BRAMBRING

BRAMBLING/BRAMBRING.  Photographed in Sunnybrae, CA, by the illustrious Rob Fowler.

May, 2010.  I stepped off the Zodiac onto Attu Island, sacred birding ground.  My first lifer on Attu? BRAMBLING.  A couple days later, I step onto Buldir Island.  My first lifer on Buldir? Rustic Bunting.

January, 2012: Lurking in someone's backyard in central Oregon, a BRAMBLING appeared.  It's good to see you again BRAMBLING...hopefully it won't be long until we meet again.

November, 2014.  I was doing field work in Humboldt County, and decided to stay for the weekend afterwards.  I didn't grow up there, but I am not ashamed to say that my years Humboldt County made a huge impact on who I am (and no, I am neither a tweaker nor a pot farmer).  I had a great weekend with friends, and without guilt did no birding whatsoever.  Arcata, where I was staying, is about 5 hours from where I currently live, so I only get up there once in a while.  The problem with living 5 hours from Arcata is that you don't really want to drive there very often, but it gets more than it's share of exceptional birds in the area.  But on this weekend, there were no stress-inducing rarities around to worry over.

I left town on Sunday, and upon getting back to Oakland I got word that Arcata's famed bird artist Gary Bloomfield found a Painted Bunting in his yard. That hurt me, as I had been just a few blocks from his house and needed PABU for my beloved state list.  But PABU was just a tremor compared to the earth-shattering news that came the following day...a BRAMBLING, of all things, had been found in Sunnybrae, which was just a couple miles from where I had been staying.  Now I had seen my share of BRAMBLINGS on Attu Island and later on Buldir, but I had not seen once since the summer of 2010.  It had been a while since I had eyeballed one...and here one had just been right under my nose, on what part of me still considers my home turf.  It was excruciating.

BRAMBLING is not an unusual bird in the western Aleutians, but it's a hell of a bird in California.  It was the first chaseable one that had been found since I started birding.  To add to BRAMBLING'S allure, it was a Sibe.  Californians love Sibes, and I am no exception.  So suffice to say, I found it remarkable that not one but two high quality vagrants had shown up immediately after I left town. Remarkable indeed.  Day after day people would refind BRAMBLING, without much apparent difficulty.

I was tempted to quit birding.

December, 2014. A few weeks later I drove down to Ventura for an early Christmas.  The unthinkable, yet somehow expected event happened; another MEGA showed up right after I left town. This time, it was the Rustic Bunting in San Francisco.  Another Sibe!  I couldn't fucking believe it. What horseshit! What did I do to deserve this torture?  It could have been worse...none of these avian torture instruments were life birds...but at this point it hardly mattered.  I had been brutally gripped off by what seemed like all my birding friends.  It was all rubbish.

I was this close to retiring from birding.

Remarkably, the Rustic Bunting decided to spend the winter in the exact same spot where it was found, and I was lucky enough to see the bird a couple times.  Things were becoming ok again.  Even more remarkably, BRAMBLING decided to stay put for the winter as well, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I could bolt back up to Humboldt to meet it.

January, 2015. Everything had fallen into place.  Dipper Dan and I drove from Oakland to Arcata on a Friday night; BRAMBLING had been seen earlier that day.  Despite having the odds stacked against us (that is another story), we both managed to show up at the appointed BRAMBLING viewing spot early the next morning to meet Rob Fowler and his group of eager birders for BRAMBLING stakeout.  We waited.  And waited.  No BRAMBLING.  The owner of the house who usually hosts BRAMBLING was going out of town, so we didn't get access to her yard, like many birders did in the past.  Hours passed.  We left, and returned later that day.  No BRAMBLING. Hours passed.  It started to rain.

We had dipped.

Sunday morning coming down.  After another eventful night, it was back to BRAMBLING, this time with Justine, Sadowski and Natarie to assist us in not finding the bird.  They did exactly that...we did not see it.  We gave up before 10:00 AM and went to eat a taco omelette.  And let me tell you, that was some taco omelette.

Later that afternoon we returned to Sunnybrae.  We had a good idea about what was going to happen, but we had to try.

