The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

May 14, 2021

The beachhead at Smelt Sands north of Yachats, Oregon.

Day 174 of the Quarantine (September 4, 2020)

The ocean was a continuous lulling drone that the forest competed with for silence. In the desert, silence always wins.

Yachats, Oregon, had the birds, 50 species for Smelt Sands, Alsea Bay, and the Tillicum Beach House, beginning with a flyover bald eagle that a pair of ravens chased up Big Creek and ending with a Caspian tern lost among the gulls.

The Caspian Tern, a common solitary forager along ocean beaches.

By our last day I had logged 9 life birds: black and ruddy turnstones hugging mussel-crusted rocks at low tide, a surprise Cassin’s auklet washed onto the beach at high tide, black oystercatchers, pigeon guillemots, and, while my brain hyperfixated on unexpected and body-crushing sneaker waves, a single wandering tattler.

“It’s a real bird,” I told Dick Shelton after mentioning I’d seen the tattler where I clambered among the rocks at Smelt Sands. We’d been having this conversation about bird names, how nineteenth-century ornithologists had a sense of humor. Dick had been writing about author Patricia McConnel and her claim that the holes in the rock faces along the Green River in Utah where the two had been hiking were evidence of extinct “peckerbirds.”

“Those aren’t real,” I said. “But the agile tit-tyrant and the fluffy-backed tit-babbler are.” I had just looked them up.

“So is the ruddy-faced tit-wagger,” he insisted.

“Is that related to the bare-cheeked rump-wagger?” I asked.

“That’s a good one. I try to avoid those.”

I’d just read a ScienceBlogs article called “About tits and boobies (relax - this post is strictly avian).” Which led me to looking up amusing bird names and ornithologists’ proclivities for double entendre (and recalling my college course in ornithology but only remembering our beautiful blond instructor and her lecture on great tits). I thought Dick had cornered the market with his private game of “midnight pewees” and “rosy-breasted pushovers” in his book Going Back to Bisbee. But long before he was born (1933), scientists have been reconnecting with their adolescent child by creating bird names like “red-rumped bush tyrant” and “helmeted woodpecker.” Real birds!

“I should write a field guide to Impossibly Rare Birds,” I told him, “and include drawings of species like bald-headed peckerwoods, and information about their habits and where to find them.”

Richard Shelton at the Tillicum Beach House works on his latest story about the poets and writers he has known since the 1960s.

Speaking of boobies and adolescence, the morning after Youngest Daughter and Husband departed for home, Dick told me that something fell behind his dresser. He asked if I could retrieve it for him.

I pulled out a leopard-skin bra and held it up to him.

“It’s not mine,” he said.

“I figured as much,” I said. “The question is: whose is it? And what’s been going on in here when I’m out birdwatching?”

“Probably because I hurried off the dancing girls, and they’re kind of slow on their walkers.”

On our last day, I secretly packed the bra into his luggage for the return home. Today, he displays it in his dining room, strapped to a piñata bust that resembles what some might call an orange-cheeked babbling tit-tyrant.