The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

March 28, 2022

All night, the wind has sifted juniper pollen through the sieves we call windows and into my swollen sinuses.  I rise earlier than usual.  Before the chickens.  Light the color of ash descends into the canyon and the eastern sky spreads only a rumor of sunrise. 

Coffee and yoga to clear my head.  Then, I sit on the porch and face the fountain.  Glorious.  The world awakens, announced by the first Cassin’s kingbird of the year.  CHI-virrr!  Warblers skip through the budding chokecherry tree, first a black-throated gray and Townsend’s, both followed by a painted redstart for the sixth day in a row.  When a small silver-gray warbler with beady eyes materializes next, I grab my camera.  Mesquite warbler!  (Lucy’s.)  Another first for the year at yard bird #68.  It’s moments like this when the air smells like expectation.  If I could smell anything.

When movement on my right catches my eye, I scan the crumbling base of the pear tree.  Something just slipped to the far side.  I swing my camera and adjust the focus on the trunk as a slip of bark dislodges and hitches upward in jerking spurts.  A brown creeper! 

I’ve seen the mousy birds in northern Arizona and many of the sky islands but never in the Mule Mountains. The aptly named woodland songbird is our only treecreeper (a family of only 11 species), ranging across North America from Alaska to Nicaragua.  Shy and secretive, few people are familiar with them although they are common. 

Just not here.  In fact, eBird says it’s been 20 years since someone last reported a brown creeper in the Mules.  I’m thrilled.  The new bird for the Big Yard comes in at species #167.

“Really blends in—maybe you’ve just never noticed it before,” the wife says when I bring her breakfast in bed and show her a photo on my camera. She’s on her second dose of Zyrtec. “Sounds like you got lucky.”

“No such thing as luck,” I say, reminding her that serendipity isn’t an accident but an act of will.  “Who was up early, sitting in the yard, paying attention to the shouting planet—holding a bloody camera?”

“There is such a thing as Luck,” she insists, shifting seamlessly, as is her way, to the fantasy of Terry Pratchett.  “And usually its first name is Bad.”

Thanks for supporting the Big Yard! More birds to come….what will #168 be?