Hours passed.

This time we got to sit around in the backyard with a bunch of college kids, so a bunch of us got to dip on BRAMBLING together.  Unfortunately, every other fucking person there had seen it already besides me and Dipper Dan.

I wondered why I bothered to chase birds with someone who is a known "dipper".

Monday.  Dan and I once again lurked in suburban Sunnybrae for hours.  By this time, we had been giving conflicting tips on viewing the bird by countless local birders, and I was pulling my hair out.  I gave hate looks to the local neighborhood Merlin, who had obviously gotten into a pattern of hunting birds at a feeder a few houses down, a feeder BRAMBLING was sometimes seen at.  I saw it kill a Pine Sisken...did it kill BRAMBLING as well? Or was it the local Sharp-shinned Hawk?  Or a cat? Despite our refusal to give up on BRAMBLING, Dipper Dan and I had a sneaking suspicion that the bird had just been eaten by something else.

Hours passed.

At one point I slipped on some grimy moss and ate shit in the street, slamming my camera onto the pavement.  Given our birding luck the past few days, I really thought that was going to be it for my birdcrusher, but it was oddly undamaged.  Later, as I stood peeping over the top of Cindy's fence into her junco-filled yard (for the record, she would not have had a problem with this) I decided to check eBird....and there it was.  Allegedly, while I was a few miles away eating a Taco Omelette the day before, someone saw BRAMBLING.  It wasn't exactly a compelling report...but shit, it's BRAMBLING.  Sure there are a lot of sketchy birders out there, but BRAMBLING is hard to misidentify...right?  We were stunned by this news, and Dipper Dan immediately went into complete denial about it....but it made us stand there even longer.

By now Dipper Dan and I had gotten sick of talking about the BRAMBLING with nonbirders, and only referred to it as BRAMBRING.  It was fun to hear bewildered nonbirders talk about BRAMBRING.  We BRAMBRINGED several people.  Despite this juvenile (yet deeply gratifying) form of entertainment, one thing was clear: the bird wasn't there.  We had put in so many hours in the last 3 days...we had to give up sometime. We clearly weren't going to see it.  So we left.

Later that day, we were coming back to the car after dipping on even more birds at Crab Park, which is not anywhere near the realm of BRAMBRING.  This is what happened next:

Random Lady: Are you guys photographing? Looking for seals?  Or...

Seagull Steve: No, not photographing.  Birding.  We are looking for-

Dipper Dan: Brambring.

*silence*

Random Lady: Did you say..."Brambring"?

Dipper Dan: *nods*

Random Lady: What is that?

Dipper Dan: Bird.

Random Lady: Oh!

That moment brought a fleeting moment of light in what was otherwise a dark abyss. We knew we had just missed BRAMBRING by the slimmest of margins, and it was never going to be seen again. And for a while, it wasn't.  So that was a fitting end to the BRAMBRING story...or so we thought.

February 2015. We were back in Humboldt County...again...once more dipping on even more birds that Dipper Dan needed to see.  We dipped on all sorts of stuff.  But the weather was shit and it was time to go home, so back to the bay we went.  The next day, I was in my office when Rob Fowler broke the horrible, treacherous news....BRAMBRING had been seen again.  Like a Siberian Phoenix, it had risen from the ashes to taunt Dipper Dan and I.

What are the chances? Could C-3PO even calculate the odds of this outcome?  Can you fucking believe it?  Do I have a BRAMBRING hex on me?  That is the third time in three months where I've been just a few miles from BRAMBRING by a day or less have been unable to make contact with it. How can that happen?  The mind reels.

Some birders say they know of suffering.  Some say they know pain.  You think life is pain?  Please, tell me about it, but I only have one response...


BRAMBRING.

The Human Birdwatcher Project Presents: Cage Bird Conspiracy Theorists

Ah, the Common Cuckoo. Undoubtedly California's best bird of 2012, and undoubtedly a bird that flew a long ways from home. Photographed in Watsonville, CA.

