Episode VI: RETURN OF THE GERI

Seagull Steve has returned to the state of Texas in an attempt to rescue his friend This Machine Nate from the clutches of the vile Geri Birders.

Little does Steve know that the GERIATRIC EMPIRE has secretly begun amassing an unstoppable army even more powerful than the dreaded hordes that swarm South Padre Island.

When assembled, this ultimate army of Geris will spell certain doom for the small band of birders struggling to restore good identification skills to the birding galaxy...

How does that grab you? I don't really have the capacity to do an opening crawl in blog format, so this will have to do. Though the Jedi were obviously the protagonists in Return of The Jedi, the Geri are decidedly not the heroes of Return of The Geri. They are the rising darkness, and we are the light to meet it. 

Always in motion is the future, but I can see it now. The mosquitoes will be thick, and Geri will be thicker. Photographers (Geri and otherwise) high on bird lust and low on almost everything else will inspire anger, fear, aggression. When brightly colored birds in plain view within spitting distance are pointed out, Geri will struggle mightily to locate them and demand more instruction so I cannot enjoy watching the birds myself. Birds will be misidentified constantly. Black-and-white Warblers will become Blackpoll Warblers. Tennessee Warblers will become Philadelphia Vireos. Eastern Wood-Pewees will become Acadian Flycatchers. Ovenbirds will become Wood Thrushes. All Catharus thrushes will become each other. Red will become blue and one will become two. There will be squadrons of Geri to wade through at many of the sites, indeed, an army I feel I may not be able to defeat. But does it spell certain doom? Perhaps, but much like Lando Calrissian, Nien Nunb and Wedge Antilles defied the odds and destroyed the second Death Star, we may be able to find a way around the legion of Geri and get into some fantastic birding. That depends on the birds, the weather, our birding strategy, and a lot of luck.

Geri may be a force to be reckoned with, but a confiding Hooded Warbler can become more powerful than you could possibly imagine. 

Cheesy/stupid intro aside, we are excited to announce that BB&B will be returning to Texas this spring. Ostensibly, I will be leading a custom trip organized by the up and coming MAX REBO BIRDING TOURS ("No one can find Ortolans like Ortolans!"), and meeting up with famed Bicknell's Thrush expert and Jawbreaker scholar, This Machine Nate. But the real reason I am going is to bend the knee and worship at the altar of Spring Migration. Like most of you, I have never seen a proper fallout...I've been around for some good waves of migrants (what some would call "modest" fallouts perhaps, which seems oxymoronic to me), but not the genuine article...warblers littering the ground, ungodly hordes of exhausted migrants, too much for one birder to possibly take in...one of the great climaxes of North American birding. I've been close enough to the real deal to develop a strong appetite for it though, and so I must head east.

I like to see Indigo Buntings. I like to see lots of them, at extremely close range. For the birder looking to get high on Indigo, spring in coastal Texas is the time and the place to do just that. 

Now, as you may have heard, I am the #7 birder in the country...it's not like I am going into this situation blind. Even if I was going to spend weeks out there (I'm not), I'm not expecting to be so lucky, or for the birds to be so unlucky. I will be completely happy just to reconnect with a bunch of different species and be there when a decent number of newly-arrived migrants drop in to the woods.  I am expecting some slow, perhaps excruciatingly slow, days on the passerine front...but this is what one must endure to have the best chance at being around for an iconic migration event. Or just plain old good birding! It's not like I require 25 species of warblers in a day to be satisfied.

I found this Scarlet Tanager in the middle of the day ("best time to make for great birdwatch", according to one notorious birder), smashing a large moth in the middle of a suburban street with nothing resembling respectable stopover habitat in sight. I shot this crippling lens-cracker out my car window. No doubt this is a bird that meets all standard fallout criteria (tired/voraciously hungry/in weird coastal habitat/totally oblivious to people/facemelting), but unfortunately one bird does not make a fallout.

