The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

A Nashville Warber stopping by the yard on its way from Canada to Mexico.

August 21, 2024

A couple weeks in North Dakota and everything changes.

The yard hums at the edge of hearing.  It is the sound of grass growing.  The sound of green, pulling sunlight and drawing moisture, stretching and reaching and slapping against thighs and knees for the single purpose of delivering its cargo.  Because tall, wet grass is a launching pad for chiggers.

I’ve never seen the mite.  Just the sign of its passage.  After the miniscule larva of the parasite crawls across my skin into some dark, dank private place—a beltline when I’m fortunate—it feeds, secreting an enzyme to digest my epidermal cells.  This leaves a red, itchy, and painful welt that persists for days, maybe weeks.

Years ago, when I worked summers at a youth camp in the mountains near Tucson, I’d paint the bites with nail polish (in a rainbow of colors), believing that the nitrocellulose polymer would suffocate the mite, entombing it under my skin and ending its sucking, itchy life cycle.  Today, I’m told the remedy is a myth.  Maybe.  All I can say is it works—perhaps because the polish prevents me from scratching.  Which is why this time of year I keep a bottle of the Wife’s hot pink “Color Therapy” in my pocket.

Chiggers.  Boldly going where no one has gone before.

A female Hermit Warbler passing through from the Pacific Northwest on its way to Mexico.

           

The Warbling Vireo, one of today’s four vireos migrating through the yard.

But chigger season is also warbler season.  And vireo and hummingbird season, the latter clouding the feeders like bees.  Eight species in all, as fall migration sends waves of the birds through the yard.  On Monday, I added a new hummingbird to my life list when John Schaefer and I drove to Paradise in the Chiricahua Mountains to see a rare white-eared hummingbird. 

We were not disappointed.  John now has stunning photos of fifteen of Arizona’s sixteen hummingbirds.  A book in our future?  Bring on the plain-capped starthroat!

My less-than-stunning photo of a White-eared Hummingbird from the George Walker House in Paradise.

The white-eared hummingbird tops my list at 488 species after the ten new birds I added in North Dakota.  I hope to pass 500 life birds during next week’s fishing adventure in Alaska.  Yes, Alaska!

I’ll let you know!

Somewhere in North or South Dakota (but also common in the yard), a Western Kingbird poses for a photo outside a gas station.

Life bird #477, the Eastern Kingbird.

Grand Forks, North Dakota. Life bird #480, the Great Crested Flycatcher, another eastern bird and similar to our Brown-crested Flycatcher.

A common summer resident at Grand Forks, North Dakota, along the Red River where it nests. Life bird #481, the Red-eyed Vireo

More to come!