You can tell yourself all you want when you bird that you don't need a good bird that day to enjoy it, and I want you that I know it's a FAT DAMN LIE. Of course you want a good bird. It's like that study where it turns out people who win Oscars die slower than the people who don't. You want the best best good bird, and you want the second-best good bird first, like when you are just unbuckling the safety belt, so you know that the trip wasn't just one of those where you say "not today, I guess." And then the best-best good bird at the farthest point from the parking lot, where the mosquitoes have seventy-five legs and firearms and old half-mesh chewing tobacco hats. So you have a story to tell.
Unless you don't get that bird, like today, in which case you say, you know, you don't need that best-best bird to be outside in the mud and the sweat and the screaming bright sun with no leaves on the trees yet. Which is also true, as long as we all agree it is, just like it's OK not to shoot a deer if you hunt and what you like is just time outdoors and you need a reason.
So I started the day with a goal. Joe was not able to join because he had to be in camp. (Which he loves.) And so I threw myself in the car and bought a bottle of juice and a cup of cream coffee and called it breakfast and I threw myself up to Wachusett Meadow just as fast as I could. And I got out the car and started walking. Don't you love when you start walking and the binoculars aren't even focused yet and all the promise of the day leads out in front of you like a dirt road with a break in the bushes where it crosses the hill you see up ahead? I walked maybe 50 feet and what was that song? A purple finch singing on territory. I have never heard it before, and I tell you it was lovely, a new thing, a new feeling, a new sight -- a jumble that isn't a house finch or a song sparrow or the rose-breasted grosbeak. But what a pleasure to see the purple (purple!) berry of a finch fixed on a bare branch and roaring, because that is how it feels to him.
So I got my second-best bird upfront after all, I guess.
And then I walked down that old dirt road there. I was headed to the heron rookery, and when I got there through the pastures with their stone walls that probably predate the war I learned about growing up in Richmond, I sat down for a while. To sit down and watch! LUXURY. I sat and let myself think about all the things I have had to think about, but I listened, too, to the redwing blackbirds and the tree swallows (this is WARTIME for tree swallows) and the croaking herons, which sound like their call is cranked out of them on a strong winch. While I was sitting there the sounds got thick behind me, and I turned to find a swamp sparrow in the leaves, and then a fistful of palm warblers, the early warblers.
Forgive me, now, while I wax babbly on birding.
The point of birding is different for everybody. I wrote a friend last week that it is hunting for me, bloodless hunting, and I know squat. It's not hunting. It's yearning. It's wishing to be the river, or at least carried on the river of birds that sweeps north and south and that eddies in time. I saw my first palm warbler in 1987, in Key West, down the street from my parents' house. I have seen them in Mexico. I never heard one sing, I think, until today. This has been said better. To see the palm warbler, its tail absolutely never stopping bobbing, to see it on the winter grounds, northbound, southbound, to see it comb the dead leaves and the ends of trees' branches where the buds have the tiny spider webs, is to for a moment -- a mean dirty little moment -- get the chance to float in the airborne river. It's a wish to live forever, thoughtless and out of time. I watched the palms move like waves at three places where water stays on the land, three ponds. Perfect insect consumption devices. Everything is a shark, and finding transcendent meaning in any animal is an insult, but perhaps it is not to find the meaning in them all.
When I sat at Fire Pond, where last year Joe and I slogged with great joy while the rain poured on our heads, I saw water beetles and backswimmers and efts and frogs and salamander eggs. And I saw the flicker of movement, and like a pointed ghost a Swainson's Thrush snuck out of a woodsy corner to work the mossy ground. Mind you, thrushes are not so easy to define that I said, "Look, a Swainson's." I worked my Sibley like a cheap lighter. Spectacle, check. Pale-ish speckling, check. Drab coloring (roughly corresponding to my professional wardrobe), check.
I had my best best bird.
I am so glad for birds.