Birders, it's time to put the kibosh down. Over the years, I've heard birders questioning the origins of high (and low) quality vagrants more and more often. Some skepticism is certainly healthy, but needlessly claiming a rare bird is someone's escaped pet is bad for everyone. This is a disturbing trend, to say the least...it is a persistent pattern observed in birders, and is often based on a lack of understanding of natural patterns of occurrence, how birds migrate, and what birds are and are not frequently kept in captivity.

In case you are not up on this contentious and very nerdy issue, let me catch you up. Birders like seeing wild birds. However, not all birds that live in the wild got there on their own. If you go to the duck pond at your local city park, you will probably come across Muscovy Ducks. They may be able to live there without supervision, but the chances that this popular barnyard bird migrated from a wild population in Central America is about nil...something we can all agree on. They are no more wild than the peacocks that get the run of your local zoo.

Problems arise when birders poo-poo a naturally-occurring bird as an escapee when there is little to no evidence to back it up. This happens over and over again, and I think less experienced birders may be prone to heeding these uninformed opinions.

For example, a friend and well-known California birder who goes by Red Phalarope Man instantly shat upon the Black-bellied Whistling-Duck (to his credit, not literally) that showed up for a brief period in the middle of the state last May. He was completely convinced it was a bird that had escaped captivity. Although there was the very small possibility he was correct, there was no compelling evidence suggesting it was anything but a wild bird, which had occurred here a few times in the past. Sure enough, you may remember last summer was a huge year for Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks that wandered far north of their usual range all over the country. Our bird, since accepted by our state's Bird Police, was just leading the first wave. Any unwitting birder who may have paid Red Phalarope Man too much heed may have passed on chasing this California MEGA, something they would have regretted for the rest of their life.

Emperor Goose is a species that has been questioned as naturally occurring outside Alaska, but has a proven regular track record of occurrence at coastal sites in the western U.S. during the winter (which is when and where one would anticipate them). If Emperors were really being released willy-nilly, you would expect them to be found all over the country, at all times of year. This vagrant Emperor Goose was photographed at Ocean Shores, WA.

Escaped birds usually come in 3 flavors:

1) Waterfowl collections and zoos. You or I don't know anyone who collect exotic ducks and geese, but these bird hoarders are out there. They hold really bizarre and exotic birds that could also migrate here from their native lands...sometimes. While I have seen some species in the wild that unquestionably originated from these bird collections (i.e. Ringed Teal, Black Swan, Egyptian Goose), people are always questioning the legitimacy of vagrant waterfowl...White-cheeked Pintail, Falcated Duck, Smew, Barnacle Goose, Bean Goose, you name it, these birds always raise doubts among certain people when they are found on our shores.

This undoubtedly wild Harris's Hawk is part of a family group that is resident in Jacumba, CA.

2) Falconry birds. Falconers keep a variety of hawks and falcons of both species that are native and not native to the continent. Sometimes they escape. I have seen a Harris's Hawk perched, with jesses, on the TV antenna of Dipper Dan's house in the Sierran foothills of Angel's Camp, CA...certainly not a wild bird, and not in a very likely place a wayward vagrant would appear.

In California, our state Bird Police for many years bizarrely refused to accept Crested Caracara as a naturally-ocrurring vagrant, despite their regular and repeated visits all over the state. They have since become less ultraconservative (always a good thing, amirite?) and accept new records of this bird just about annually.



Black-throated Magpie-Jays roam free in the Tijuana River Valley, just south of San Diego. This is a great example of an obvious escapee...it's a nonmigratory species that is found nowhere near San Diego, but is known to be kept in captivity (unfortunately) just across the border in Mexico.

3) Cage birds. This category includes parrots and many Carribean and Mexican birds that were likely caught in the wild but were released or escaped far from where they were kidnapped. Many species that fall into this category are known. However, birders often get too wrapped up in the "cage bird" hypothesis, i.e. the Red-legged Honeycreeper found during spring migration on the Dry Tortugas that was rejected by the state's ostensibly then-corrupt Bird Police.