Aside from seeing a lot of birds and getting some crushing in, I do have one particular target bird in mind - Swainson's Warbler. I have never seen a Swainson's Warbler, and I hope to rectify that unfortunate situation by the time I return to California. While pretty much everyone else is looking up for yellow, green, blue, orange and red, I will be looking down for brown...at least some of the time. I am merely mortal, unable to resist the canopy-loving species, and one in particular has a special draw. If you are new to BB&B, you may not know that I dream about Cerulean Warblers more than any other bird, and I dream about birds with embarrassing frequency. I think it's a fantastic bird to dream about! Just last week, in a dream, I had male Cerulean and Blackburnian Warblers in the same binocular view...what a combo! You could even call it a dream combo. Will these birds make the jump from my subconscious to my binoculars in a few months? And if they do...what are the implications? Can anyone be ready for something like that? If you missed it from back in 2014, From South Padre Island to The Astral Plane: A Cerulean Warbler Vision Quest is a pretty good read. It is completely accurate account, with no fiction or exaggerations of any sort. Big lenses may be raised against me in anger once again, but I am not afraid...

Right. The mind begins to wander. Possibilities of glory on the scale of an exploding Death Star or failure the size of Alderaan seem equally plausible. Is my fate intertwined with that of the Cerulean Warbler? Is my entire life just a Franzenesque cliche? A lot of questions may be answered on this trip.

When the Geri-to-warbler ratio is askew in the woods, there will be no shortage of other great birds to look for instead. Upland Sandpiper is one of a great many shorebird species that use the area in spring, and I haven't seen them since the last time I was in the Lone Star [Beer] State.

Well, now you know the main plotlines we will be working with. Top priorities are freeing This Machine from the carbonite, lifer Swainson's Warbler, ask Cerulean Warbler about interdimensional travel and astro-projection. Eastern Whip and Black-whiskered Vireo are both needed birds as well, but I reckon a lot of luck would be required for either and my expectations for those are not high. Most of the time, it will be all about year birds! And our clients, of course...MAX REBO BIRDING TOURS is famous for going above and beyond to coddle (not cuddle) clientele, and this trip will be no exception.

I guess I should wrap this, considering nothing has even happened yet and it is still winter. The passerines in this post were photographed on South Padre Island, and the UPSA was in some ag fields north of Harlingen. All in Texas, obvi.

Straight Outta Massachusetts

Few people know that I originated in the Berkshires, aka Berkshire County, aka The Shires of Berk, in western Massachusetts. That is where my dad's side of the family lived for many generations, and family still dwells there to this day. In October, I took my new family back to meet my old family, then drove out to the coast for something resembling an actual vacation...which, of course, means there was birding. Not hella, but enough to scratch the itch. I didn't really have any dedicated time to bird in the Berkshires (where I got a great many lifers when I was younger), but we did get to spend a lot of time outdoors around Cape Ann, Ipswich and Plum Island. While we didn't rack up a very high species list (we were too late for most Neotropical migrants, which had already gone south), we did see some east coast goodness and I got a handful of bird photos worth sharing. Oh yeah, I got a LIFE BIRD too.

This extremely confiding Downy Woodpecker voraciously attacked the stalk of a sunflower at Halibut Point State Park, which turned out to have some of the best birding of the trip. I think a lot of birders consider it primarily a seawatching site, but for a west coast birder starved for eastern passerines, it definitely hit the spot.

Not a whole lot was photographed, granted, but the birding was good! Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Red-eyed and Blue-headed Vireos, Gray Catbird, Magnolia Warbler, Swamp and Field Sparrows were nice migrants. Flocks of White-throated Sparrows were larger than I had seen anywhere else. It had been a few years since I was around eastern White-breasted Nuthatches, which a look a bit different and sound a lot different from California birds. Remember, this was almost a split a few years ago.

As I said, Halibut Point is known for its quality of seawatching...I didn't have high hopes and didn't really intend on doing a serious seawatch, but it did not disappoint! The number of sea ducks going by was really impressive, we rarely see numbers like that moving on the west coast. In fact, I think the only place I've seen so many scoters on the move was in the Sea of Cortez.

White-winged Scoters were the most abundant migrant. Gannets went by in pleasing numbers, and Razorbills (something I did not expect) and Cory's Shearwaters (my first ever from land) were very nice to pick out. I could definitely see myself spending a whole lot of time here if I was in the area more often.

I really only had one target bird in mind for this trip though...Great Cormorant. I had never seen a Great Cormorant, but found them easily enough. Life bird! Not the juiciest life bird I've ever had, but hey a [native] life bird is a life bird. These two were at Bass Rocks, a traditional site for them, but I had them at a couple other locations as well. As advertised, they were both large and quite cormoranty.

