The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

January 19, 2025

The hermit thrush is back. It stands on a broken branch and bobs, slowly raising its rufous tail, eyeing me with what looks like genuine amusement. I imagine it wonders what stupidity all the commotion is about.

The bird has been our daily companion for the past week on the new property where we’re laying out the writing shed, an off-grid shack of rough-sawn timber and corrugated metal. The Wife calls it a tree fort because it’s mounted on a hillside to granite boulders and tucked among the oaks. She’s reading The Years of the Forest by Helen Hoover, the story about how the author and her husband abandoned a cozy life in Chicago to homestead on five acres and a cabin in far northern Minnesota. They also had three chickens.

“What does it mean to give up urban comforts for the deeper delights of wilderness living?” Helen Hoover asks.

I can give you a list. One that begins with gashes, contusions, crushed toes, and torn muscles. I’ll refrain from numbering those items in the “stupid” category.

While the son-in-law jack-hammered the granite, I cut trees and pounded rebar through logs to build a trail in the woods to the “off-gridder” we’ve started calling Hermit Thrush Lookout. When complete, after we’ve winched up tons of lumber and metal and lifted it into place, I plan on hauling my desk and file cabinets here. Maybe my late mentor’s leather recliner and a cot. Certainly, a woodstove in the corner for coffee and tea and warmth. Large windows on three sides and a covered porch will give me inspiration between pounding out words. There will be more inspiration than words, I’m sure.

My one requirement: It must be magical.

The beginning of the trail to the writing shed.

More trail.

And still more trail.

The mockup of the writing shed support and floor. We will replace the 2X4s with treated 8X12 timbers after they arrive.

Stay tuned for the March building update!

I pointed out the thrush to the son-in-law, who looked like a ghost in his shroud of granite dust. As always, we work and we bird. This is the nature of things. During two trips to North Dakota to remodel his mom’s house, I dragged him to the Red River every morning for birds. First Caribou coffee, lattes and Mint Conditions, then hiking through cottonwoods for never-before-seen red-eyed vireos, great crested flycatchers, and barred owls. Then plumbing and sheetrock.

The only other person I watch birds with as much is John Schaefer, who I joined last year to see the two life hummingbirds, a white-eared and starthroat, and who took me to Alaska for a lifetime bucket-list excursion of salmon and halibut with a side dish of kittiwake and tufted puffin.

Or Dawn Garcia, a megabirder I met at Dana Point over a rare gray catbird at the beach. Because we shared our bird lists in California and when she visited me in Arizona for a couple days last month, eBird says Dawn is my “Birding Bestie.”

That’s a new first.

You can probably guess that “Team” eBird has reported my birding statistics for 2024. For the 312 species I saw last year—a new record—I spent 847.74 hours watching birds at 92 locations, my number one spot being, of course, right here in my own backyard.

Where I posted 1022 photographs.

Which places me in the top .9 percent of media contributors in the eBird world.

Here are the birds of the week.

Male Pyrrhuloxia.

Young male Phainopepla.

Female Arizona Woodpecker.

Male Northern Flicker.

Male Western Bluebird.

Yellow-eyed Junco.

And Mr. Magnificent, a male Rivoli’s Hummingbird.

Thanks for supporting The Big Yard! More to come…