Most experienced birders have encountered at least a couple of birds that truly fall into one these "escaped" categories in the wild. California seems to get a lot of them...mixed with wild birds in wild settings, I've run into flamingos, Pin-tailed Whydah, Red-billed Leothrix, Black-backed Oriole, White-collared Seedeater, Phyrruloxia, Blue Mockingbird, Gray Silky-Flycatcher, who knows how many kinds of parrots and parakeets...the list goes on.

Brambling is one of many Siberian/Asian birds that make a wrong turn during migration and show up in North America. This one spent a winter in Woodburn, Oregon.

So how does one avoid being overly cautious? Learn about the species in question. Does it have an established pattern of occurrence? Is it a long distance migrant? Where have strays shown up in the past? Would it be more likely to find in certain seasons than others? There is much wisdom to soak up from other birders, but not the self-proclaimed authorities who rank a lot lower on the Global Birder Ranking Scale than they think they do...and it can take more than some decent bird ID chops to really sort these folks out.

There are known repeat offender escapees, and known areas where there are high concentrations of these birds as well. For example, southern California gets all kinds of bizarre stuff, mostly on the coastal plain; it is widely believed that these birds originate from cage birds just over the Mexican border. Florida is awash in strange exotics as well.

A recent instance where the Cage Bird Conspiracy came up was when a Common Cuckoo (a long-distance Siberian migrant) spent some time in California this fall. This species occurs rarely but regularly on Alaskan islands during migration, so as with other "sibes", birders have always known that a stray could potentially fly down the west coast of North America. There is a definite pattern of this happening with many other species...many Asian-flavored waterfowl birds, plovers and sandpipers, Red-throated Pipit, Northern Wheatear, wagtails, etc. stray regularly to Alaska, and sometimes down into Canada and the Lower 48. When you look at the above map, you can see that the Bering Strait separates Alaska's Seward Peninsula and easternmost Russia by a mere 50 miles or so...it is no stretch of the imagination to think a lost Russian bird could find themselves migrating down the wrong coast by mistake. However, to invent a scenario in which a Common Cuckoo is born in Russia/East Asia, captured, sold to a tourist, taken to the United States and somehow freed during the height of fall migration (something a couple birders insinuated) sounds more like Hollywood to me. And yes, that is a movie I would see.

What about ship-assisted birds you ask? Well, that is another blog post for another time.

Pin-tailed Whydahs are becoming increasingly common in southern California, and have now been reported at least twice as Fork-tailed Flycatchers. This is also an annoying trend, but misidentifications always have and always will happen. Whydahs are African birds, so based on the fact that no passerines migrate between North America and Africa (except Northern Wheatear?!), we can deduce that this is not a true vagrant.

Of course there are instances where escaped birds are mistakenly considered naturally-occurring as well, but I feel those cases are a bit easier to sort out. It is certainly true that birders are falliable and are probably not correct 100% of the time in either case...as the Human Birdwatcher Project reminds us, "birders are people too!".

Winter Tour Part IV: A Brambling Finale

A white as Snow Bunting. Also, a white-ass Snow Bunting. Found in an old parking lot next to the PDX airport, OR.

After a week in Port Angeles, I was ready for a change of scenery. A storm chased me out of the Olympic Peninsula and I ended up at Pinko's house in Northeast Portland. Aside from going to some good bars and restraunts, I ended up going birding with the one who calls herself "Jen", who owns and operates I Used To Hate Birds. It turns out she is a crude, perverse woman who Still Hates Birds, and we had a horrible time birding together.

Kidding! Jen is rad. She even showed me this glowing little Snow Bunting, which I had struck out on earlier in my road trip.

Behold the Snow Bunting in it's ivory awesomeness. This is a particularly white individual that had some birders trying to twist it into a McKay's, or some sort of hybrid.

When it time came to leave Portland, a brutal storm had moved onto the West Coast and I was seriously stressed about dealing with the snow and ice that lay on the high passes of Highway 5. What was even more stressful was that no other than a BRAMBLING has conveniently been wintering in someone's backyard just south of Portland, which was where I happened to be going. On top of that, it was rumored that The Gatekeeper of the Brambling would be at work that day, and I would have to stand creepily/pathetically on the sidewalk and hope to get a glimpse of it as it went to and from the back yard.

