Cracking The Code of The Rebus: A Band Return For an Evening Grosbeak

Do you get to see Evening Grosbeaks often? I don't. I haven't seen one in years. The lowlands of the South Bay are, unsurprisingly, a poor place to live if you want to encounter this charismatic species very often. A quick check of eBird confirms my already dire suspicions...I haven't seen an Evening Grosbeak since 2013, when I made a rare foray into my now current county to see them in suburban Sunnyvale.

2013? Good lord. It has been too long.

But the winter of 2019-2020 has not been like most other winters. It has been an invasion year for Red Crossbills and Evening Grosbeaks in much of California, and as the old saying goes, I was "on heightened alert due to the Grosbeaks". You may not remember that one, but I assure you it's a thing. Luckily I was not the only one on heightened alert, and local birders found a flock of grosbeaks in downtown Los Altos, where they settled down and were too good to pass up. 

As you have already figured out, I found them. After some mixed success with getting looks at the flock, I stumbled on to the main group of birds while walking back to my car a few blocks away. No birders were there, no people on the street asked me what I was doing, and cops ignored me as I tried to crush the brazen grosbeaks raining down berries upon me from low overhead. It's rare to be birding around tons of people and not get interrupted, so I had a particularly excellent time.

This is what Evening Grosbeak habitat looks like in Los Altos. It's a weird place to be birdwatching.

The name of the Evening Grosbeak game around here is Chinese pistache, an ornamental tree commonly planted in the area that get fully loaded with berries in late fall and early winter. Lots of birds love pistache berries, including the grosbeaks. Just look at this glutton.

After my time with this gripping little flock, I was sated. Fingers crossed to not wait another six years to see them again.

But the good grosbeak times did not stop when I left the birds behind. Several days later I uploaded my photos and was shocked to plainly see a band on a female I had taken quite a few pictures of.

Finding bands on birds is always fun, but finding a band on a passerine someplace where there is no banding going on is almost unheard of. I also had no idea the bird was banded while I was taking pictures of it...how embarrassing.

A few days later, Friend of The Blog David Tomb contacted me and told me had refound the banded bird. This is what finally got me to actually look closely at the band...I had assumed that there was no way I had good enough photos of the band that the entire code could be readable. USFWS songbird bands are tiny and definitely not meant to be read while the bird wearing it is moving around uninhibited.

I was wrong.

I was shocked, again, to find that I could make out 8 consecutive digits of the band numbers in my photos. That's not supposed to happen. Then another thing that wasn't supposed to happen happened...in a Hail Mary check of eBird photos, I found that one other observer had put up a photo of the banded bird. The one and only number she could make out was the one I was missing. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Lo and behold, I had somehow gotten the entire band number of a tiny band I had no idea was there when I was staring right at it. This is not how it is supposed to go. I got the banding info immediately, and there it is. The bird is from western Oregon, or at least spent time there in the past, which makes it presumably a Type 1 Evening Grosbeak, as opposed to the Type 2s that are found in the Sierras. It's not a young bird either! 

Pretty chuffed about the whole thing - I might never recover a songbird band in this manner ever again!

I will leave you with a fitting passage on Evening Grosbeaks, from the inimitable William Leon Dawson, back in 1923:

His garb is a patchwork; his song a series of shrieks; his motions eccentric; his humor phlegmatic; and his concepts beyond the kin of man. Although at times one of the most approachable of birds, he is, on the whole, an avian freak, a rebus in feathers.

South Bay Evening Grosbeaks

I don't bird the south bay very often. I will admit it. In the bay area, I stick to Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda for the most part...to get me out of those counties takes a particularly rare bird or a particularly deep and numbing boredom that only birding some different places can alleviate. Yes, even the Perpetual Weekend can take its toll if you don't do enough stuff.

And so one day not long ago I found myself sitting in sluggish traffic on Highway 101 hating everything for a good hour and a half before I got to where I was going...a suburb of Sunnyvale, CA. 887 Mango Street. Why? A tree in front of their house had been attracting Evening Grosbeaks for several weeks.

Evening Grosbeaks are not rare in California, but in their strongholds in the northern and mountainous parts of the state they are always creatures of irregularity. It takes some strange conditions to drive them to the lowlands. The flocks known to lurk in this neighborhood were certainly there due to the poor seed crop in mountains and northern forests that drove this species and many other "winter finches" far to the south of where the snowy winter fortresses that they prefer. I would be very interested in where these Sunnyvale grosbeaks were 6 months ago...higher elevations of California, or someplace distant and bizarre? We will never know.

After staring at the barren, lifeless trees in the area for a few minutes, I moved on to the other neighborhood address that had been hosting birds, to no avail. Determined to see these birds (that many birders had missed repeatedly), I deliberately left my camera in my car and walked back to Mango Street. There's nothing like the old leave-the-camera-behind trick to lure in high-quality birds.

As I approached the area, I could hear a distinct cracking sound ahead of me...I looked around a tree trunk, and there sat 2 male Evening Grosbeaks, crunching away on the seeds of a pistache tree. My pupils dilated. The heart quickened. I chewed on my dry tongue like it was a piece of jerky. They were closer than I had ever seen them, which had been at least 4 years actually.

Quickly, my face began to melt, it was awful. Have you ever had to go running with a melty face? It gets everywhere. Trying to keep my shit together, I staggered/ran/violently convulsed back towards my car to retrieve me camera, praying to the Bird Gods that the birds would not be gone by the time I returned.

The Bird Gods were merciful that day, although I am still feeling the effects of the rather large blood sacrifice I made later in the day was far larger than what I normally offer. The grosbeaks just sat around munching loudly and occasionally called as I sat there crushing them repeatedly, as you have probably figured out by now. I inched closer and closer to them until some loud people walking a dog walked directly underneath them, which had almost no noticeable effect on the birds. At that point I just walked as close as I wanted while still getting the best angles. It was glorious.

Finally, a garbage truck drove by and spooked them, but we all lived happily ever after.