The Big Yard: Birdwatching in a Time of Quarantine

Or: The Evolution of a Lister

Cassin’s Kingbird

Day 16 of the Quarantine (March 29, 2020)

            First Cassin’s kingbird of the season.  Yard bird #52—already more than halfway to my goal.  The large flycatching migrant with the crest and heavy bill stares at me from the top of a walnut tree.  He has a milk mustache on its chin. 

            The bird is named for John Cassin, a nineteenth-century ornithologist and taxonomist who described nearly 200 birds.  He spent most of his days pouring over dried bird skins at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences where he was made curator in 1842.  He personally collected only one bird, a new vireo that he shot near town and named the Philadelphia vireo. “Collected.” Ornithologists of his day readily killed birds for science.  John James Audubon, himself, downed the more than 400 birds he painted.  His favorite 60 caliber “Long Tom” fowling piece with its maple stock, checkered wrist, and engraved “pineapple” trigger guard recently sold at auction for $192,000.

Cassin didn’t name the kingbird after himself.  George Lawrence, another bird enthusiast and one of Cassin’s co-authors of Birds of North America (1860), did that.  Cassin, in turn, named a goldfinch for Lawrence.  Titmouse for tattler, as it were.  Unfortunately, Cassin came to an early death at 55, poisoned by the arsenic used to preserve his birds.

Ruby-crowned Kinglet

In the afternoon, I go looking for a crissal thrasher at Murray Springs, ten minutes from my door. Crissal in this case isn’t someone’s name but refers to the colorful feathers that flare around the bird’s cloaca.  When I look up the Latin root crissare, my fondness for nineteenth-century ornithologists expands like the smile on my face: “to move the buttocks during intercourse.”  A twerking thrasher!

A few people also hike the trail, but we give each other a wide berth, stepping into the whitethorn and tarbush.  We smile, but the look is tentative.  It says, Don’t come too close!

No crissal thrasher comes close either.  Just ruby-crowned kinglets, yellow-rumped warblers, and a towhee named for Lt. James William Abert, who shot one in 1850.

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Abert’s Towhee