The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Lives of Familiar Birds

260 Pages·2009·6.25 MB·English

by  John Yow

Te Armchair Birder
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D I S C O V E R I N G
the S E C R E T L I V E S
Te Armchair Birder
of F A M I L I A R B I R D S
J O H N Y O W
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
This book was © 2009 by JOHN YOW
published with the All rights reserved
assistance of the Designed by Kimberly Bryant
Blythe Family Fund Set in Whitman and Bickham by
of the University of Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
North Carolina Manufactured in the United States of America
Press.
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
The University of North Carolina Press has been a
member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Yow, John.
The armchair birder : discovering the secret lives
of familiar birds / by John Yow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8078-3279-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Birds. 2. Bird watching. I. Title.
QL673.Y69 2009
598.0973—dc22
2008031979
cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated,
with afection and admiration, to my fater.
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
A Note on the Sources xi
Sping
Carolina Wren 3
Eastern Phoebe 9
Rose-Breasted Grosbeak 15
Eastern Bluebird 21
Belted Kingfsher 28
Scarlet Tanager and Summer Tanager 34
Brown-Headed Cowbird 41
Redheads
Red-Bellied Woodpecker 48
Red-Headed Woodpecker 48
Mourning Dove 58
Summer
Cedar Waxwing 67
American Goldfnch 73
Wood Thrush 79
Yellow-Billed Cuckoo 85
Chimney Swift 91
Northern Mockingbird 96
Goatsuckers
Whip-Poor-Will 103
Chuck-Will’s-Widow 103
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird 110
Northern Cardinal 116
Autumn
Wild Turkey 125
Canada Goose 131
American Crow 138
Great Blue Heron 144
Turkey Vulture 149
White-Breasted Nuthatch 156
Bald Eagle 161
Loud Owls
Great Horned Owl 167
Barred Owl 170
“Confusing Fall Warblers” 175
Winter
Sandhill Crane 183
Blue Jay 189
Bobwhite 195
Pileated Woodpecker 200
American Robin 207
The Titmouse Family
Carolina Chickadee 213
Tufted Titmouse 218
Osprey 223
Chicken Hawks?
Red-Tailed Hawk 229
Cooper’s Hawk 233
Afterword 237
Sources 239
Index 243
INTRODUCTION
The designation “armchair birder” signals no achievement and con-
fers no distinction. I can’t claim to have driven 300 miles in the
middle of the night to see the avocets at dawn on Delaware Bay. As
for my “life list,” you could just about get the whole thing on a cock-
tail napkin.
What I do, mostly, is hang feeders and watch the birds that come
to me. I listen to their songs and sometimes succeed in fguring out
which bird is singing which tune. I observe what I can of their behav-
ior. If a bird happens to wander in that I haven’t seen before, it’s a big
day. I’m like, as Keats says, “some watcher of the skies / When a new
planet swims into his ken.”
Following family tradition, I’ve always hung a bird feeder or two,
but my skies got bigger ten years ago when my wife and daughter and
I moved from the suburbs to the country. I began seeing woodland
birds I’d only seen pictures of—tanagers, indigo buntings, pileated
woodpeckers, the shy and retiring yellow-billed cuckoo. The frst
spring we were here, I looked out the window and dropped my spoon
into my cereal bowl. A rose-breasted grosbeak was sitting on the
feeder. My goodness—Peterson’s cover bird, not twenty feet away.
Again, though, you don’t have to live in the woods to be an arm-
chair birder. On the other hand, if your interest extends beyond the
boundaries of your own property, you are permitted to get out of your
chair—temporarily anyway. I confess to having seen swallow-tailed
kites in the Florida panhandle, frigate birds circling around a high-
rise hotel in Cancun, and black skimmers on the Georgia coast. At a
bird sanctuary in Jamaica, the spectacular “doctor-bird” perched on
my fnger and sipped sugar water from a drip-bottle.
But the armchair birder doesn’t have to go anywhere. Because
here’s the thing: Reading is encouraged. Birds, after all, are down-
right remarkable creatures, and there’s only so much I’m going to fnd
out by watching the chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice that come
to the feeder all year-round. So, establishing my armchair status, I
have an ever-expanding bookshelf that includes, among other things,
ix