The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

John James Audubon named this wren for his friend Thomas Bewick (1753 – 1828), a British naturalist and wood engraver.

January 19, 2024

A tail-cocked wren the color of bark spirals along a branch in the bare, sapsucker-pocked apple tree.  I hope for house wren, which would be new for the month, but when I see the bold white slash above its eye, I mentally check off the expected.  Bewick’s wren.

Then I turn my attention to the next flick of wings.

This Ruby-crowned Kinglet has been visiting the yard every day since early September.

Watching birds keeps me in the moment.  My mind can’t wander to concerns about frozen pipes and kids with Covid (yes, all the kids—daughters, sons-in-law, and grandkids—three plague houses) when each moment the slightest movement draws my eyes.

“Birding shifts your perceptions,” says Christian Cooper, “adding new layers of meaning and brokering connections: between sounds and seasons, across far-flung places, and between who we are as people and a wild world that both transcends and embraces us.”  I’m reading his new book, Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, his memoir about the joys and struggles of growing up a “Black queer nerd” and how birds opened “a window into the wondrous.”

His “yard” is Central Park, which boasts a bird list of more than 280 species due to the “Central Park Effect”—an 843-acre magnet of diverse trees, shrubs, and ponds that offers food and shelter for birds migrating up and down the East Coast.

Quite a window.  Mine is a wondrous 176 species.

Later, I decide to shift my perceptions.  January has been a bit dry—not just with rainfall (about a third of an inch) but with birds.  On any day, I may see 30 species...but it’s always the same species.  A score of pine siskins and house finches.  A dozen juncos and lesser goldfinches and Mexican jays.  The usual pair of hermit thrushes, bridled titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches.  The same Arizona woodpecker.  The one ruby-crowned kinglet.  The Bewick’s wren.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy them.  I’m up before dawn every morning to greet them. It’s just that my thrill of the unexpected has waned.  I need a fresh insertion of the feathered kind.  So, I take a ten-minute drive to the San Pedro River.  I hear a rare winter wren is probing for spiders along the logjam at signpost #6.

Although they aren’t far away at the San Pedro River, January has yet to see a Lincoln’s Sparrow in the yard.

Or a Red-tailed Hawk.

This was a nice find beneath the bridge over the river, a rare Louisiana Waterthrush patrolling the banks for insects.

The wondrous Winter Wren, a very rare winter resident of riparian thickets and logjams.

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