The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher
January 23, 2023
The Universe is always speaking to us. We just need to listen. Two days after I wrote about my ambivalence of birding as rarity-driven chasing, checking-off-the-box listing, see-it-and-leave-it bird-spotting, three birders from Sweden drove up to the yard to glimpse my Cassin’s finches, which obliged them by perching high in the elderberry tree. The birders stayed for ten minutes (mostly because I stopped them to chat). Then they were off to the Chiricahua Mountains for Montezuma quail before returning to Houston to catch a flight home. The Swedes didn’t even get out of their rental car.
Today, the Universe is less affirming and more mystery-revealing. I love it when Nature crushes my preconceptions and leaves me with the feeling of surprise and awe.
I was raised like most of us...with cats and dogs and hamsters and rats, horses and parakeets and boa constrictors and iguanas and toads, salamanders, tarantulas, guppies and seahorses—even a pet rattlesnake (who I named “Fang.”). And like most of us, I understood that in the world there are boys and there are girls. Okay, freshwater protozoans can have seven sexes, whereby each can mate with any type except its own, but these are free-living, single-celled, miniscule bags of mostly water and closer to being plants than animals. And I wouldn’t learn about them until just now.
While reading about the gender-bending proclivities of white-throated sparrows.
Lately, I’ve heard the clear, metallic-ringing chink of their call, but so far haven’t laid eyes on one. The rare, mustard-lored sparrows have graced the yard before (in winter). I even have a few blurry photographs. But that was 12 years ago.
Yesterday, I donned sweats and t-shirt, and the wife and I drove to the eastern flanks of the Chiricahua Mountains to spend an afternoon with our friend Rick Taylor, whose home is literally tucked into the largest sycamore tree in Whitetail Canyon. We went for stimulating coffee and strong conversation. We went for the birds—or at least I did, his yard list stands at 243, 70 more species than mine. And, we went for the white-throated sparrows Rick had been telling me about, the ones shuffling around his water feature. Ones with white stripes on their head. And ones with tan stripes.
It seems that white-striped white-throated sparrows only mate with tan-striped white-throated sparrows. Because there are white-striped males and white-striped females, tan-striped males and tan-striped females, each group reproduces with only one fourth of the population. In other words, there are four distinct sexes.
Biologists Elaina Tuttle and Rusty Gonser discovered that this blurring the lines of what we might see as “normal” has to do with sex chromosomes and genes and things called “inversions”—all too much to explain here. But suffice to say, the emergence of these four sexes, although driven by genes, doesn’t involve anatomy. White-stripes can still kiss cloacas with white-stripes, and tan-stripes with tan-stripes. The wobbly bits still work.
Instead, it’s the sparrow’s behavior that’s separating the species into four sexes.
White-throated sparrows remind us that gender is a human construct.
And a myth.
The Universe has spoken: chasing birds isn’t for me. However, like Nature, there’s room for bending. Like when you call on a friend and he has sparrows. Or, like when a red-headed woodpecker, a rare and gorgeous species you’ve never encountered in Arizona, is visiting a small pecan grove only 3.3 miles off your route to Rick Taylor’s home.
I’ll plant a shrub to offset my .002 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in my yard and in my pajamas for the next post.
Thank you for this. Your writing touched a place in me that needed to release. My tears and I thank you. We don't always know what we need, but as you say "The Universe is always speaking to us. We just need to listen." thank you.
That’s fascinating, especially about a species that here is so common I hardly pay them any mind.