Luckily, The Gatekeeper had stayed home sick that day, and birders had full access to Brambling Goodness. Despite the rain, the Brambling arrived in less than an hour, and a few of us got some solid views. I had seen a number of them in the Aleutian Islands before, but this was my first for the Lower 48 (not that I keep that list). Only a tiny minority of North American birders have been lucky enough to see one of these, and this was a pretty abiding bird.

Brambling. Dark-eyed Junco. Brambling > Junco. Woodburn, OR.

Brambling. Hella rare, and very colorful. Or perhaps I should say, "hella colourful".

Eurasian Wigeon. Easy to find, but hard to photograph in a rainstorm. Westmoreland Park, Portland, OR.

Broadside Eurasian Wigeon. Birders interested in the Global Birding Ranking System may want to know you have to be able to identify female Eurasian Wigeons in order to qualify for the upper 50%.

Jen and I saw a number of Thayer's Gulls at Westmoreland Park. I'm still having trouble reconciling the fact that I see so many all the time...Thayer's was a relatively rare and extremely difficult bird to identify in my formative birding years in Southern California.

Buffleheads don't mind a little rain...or even a lot. Being distant (yet obvious) relatives of buffaloes, they are strong. Westmoreland Park, OR.

Anna's Hummingbirds can provide some much-needed color to the Pacific Northwest in winter. Woodburn, OR.

As a final note, there was a father and son who were in attendance at the Brambling. The son looked to be 9 or 10 years old. After the Brambling came and went, the father explained they had just flown out from Cincinnati, specifically to see the Brambling and a nearby Emperor Goose. Last fall, Pops explained that he had taken his son to see The Big Year...and after the movie was over, his son said "I want to do a big year". And that's what they were doing. If I were capable of human emotion (I only experience avian emotion, at this point), I may have shed a cheesey/nerdy tear or two.

After the Brambling, I made it safely to Corvallis, Arcata and back to San Francisco. Thanks to Whitney, Sam, Lena, Jerome, Seanessy, Debbiebaby, Cass, Liz, and Pinko for the hospitality and good company, as well as Stilt, Alex (Arex), Charlie and Anne for being heroic and rad.

Happy times! Great success!

Out Here Standing On A Rooftop Screaming

Different shades of rock. Sandpipers. Rock Sandpipers. Adak Island, Alaska.

Whoa! Its almost Thanksgiving! How did that happen? I'm contemplating entering a deep and profound state of panic. What else is there to do? All my friends have higher year lists than me....but that's ok, because we all know who is having more fun. That, and I am positive that they didn't run into dozens of Bramblings this summer.

Yes, birders like to lord their bird sightings over each other. It's all part of the game. They sound like a bunch of assholes, I know, but they're mostly just juvenile. Actually, one of the biggest assholes I can think of is a certain birder from San Diego. In fact, this person's reputation is so well-known that he would even recognize himself if he was to read this. So I don't feel bad then, because I'm just keeping it real.

Rock Ptarmigan! Adak Island, Alaska.

Which is too bad, because San Diego is a quality county for birding in California, and I have great sympathy for all the poor schmucks who run into this tool and don't know what they have on their hands. One of the last things birders expect when they run into other enthusiasts in the field is for them to be complete dicks. Awkward, badly dressed, and prone to horribly mispronouncing things, yes, but not dicks.

Honestly, what does that accomplish? As cheesy as it sounds, birders have a community, and it doesnt really benefit anyone to give your peers shit for trivial and outright stupid reasons. You know what I'm saying? If you want to vent and act like a child and pretend people want to pay attention to you, start a blog for God's sake.

Yes I know this is a gruesome picture, but these are Bramblings, so cut me some slack. Attu Island, Alaska.

Yes, that last bit was intentionally ironic, thanks. I hope you are all preparing yourselves for the doom and horror that is sure to arrive at your doorstep on Thursday. I also suggest everyone evacuating the entire Mono Basin, because something bad will happen on Thanksgiving. I guarantee it. Things may never be the same again.

Steaming west through the Aleutians on the Tiglax.