That damn yellow-headed blackbird: I just couldn’t find it. As William von Herff reported in last week’s Independent (“Rare Birds in Truro,” page B8), this rare Western bird was first seen on the Outer Cape in early November, hanging around with a flock of starlings and brown-headed cowbirds at the Old North Cemetery.
So, of course, I wanted to see it. My last yellow-headed blackbird was over 40 years ago, when I was conducting bird surveys for the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife at the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base in southern California. That bird was a male with a bright yellow, somewhat bulbous head. It was in a small remote marsh amid some wild rolling hills, clinging to a reed the way blackbirds like to do, and singing its head off the way blackbirds like to do.
I remember the bird, but I also remember the occasion because it happened to be the only time in my life (so far) that I met an honest-to-God shepherd. He was accompanied by a couple hundred sheep and two dogs. He wore regular clothes, lived in a trailer, did not have a crook-shaped staff, and was Mexican.
We were having a good time trying to communicate with very few words in common, and of course he had to count his sheep and I my birds. I think he wondered what the hell anybody would be doing out in this isolated place counting birds. I recalled the famous geneticist who was out netting flies on some mountaintop. When asked by the quizzical locals what a grown man was doing chasing bugs, he gave them the answer they were most likely to understand: “They pay me to do this.” How to say this in Spanish?
So, I went out repeatedly in Truro and could not find the bird. I didn’t see a single shepherd either, but I encountered quite a few birders, including friends and acquaintances, and some real big shots in the local birding world. One of the unsung delights of birding is the camaraderie that exists among birders. Birding is a curious blend of the solitary and the communal. The next best thing to finding a rarity — or any bird — is sharing it with others.
I roamed the mostly deserted corridor of Route 6A, flanked by empty cottage colonies, beach houses, and motels, scanning the shoulders of the road and the utility wires overhead; I respectfully paced through the Old North Cemetery, a lovely place with many interesting dead people.
No bird.
But there were some amazing sights: over a thousand starlings and probably hundreds of brown-headed cowbirds flocking together. This very act of togetherness is so impressive: their need to aggregate speaks to something in the human psyche as well. The weird chatter and slightly salacious whistles of a flock of starlings is a bit spooky, but when they erupt en masse and swirl through the sky in what is called a murmuration, it takes your breath away.
These are European birds but long established here and apparently doing well. Most people don’t care for them, but they have their virtues. They are actually quite attractive; the stars on their feathers wear away over the winter to reveal a glossy purple plumage by spring. Mozart had a starling, and it could sing and talk like a parrot. And consider the cowbird: it is an obligate nest parasite, meaning females always lay their eggs in other species’ nests; therefore, every cowbird you see is a foster child. How does it know it is a cowbird? A quandary.
So, there was no bird among all these with a slightly yellowish tinge, but the winter is young, and I will keep looking. It’s fun; it gets me outside, in hat and gloves; and it keeps me in the game. As Bertrand Russell said: “The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