Great Black-backed Gull is a novel bird to me. I really want to find one in California sometime. This one was at Eastern Point Wildlife Sanctuary in Gloucester, where there were great multitudes of sparrows and the only Indigo Bunting of the trip. It was a bit confusing to get there, but if you just ignore all the private property signs, everything is fine!

Chipping Sparrows are much more abundant on this part of the continent than what I am used to. Usually I look through flocks of sparrows to find a Chipping. In the east, you look through flocks of Chipping Sparrows to find something else. I got into a thick swarm of them at Eastern Point.

Eastern Point, and coastal Massachusetts in general, is SWAMP SPARROW COUNTRY. The locals here have no need to demand MAKE OUR COUNTRY SWAMP SPARROW AGAIN because the COUNTRY is already SWAMP SPARROW. This photo is proof.

Andrew's Point is another famed seawatching spot, just east of Halibut Point. I did a more dedicated seawatch here, and I'm glad I did. This GBBG (pronounced "guh-buh-buh-guh") has a moon nestled in the crook of its wing.

This dude pulled in a huge striped bass while I was there. He braved some serious surf, slippery rocks and terrible weather to land it...impressive. Most impressive. How come California fishermen don't go to such lengths? What have you got to say for yourselves?

The seawatching was very good here as well - I got my first Atlantic Northern Fulmar ever, a nice bird to bank in case of a split. Common Eiders (above) went by frequently, as did all the scoter species and a sizable number of Red-breasted Mergansers. Razorbills and Cory's Shearwaters made more appearances, and I saw my first eastern Red-throated Loon.

I was surprised to see a very distant Peregrine Falcon darting after something in between troughs. It caught something a few moments later, then headed back toward land to consume it. I was shocked to see it was a Leach's Storm-Petrel! I hadn't seen any at all, and would certainly not have seen this one (it was too windy and choppy) if the Peregrine had not caught it and showed it to me. Per eBird, another birder photographed a Peregrine doing the same thing to the same species a few years ago from the same spot.

After we left the Cape we headed west where we got another Airbnb at Great Neck, technically in Ipswich though it is not exactly close to town. Though the birding here was disappointing (it can be quite good apparently), it was a beautiful spot with access to a private beach. We were up on a hill overlooking Clark Pond and the mouth of Plum Island Sound...the southern end of Plum Island was just a few hundred yards away! Considering it takes almost an hour to get there by car, it's a pretty funny situation. For anyone who has not birded in the area, Plum Island/Parker River National Wildlife Refuge is a legendary birding spot in the state. Generally speaking, everything that shows up in Massachusetts seems to show up at Plum Island at some point, or within a few miles. Of course, we birded it, though the birds and the weather did not cooperate enough for much photography. This Song Sparrow (very different from the locals here in the bay area) took pity on me at least.

Parker River has lots of American Black Ducks throughout the year. In fact, probably the vast majority that I have seen in my life have been at this refuge over the years...but apparently I haven't seen enough to really provide meaningful commentary on them. What does it mean to be an American Black Duck? How is the soul of an American Black Duck different from that of a Mallard, a Mottled Duck, a Mexican Mallard? These are the things that keep me up at night.

This is the view of where we stayed, looking south from Plum Island.

Huh...guess I didn't do much crushing on that trip! Good thing I don't claim to be a photographer. The birding really was better than what the pictures indicate, seriously. Other avian highlights from Parker River include Long-tailed Duck, American Golden-Plover, Stilt and White-rumped Sandpipers, Fish Crow, Lapland Longspurs, a plethora of sparrows (Field, Swamp, Clay-colored, White-crowned, etc) and Purple Finches.

Maybe next time I'll get out to Cape Cod again. Did you see that footage from last year of shearwater flocks practically feeding on the beach (there's some good video *here* - skip to about 35 seconds in)? I want to be a part of that.

Oh yeah, Annie turns one today! I think she enjoyed the trip. She was particularly enthused about the apple orchard and a mudflat...she is a child of many habitats. I wonder if that ridiculous pink suit still fits, we need to get some more mileage out of it. Billy had a birthday this week too...much love to my girls, looking forward to our next trip together!

Bat Falcon!

