Among birding’s dearest effects is a sense of universality, of familiarity and ease that leads me to a peace attached to what I know about what I see. I remember the first magpie I ever saw, or at least the first I got a good look at, in a national park in the American West. Years later, I remember the first one I saw in an ordinary place, in a yard in Nebraska as I drove west to see something exotic (I think it was yellow-headed blackbirds). I’ve seen them in Australia – they were the first birds I saw in Australia, playing on a radio tower – and in Hyde Park in London.
Today, I saw them in Barcelona, Spain, working the mid-sized corvid niche in the Parc de Montjuic. I walked in a piney section on a the hillside, wondering where the jays were, and it came to me that it wasn’t jays but maggies that owned the relevant niche here. Similarly, I saw some kind of tit (let’s hope that doesn’t set off the Internet surfing filters of my literally dozens of readers annually) in the pines. I heard them first, the scruffle of their feet and wings in the pine bark, and then the tik-tik-tik they make when they work the pine cones (I think). In the states, it’s a chickadee that would do that.
There were also finches of some kind, dead ringers for house finches but lemony instead of reddish. And something I didn’t know at all, with a black cap and a loud, melodious warble, which I wished would follow me home. I had considered not taking my binoculars, but I’m so glad I did. I did look like a tourist, but what the hell. I am a tourist.
I walked from the Paral-lel Metro stop up the hill toward the park, stopping to buy some pastry (and conducting the transaction in Spanish, miracles never cease), and then on past the funicular to the fort. Walking along the fort’s walls, I saw the finches and the maggies until I was familiar with their calls, the raspy doves and the squealing European swifts (which sound like someone’s crushing them in a wheel when they fight).
And miracle of miracles, I think I saw an eagle, far out among the gulls, soaring, big-tailed a gorgeous. It was no osprey, and I’ll have to look and see if there is another bird of prey, but my mind is shaping it now into an eagle’s profile, so it may be too late to see it whole in my mind’s eye.
Finally, I saw a little falcon, a Eurasian kestrel or a hobby, I think, taking the American kestrel’s place in the pattern of avian life. At the art museum, as I walked past, I saw there is an exhibit on still lifes – “natures mortes” – currently on display. I kept walking. I’ll take the living ones any day.