A few days ago, a friend texted me that a red-flanked bluetail had been spotted a couple of miles from where I live. I had to look up what a red-flanked bluetail was. Turns out that the red-flanked bluetail—also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin—is a small songbird with red flanks (or orange flanks, I guess, depending on who’s looking?) and a blue tail (which isn’t always a big deal?). More to the point, the species normally ranges throughout Asia and Europe, so in the Seattle area it is quite the rarity.
News of the bluetail left me largely unmoved. I like birds a lot, as people who know me know, but I don’t chase rarities. I don’t have any profound philosophical reasons for this. I’m just lazy, and the thought of skulking around the suburbs for hours only to stand among the peering hordes just this side of some befuddled schlub’s property line so I can stare at some distant smudge in the bushes is not why I got into birding.
On second thought, there might just be a tiny bit of philosophy undergirding my studied disinterest.
Not that I dismiss rarities out of hand. A couple of male Eurasian wigeons—a kind of dabbling duck that is a rare if reliable visitor from eastern Asia—have been hanging out with the resident flock of American wigeons at a nearby park for the past couple of years. Whenever I’m there I scan for their reddish heads among the sea of green and brown heads that is the wigeon flock as they all munch their way across the grass. I can’t deny the little flare of delight I feel when I spot the two males waddling along, strangers in a strange land.
At least at the park I have an idea of what I’m looking for. I’m impressed someone had the wherewithal not only to notice the red-flanked bluetail (or orange-flanked bush-robin), but also to know what it was. I can’t guarantee I would have been equal to the occasion had the bluetail shown up in my yard. I’ve lived on the western slope of the Cascade Range for most of my life and am pretty familiar with its avifauna, but over the years there have been a lot of stray peeps and chirps I didn’t bother with beyond thinking, Huh, that sounds different; or weird flashes out of the corner of my eye that I never took the time to track down.
I like to think my general experience has been enriched, though, even if I never solved those mysteries in an academic sense.
Sometimes I wonder how many rare birds I’ve been in the presence of without knowing it. Given the way birds move around the world, I assume a fair few. If I were so inclined I could try to figure it out. There are algorithms for this sort of thing. I could enter my parameters, and the trickster gods of probability would spit out the odds of, say, a female red-flanked bluetail (or orange-flanked bush-robin) flying about near the coast of China or Japan and getting ready to migrate to her breeding grounds in Russia when she is suddenly swept up in a storm and blown out to sea, and she flaps and flaps until, exhausted, she comes upon a freighter heading east, and she alights on this savior ship and sails over the Pacific to the Salish Sea, where, as the ship slips into the inland waters, she sees a dark forest on a foreign shore, so she disembarks and flies into the trees, but rather than concealing herself she makes her way to a small town and takes up brief residence in someone’s backyard a few miles from my house, actually just a short walk from the bookstore I often visit, and which I was planning to go to tomorrow, to get a cup of coffee.
Those odds have to be vanishingly small, don’t they? I mean, squint and what we’re really talking about is a miracle. This small bird somehow made it here all the way from Asia. Practically on my doorstep. And I’ll be up that way. So maybe just a quick look. I’d be a fool not to.
Photo of a female red-flanked bluetail taken in Japan in 2013 by Alpsdake, courtesy of Creative Commons.
Hi, Eric! Your pen-ultimate paragraph gave me such joy. Call it the graph on the female red-flanked bluetail gone astray or what-we-don’t-see-when-we’re-busy-drinking-coffee graph.
The last birder I seriously interviewed for a story waxed most poetically when he talked about driving over to the dump near nightfall to listen for birds. Sometimes he took his wife, and they’d sit, probably in their car, not far from the fence with the windows wide open. “Shhhh,” I imagine my source saying to his partner. “Listen. Do you hear it?”
Oooh, I’d love to see that graph. I imagine a line doing a lot of dipsy-doodles or something, with a little flash of red in the bottom right corner. And that’s a lovely image of the two in the car with the windows down, listening. More often than not, when I bird by car with my wife next to me, she’s yelling at me to keep my eyes on the road.
Love it, Eric! Matrimonial birding is not without its strife.