz upped the ante and began a screech-owl trill. A Lincoln's Sparrow immediately shot up, crown feathers erect, desperate to locate the enemy. An Eastern Towhee popped up. Runtz kept trilling. A Blue Jay swooped in and began to furiously hop about. Now Runtz began a series of high descending whinnies. The towhee attacked the Blue Jay. Another towhee appeared and joined in. Two more jays shot down and joined the fray. Sparrows began to fly up everywhere. A Carolina Wren appeared, spoiling for a scrap. The Mourning Warbler got out while the going was good. Things were rapidly getting out of hand. Turkey Vultures were circling above in mystified disbelief. An American Crow appeared and began cawing furiously. I was getting nervous. It was turning into an Alfred Hitchcock scene.

Two elderly ladies came by and stood in utter amazement. I attempted an explanatory grin, which may have been taken amiss, since a flicker of real fear appeared on their faces at that very instant. Runtz noticed nothing and turned it up a notch. He was by now in full flight, alternating pishing, kissing, and wild trills. The two ladies hastened down the trail and one produced a cell phone and called 911. I heard her giving exact directions to our location. I tried to speak to Runtz, but he was out of control, as was the avian donnybrook. Cravenly I slipped off and rushed to the Visitor Centre to hide. I don't know how it ended. I did hear sirens but am not sure if they were incidental or not. I hope it ended well, though come to think of it, I haven't seen Mike since. I probably should visit him if I can locate the institution.

Obviously, some ability to pish, at least adequately, is greatly desirable for coaxing out difficult birds when you are trying to run up your numbers. So is the ability to “do” chips.

Chips can be very important. Not fresh hot ones with malt vinegar, ketchup, and lots of salt. No. I'm talking about recognizing chip sounds. You're walking, say, in Jobes' Woods in Presqu'ile Provincial Park, and Doug McRae suddenly and for no apparent reason says, “Hermit Thrush.”

“Excuse me?” you respond, lost in reverie.

“Hermit Thrush,” repeats McRae. Then it dawns on you that on some subliminal level you perceived one single little chip note a moment ago.

“For sure,” you say, hopefully before McRae gets suspicious and thinks not only that you did not know that so-readily-recognizable a chip was a Hermit Thrush, but that you may not even have noticed it.

Photo
by Carol M. Horner
.

Hermit Thrush. Corner Marsh, Pickering. The rust-red tail betrays
this as a Hermit Thrush.

Doing chips is important, especially for identifying skulkers. “A chip is a chip,” the foolish might say, but they would be wrong. If you know your chips — forget the songs — you are off to the races. Do not be daunted by the fact that several hundred of the most common chips sound virtually identical to the untrained ear. Be aware that there are bright chips, dull chips, lacklustre chips, “chippy” chips, and so forth. Get a chip recording and start learning them. It will save you an enormous amount of time. And if you misidentify a chip, and pish out a different bird, you can always say, “I guess the Swainson's went the other way or it just isn't going to come out.”

I shall not even mention the need to study the recordings of nocturnal migration flight calls because of the concomitant dangers of being mistaken for a street person when lying on your back on the sidewalk at night straining to hear faint overhead calls. This is not for the uninitiated. It can also lead to severe sleep deprivation in migration season. Margaret sleeps every night in May with her window wide open listening for migrating thrushes and can be quite tired by morning.

Suffice it to say that, armed with proper pish and chip skills, your Big Year is going to be a sight easier.

5
Algonquin Grand Slam

How sweet it is!

— E
NVER
H
OXHA

W
HEN
H
UGH SUGGESTS WE KICK
off my Big Year with a mid-January trip ( January 19–21) to Algonquin Provincial Park, I am all for it. I have already missed almost two weeks by being in England — an inauspicious beginning — and the Razorbill that was so good to me in December 2006 disappeared from Niagara-on-the-Lake just before my return. A quick mid-January trip to Niagara produced ten species of gulls, including California Gull (a first-winter bird in Hamilton), Lesser Black-backed Gull, and Black-legged Kittiwake, but nothing rare, and I was disappointed. I felt that I desperately needed to get going. American Three-toed Woodpeckers had been showing up in the Park and this is obviously a species not to miss. It becomes one of our five target Algonquin birds.

We decide to spend two nights in Whitney to give us the better part of three days' birding. This turns out to be a smart move. We need the third morning.

Hugh suggests I mention the trip to Margaret to see if she is interested. Margaret, of course, is not about to be left behind. At this point I still firmly believe that she and Hugh are both simply committed to helping me reach three hundred and have no secret intentions of their own to get there ahead of me. The sheer altruism of it all impresses me very favourably. I can't imagine being that selfless.

On Friday morning, January 19, Margaret and Hugh and I leave for Algonquin. We go straight to our motel at Whitney, check in, have lunch, and head for the feeders at the Nature Centre. The feeders are good to us; so is the road. By dark, at 4:45 p.m., I have added seven birds to my year list: Hairy Woodpecker, American Tree Sparrow, Purple Finch, Common Redpoll, Pine Siskin, Evening Grosbeak, and Gray Jay, of which the last species is one of our five target birds. We have also seen many crossbills of both kinds right on the road and are well satisfied, even without our other four targets. None of us know that we will not see redpolls again all winter.

The next morning we get an early start, despite the fact that after breakfast it is still minus thirty degrees Celsius. Though the Centre doesn't officially open until 9:00 a.m., we sneak in a side door and find wild activity at the feeders featuring at least fifty very bold Evening Grosbeaks. Then we go off in serious pursuit of our target birds — Hugh doesn't like to fool around — and by dark we have Black-backed Woodpecker and Boreal Chickadee, both on the Opeongo Road.

The chickadee is easy, but the woodpecker causes some stress. I see it fly across the road in front of me and mark where I think it lands. I plunge in after it across an alder bog and up a steep hill and find it about seventy-five metres back in the bush, busily attacking a spruce tree. I call out “Black-backed” and turn to look for Hugh and see him flailing madly through the alders up to his waist in snow. Trying not to think about heart attacks, I watch him motor up the hill. Thank God the bird is still there.

“Where's Margaret?” I ask.

“I'm down here on the road,” comes a little voice on the wind. Suspecting we just might have a good bird when she saw us both suddenly run off the road and plunge into the snow-filled bush, she has come up to see what it is all about. “What have you got?”

“A Black-backed,” I say.

“I'll be right up,” says Margaret.

“No,” I call, “wait there. I'll come down to get you. There's an easier way up.” I don't want her wrecking her hip replacement this early in the trip. Save her for the Three-toed, you know. She has great ears.

I find a better way back to the road and break the trail a bit. Margaret plunges in behind me, and all is well until we come to a log I have gone over. Since Margaret is not a tall woman and is up to her chest in snow, this log poses a problem. Certain that the Black-backed is by now sated and about to fly off, we desperately beat our way around the log and even before cresting the hill, Margaret cries, “I see it!” Fortunately it is high enough up the tree that she can see it without plowing up the last steep ten metres.