Bats! Fuck! What is the deal with bats???? Well, bats aren't exactly a scientific enigma, but I don't see a whole lot of them. I was birding the Los Capitancillos Ponds recently when a big bat flew by in broad daylight. It was a hoary bat, one of the big bat species found throughout the United States. They stay active throughout the winter in the southern part of their range (many other species hibernate). I'm not sure what this individual was up to exactly, but it's diurnal adventure suddenly veered toward disaster right in front of my eyes.

The local American Kestrel that has been wintering here decided that the bat was a prey item - it went in for the kill! I was shocked. Kestrels typically seem so focused on little things on the ground, not this sort of hairy flying thing.

I rarely see kestrels go after anything as big as a hoary, and as you can guess I'd never seen a kestrel go after a bat of any kind. Even a kestrel in frenzied aerial pursuit is rare to see, that's much more of a Merlin thing.

This wasn't a playful chase on the kestrel's part, it was definitely a concerted effort to take the bat down. Horrifying for the bat, no doubt, but awesome to watch!

The kestrel did make contact with the bat at one point, but the bat persevered and was able to escape with its life. Kestrels are known to prey on bats, but this is the first time I'd seen it. Good aerial drama at the local patch!

Risky and Embarrassing: Ten Years of BB&B

This is a 2008-quality photo. Clearly, it leaves a lot to be desired...but it's a Burrowing Owl that lives under a big shoe! Burrowing Owls are great. Taken somewhere in the Imperial Valley, CA.

In July of 2008, one strange and humble birder began a blog. A blog that was meant for birders, yes, but aspired to be something different. Now this wasn't the birder's first blog, he had actually blogged successfully before, and was told by more than one person that he was actually a decent writer. But he wrote about friends, about music, about politics, about gossip, about raging...the exact sorts of things that bird bloggers not only don't write about, the majority of them don't even seem to have any personal experience with these concepts. Well, to be fair, birders gossip ceaselessly, but the human element was (and is) largely absent from both birders and their blogs.

The birder was acutely aware that he didn't fit in with most of the birders he had met over the years. How many other birders had to regularly cancel birding plans due to hangovers? How many other birders found themselves constantly annoyed by other birders? How come 90% of bird blogs he came across seemed like they were written by the same person? Did any other birders worship Greg Graffin as much as he did? Were there other birders out there in the Birdosphere that he would like to get to know? To find both a love of birding and a sense of the absurd cohabitating within a single soul was rare then, and it still is now. These are some of the notions that the birder had running through his head when he embarked on the saga that is BB&B. The birder had an angle on things that he felt was shared by few others of his nerdy ilk. He would blog birds, but he would do it differently. It was a risky venture, not to mention embarrassing. Would anyone ever notice? Would anyone care? On his deathbed, a wise ancient with great tufts of ear hair had warned him..."Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny".

And so, in July of 2008, Bourbon, Bastards and Birds quietly hatched. For years the birder toiled in relative solitude, with only a couple dozen regular readers and some unremarkable camera gear to help illustrate his posts with. It was rough going, but rewarding. The birding got better as time went on...he took bird jobs at Midway Atoll, Pennsylvania, southeast Arizona, the Aleutian Islands, Mexico, North Dakota...he had a lot of good material to work with. He was getting a lot of lifers. He only had to work half the year; the rest of the year was spent on a Perpetual Weekend. That left a lot of time for both birding and blogging.

In the winter and spring of 2010, the birder spent a lot of time in eastern Mexico, where Aplomado Falcons still have a stronghold. He still didn't have great camera equipment to work with, but birding there changed everything for him. Things have never been the same. Photographed in Alvarado, Veracruz, Mexico.

Eventually, at a point he cannot identify (2012-2013 maybe?), the birder and his blog went from obscurity to...to whatever is slightly more noticeable than obscurity. Semi-opaqueness? He befriended other bird bloggers. Random birders he would run into while in the field would recognize him from his blog (which the birder has never gotten used to, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't talk to him). A couple years after that, it all finally came together...when Dipper Dan the Global Birder Ranking System upgraded his status to #7 birder in the whole country, the glory and fame peaked, along with the drug abuse (not use, definitely abuse), outbursts of violence, sexcapades, general depravity, attempts at becoming an artist, etc. Eventually, he was committing acts so bizarre and vile that the birder himself could not deny the fact that he had become morally bankrupt and rotten to the core. This carried on for quite some time, though he managed to keep birding and blogging through it all.

