Rusty Blackbirds in April

I went out birding on Sunday. I’m often asked what “going birding” entails. Do you go into the woods and try to find as many different birds as possible? Yes, that’s frequently a goal. Do you look for that one bird that’s eluded you, the Magnificent High-breasted Warbledoodle? Yup, that can be a big part of it. Do you try to see more birds than you did last year, or more birds than your buddy has? Sure, that can be good fun.

Birding is all of that and, often, exactly none of that.

I went out Sunday with limited time. My buddy Dave is almost ten birds ahead of me for the year and that needs fixing. It’s a good-natured competition that we play off as a matter of life and death. With so many real existential crises in the world, it’s nice to pretend a mundane pursuit you can actually control is of utmost importance. I needed a bunch of birds and I knew going north of here to Maple River, a flooded wildlife management area, would get me the goods. I’d move fast and tick lots of birds. (Birders call seeing a bird a tick, as in ticking a mechanical counting device. Not actual ticks, which none of us are fond of.)

I did not move fast. I did not tick many birds. Dave continues to outpace me.

I did spend the better part of an hour getting to know some Rusty Blackbirds.

While hightailing it in search of some ducks, I caught ear of a flock of blackbirds. Probably a thousand birds, mostly the ubiquitous Red-winged Blackbirds. There were Common Grackles and Rusty Blackbirds in the flock. Some European Starlings were moving with them as well, although starlings aren’t blackbirds. I got all of that from sound. I’m not a good ear birder by any stretch, but living in these parts, you learn to parse out the members of a blackbird flock pretty easily. It’s a chaotic cacophony, but you catch the solos and know who’s there.

The rusties made me stop. I adore Rusty Blackbirds. They’re not colorful, can be kind of shy, and sing a song that can best be described as “somewhat grating,” or perhaps more diplomatically, “unpleasant.” In other words, they’re perfect. They are also in trouble. It is estimated that more than three quarters of the entire species has vanished in little more than my half-century lifetime. What’s causing it is a bit of a mystery. Habitat loss on the wintering grounds in the southeastern US is a big suspect. Similar problems, climate change induced, on the bog and muskeg nesting grounds in Canada and Alaska could be a culprit. Then there’s the in-between, what we call the stop-over habitat, in places like here in Michigan. Good flooded forests where they can rest for a few days are harder to come by every year. There could also be diseases or other bird-killing calamities like mercury poisoning befalling them. Regardless, they’re struggling. I took a local NPR reporter out looking for them near this spot a decade ago. I talked about how everyone loves a hummingbird or an eagle or a colorful warbler. But the rusties, I implored, need love more than any eagle. I think I bought my own propaganda that day, because they became one of my favorite birds.

And so I stopped and let the flock trickle through the trees, as they do, like a stream navigating a bed of pebbles. As luck would have it, (lots of birding is luck!), three rusties dropped down from the flock and decided to work the flooded forest floor. At that point I stopped moving. If you stay relatively motionless and don’t wave your arms, most birds decide quickly that you are of no consequence. I’ve found it’s almost impossible for most humans to keep their arms close to their bodies. Pointing and gesticulating is like breathing to an active person on a hike in the woods, but you do not want to do that if you’re going to spend quality time with a bird. Predators have appendages. To get close to a bird, be a featureless blob.

One of the rusties decided to come over about fifteen feet away from me and start flipping rotting leaves in the shallow water to see if anything tasty was underneath. There was! He hopped on the log, ran the length of the log, posed in the sun, paced back and forth in the water, and generally behaved like a Rusty Blackbird. And I watched. I’m a birdwatcher after all. It’s right there in the name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQt-WCO6nhw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fUu-zD-AxI

This is how you come to know a bird. You can look at all the marks in a field guide, study photographs, and memorize plumage details. That’ll help you tell a Rusty Blackbird from a wayward Brewer’s Blackbird, but none of that is knowing the bird. You can get book smart and have a hundred facts about Euphagus carolinus (Rusty Blackbird) at the ready. They lay three to six blue-green eggs in a nest often wrapped in wet decaying leaves that harden into a protective wall. That’s neat, but it doesn’t help you know the bird. Lots of people know precisely what I look like, when and where I was born, what my average heart rate is, and how tall I am. None of them know me.

I tell new birders one of the best ways to become familiar with birds is to do what I was spending Sunday afternoon doing. Watching a bird. The assertiveness bordering on disdain with which he tosses leaves over to look underneath. The testing of water depth with a tentative step. The trips between branch and ground. The quick scans for danger from the top of a log. The reaction to a cousin with red wing patches flying past. The feather fluffing to shake off water droplets. All those things are the bird. Not the painting in the field guide or the statistics in the ornithology text. As a philosopher once said, “the map is not the territory.” The bird is not in the book, it’s the beast in front of you. When given the chance to spend a moment with the beast, you take it.

After a long while, the rusty flew about fifty feet away to another pool of decaying leaves and delicious invertebrates. I could have followed, but there was no need and my time had dwindled. One of my birding mentors once said, after long and lingering looks at a rarity, “This bird owes us nothing.” Sometimes a bird just stays in one place and lets you drink in every drop of it. It opens a window to a small alcove of its life in a certain place and a certain time. You get invited into the natural world for a longer glimpse than a human typically gets, possibly a longer one than we deserve. When you’ve taken your fill and return to humanity, you have to admit that the bird owes you nothing further.And so I took leave of my friend the Rusty Blackbird, its debt paid in full, if ever there even was a debt. More likely, I owed that bird something. I had nothing but joy to take and little to offer in return. As I walked back to my car, all I could do was glance over to the flock and lift my binoculars in salute. “I’ll keep telling your story,” I assured them.

The blackbirds poked at some floating leaves.