Red-headed Love Child

This chapter shows how the author journeyed out to Nebraska in the last days of March to witness the tail end of one of the great ornithological wonders in North America: the northward migration of sandhill cranes along the Platte River. For probably 10,000 years or more, the tall, steel-gray birds have thrown their unmusically beautiful calls across the shallow floodplain that is now in the heart of America's corn and burger-producing breadbasket. In the air they were gracefully buoyant and powerful fliers. On the ground they were just as stately — walking, stalking, dancing, and prancing as crane-kind does. When one is surrounded by cranes it is easy to understand how the family of birds have generated awe and worship around the world.

The Keepers of the Ghost Bird

This chapter focuses on the birds in Bermuda. Prior to 1600, it is estimated that half a million pairs of devil birds bred on Bermuda, making it, in essence, a gigantic seabird colony. The cedar trees that covered Bermuda were endemic and low-growing; they tilted in high winds, uprooting and leaving small cavities beneath. The birds used their black beaks, which ended in a graceful hook, to dig twelve-foot burrows beneath the trees, and used their webbed feet to push the dirt out behind them. The sailors called it the cahow after its sound. It would be centuries before it would emerge as a species of gadfly petrel — a sleek-bodied, hollow-boned soarer with three-foot-long, paddle-shaped wings. In 1906, Dr. Louis Mowbray, who would become the first director of the Bermuda Aquarium, found a live bird in a hole on one of the Castle Harbor Islands; he classified it as a Peale's petrel from New Zealand, blown off course. A decade elapsed before an ornithologist realized that Mowbray's live bird was actually the real thing: a Bermuda petrel.

Assault on the French Canal Bridge

This chapter details the author's experience during a birding tour in Panama, when their group was mistakenly attacked by heavily armed U.S. soldiers. On December 31, 1999, forty-five years of jungle warfare training ended when the Panama Canal and the U.S. military bases in the Canal Zone, including popular birding sites such as Ft. Sherman, Ft. Clayton, and Albrook Air Force Base, were transferred to the Panamanian government. Until then, birding tours in the Canal Zone often encountered U.S. forces on jungle maneuvers. Walking through the woods along Achiote or Black Tank Road, the author's group encountered soldiers crouched in the undergrowth. Occasionally, the solder would ask if they had seen “the aggressor.” Communicating with outsiders, birders in this case, seemed to be part of their strategy.

The Hour (or Two) before the Dawn

This chapter details the author's experience listening to birds an hour or two before the dawn during a cross-country ride. As the author crossed the Big Hole River, a lone marsh wren sang lazily. It was a western marsh wren, with all of the harsh buzzes and rattles and whistles one would expect from its more than one hundred different songs, so different from the eastern marsh wren the author heard on the other side of the Great Plains. Yellow warblers race among a dozen or so different songs, filling all air time between songs with frenetic chipping. The author also listened to northern waterthrushes.

Birding in Traffic

This chapter describes how the author took a subway to Union Square Park to see a bird they had never seen. The bird, a Scott's oriole, had been noted intermittently behind the statue of Mohandas Gandhi since December, though it took birders several weeks to figure out that it was not in fact an orchard oriole — which would have been unusual enough for winter in Manhattan. Scott's oriole is a bird of the Southwest and has never been recorded in New York. The chapter then discusses the point of bird-watching. “Nature” is not necessarily elsewhere. It is the person holding the binoculars, as much as the bird in the tree, and it is the intersection of these two creatures. Birding in city parks evokes much the same sensation. The parks, and the cities around them, may be human-made, but the wildlife that flashes through is no less real.

One Single Hummingbird

This chapter narrates the author's quest to see a lucifer hummingbird. To better appreciate bird diversity across the United States, the author brought twelve college students to Texas for the culminating week of their intensive ornithology course. In field guides, lucifer hummingbirds did not seem too different from the dozens of ruby-throated hummingbirds they had seen in the east. Nor were its proclivities different. Like the other twenty-four hummingbirds that spend time in the United States, the lucifer specialized in drinking nectar. More noteworthy was its name; lucifer means “light-bearing” in Latin, likely a reference to its iridescent gorget. That, and according to one dubious source, a group of lucifers is called an inferno.

Nighthawks

This chapter details how the author saw nighthawks while bird-watching in Lake Perez in Stone Valley. Nighthawks and their relatives — whip-poor-wills, oilbirds, frogmouths, pauraques, and nightjars — are odd, secretive, mostly crepuscular or nocturnal birds. On the wing, a common nighthawk is acrobatic and incredibly sleek. In the hand, however, its wings seem too long, its body squat and strange. A nighthawk's tiny black beak hides an enormous mouth that resembles a bullfrog's when it opens. Because they eat and drink while flying, this oversized mouth is useful for trapping insects and skimming lake water. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that these unusual birds used their huge mouths for another purpose: drinking milk from the teats of goats and sheep under the cover of night. According to the lore, a goat suckled by a nightjar met an unfortunate end — blindness and then death. Of course, the birds do not engage in this behavior, but the belief earned their family the name Caprimulgidae, or “goatsucker.”

Birding on Bleaker Island

This chapter narrates the author's first island-hopping trip to Bleaker Island, wherein she hoped to see at least two penguin species, the steamer duck, and maybe a black-necked swan. There are no trees on Bleaker — which is true throughout most of the Falklands — and a large rocky hill covers about half of the small island. Because the author hails from the land of trees in central New York State, the sheer openness of the landscape felt raw and exposed. The author then describes the skuas. These are huge, predatory birds that look like ubergulls. They are the bird bullies of the islands — harassing other birds to drop their food, attacking and devouring young birds, and swooping and diving on anything they do not like, including people.

Crane, Water, Change

This chapter reflects on how the author witnessed the migration of sandhill cranes. The author's neighborhood is a rural subdivision; pocketed with wetlands, it is also a home for birds. The chapter then discusses three things that the author has learned about cranes. First, the birds that migrate over the town of Healy are lesser sandhill cranes, of fifteen crane species worldwide, the only one that breeds in Alaska. Second, cranes, like most creatures, have multiple calls. Third, the Athabascan word for crane is dildoola, lilting the onomatopoeia of their song, and the word for cranberry is dildoola baba, meaning “crane's food.” The author also argues that one cannot write about sandhill cranes without writing about wetlands.

Secret of Owls

This chapter looks at the author's experience hiking in the Cumberland Forest, which stretches up from swamps and wetlands, along ridges of hemlocks and pines, into a series of canyons that contain frozen rivers and a couple of small, ice-locked lakes. For three nights, the author had heard the sounds of Vancouver Island northern pygmy-owls. It is not uncommon to hear barred owls or great horned owls in Cumberland Forest, but the unique call of a pygmy-owl is relatively rare, and they had been more active than usual. Northern pygmy-owls were once numerous on the island, but since the 1920s, their numbers have been declining fast due to logging, urban development, and other activities leading to habitat destruction and so the fragmentation of their population.