The BB&B saga took a couple of dramatic turns in April of 2016, when the birder impregnated someone named Billy, and in the same week (the same day?) officially brought his famously fertile friend (and vastly superior writer) Cassidy Grattan in to the BB&B fold. Coincidence? Impossible. Slightly over 9 months later, the birder found himself to be a father. Though no longer a surprise at this point, it was still an extremely interesting turn of events.

And here we are, at the dawn of 2018. If you are wondering, the birder is not Felonious Jive, it's me, Seagull Steve. The Great Ornithologist Felonious Jive is now our only staff writer who is not a father, which is probably for the best considering he still does big fat rails of white stuff off his scope this time of year, and I'm not talking about snow! I don't think Annabelle will be doing Christmas Bird Counts with him any time soon.

Ah, the Iceland Gull...in 2017 we said goodbye to Thayer's Gull, effectively retiring one of the continent's most vexing ID problems. More than a few birders were unhappy about this lump made by the AOS, and the world's smallest violin got a lot of use for a few weeks. Lump or no lump, it's a bummer to not be close to the bay's classic herring run sites any more, but now I've got a huge gull roost within walking distance of Rancho de Bastardos.  Fingers crossed for a good gull at my patch in the next few months. Photographed at the Los Capitancillos Ponds, San Jose, CA.

Now on the other side of 2017, I'm happy to report that I'm somewhat settled into my role as a father. The constant exhaustion of the early months of raising Annie has morphed into constant distraction instead. Bourbon, Bastards, and Birds really does sum up much of my life now. Well, it always has, but now the definition of "bastard" has switched from the informal use to the strictest sense of the word...I spend most of his time with my lovely bastard girlfriend and our wonderful bastard daughter, and several times a week see my old friend Whiskey. My 2017 year list finished at 350 species (320 in California), which I figure to be the lowest total I've had since 2006, or some other year in the pre-blog daily binge-drinking era...The Ashtray is gone, but not forgotten.

Why such a low and embarrassing total? I had a baby, obvi. But on top of that, I saw almost no mountain birds (no Sierra trip this year), and had only a handful of dedicated birding days outside of California. That said, 2017's Lower 48 list (aka the whole year list) was actually better than 2016's Lower 48 list, and I got each and every expected "local" California species that I humiliatingly did not see in 2016 - Tundra Swan, White-winged Scoter, Sandhill Crane, Glaucous Gull, Prairie Falcon, Blackpoll Warbler. Eight new birds for the California list was a fantastic total though, and matched 2016's total of additions to the precious state list. I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to match that pace of state birds this year, or ever again.

Lifers were few and far between in 2017, but Great Cormorant finally ended up in the proverbial bag after all these years. This wasn't a nemesis bird by any means, but it was my easiest remaining Lower 48 bird. To me, Great Cormorant has one of the strangest distributions of any North American species...they are a cold water seabird on the east coast, but you can also see them in equatorial Africa, hundreds of miles from the coast. Weird. Photographed at Bass Rocks, Rockport, MA.

2017 will go down in my personal history book as the year Annabelle was born, and the year of the Ross's Gull - what is dead may never die! I could do a nice post to wrap up all my birding from this year, but let's face it...I'm hopelessly behind and time is of the essence. So we must look ahead. Cherish the birds of 2017, but don't cling to them. Try to process the daily horrors of a president that makes George W. Bush seem meek and innocent in comparison, of a soulless and revolting congress, of the tragedies wrought by the hurricanes in the Caribbean, of the catastrophic Thomas Fire that ran amok in my home county and is now the largest fire in California's history. To top it off, December saw a return of grim, drought-like conditions to the state...but will things turn around? How will 2018 be different?

How about this for starters...BB&B will be turning TEN YEARS OLD. Can you believe it? I can't. We will be celebrating. We will be birding. We plan on bringing you lots of special content...more interviews, more features from The Human Birdwatcher Project (the original birding project), and plenty of the classic birding and birder coverage that has kept you coming back all this time. I may not be able to effortlessly churn out 1-2 posts a week anymore, but BB&B intends to not finish 2018 with a swan song and a death rattle, but with the violent and victorious bellow of a well-oiled blogging machine! Or something along those lines.

Thanks to everyone who has read us over all these years, see you again soon!