Sinister Bird Cheerleading
I realized that as my life has shifted to more professional writing, I don't write for my blog like I used to. Once I've written something that ends up over at Outdoor News or Audubon, there's no need to put it here. But I do a lot of writing for other things like Encyclopedia Shows so rather than just leaving that to be scratches in one of the myriad of notebooks Non Birding Bill and I keep, I thought I might as well put it out here for better or for worse. So here is this week's Encyclopedia Show entry on Cheerleading. There is some profanity (gasp).
I don't get cheerleading. I'm not disparaging people to have cheered or currently cheer but I don't get the concept as a whole. But then again, I'm often perplexed by sports ball. We cheer for people with tremendous athletic ability who can tackle each other, or throw and catch an oddly shaped ball from one end of a field to another, or for being able to dodge of bunch of dudes while bouncing a ball and periodically tossing it into a round net. I find the find the sports industry as strange as I find the spectacle of the fashion industry.
Maybe it’s because most of the things I do aren’t cheer related events like birding or paint by number. No one ever cheers you while birding:
“2-4-6-8!
Who just got a magnificent frigate?
Birdchick! That’s right, bird-bird-bird-bird Birdchick!”
For me personally, I don't find cheerleading useful. Every now and then I get in my head to do a 5K. I'm not great at it. My rules for a 5K are:
1. Finish.
2. Don't die.
3. Don't be last.
My reasons for doing 5ks isn’t any deep spiritual thing. It’s to keep eating in the manner in which I have become accustomed and if there ever really is a zombie apocalypse I'll have a reasonable chance of surviving the first round of killings. I've never experienced the "runner's high" that people talk about, but then again the people who tell me about it tell I need to do a longer run and that you really feel it at the 8k mark. Blah. I'm lucky to make it to the 5k mark.
When you run at events, there are people who are cheering you on...complete with cowbell, usually at the halfway mark or towards the finish. When I get to that point I'm not that thrilled with the cheering because my brain is generally to the point of, "Hey, you know a walk/run is a perfectly valid way to finish this and would probably burn more calories...aw, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck, people are cheering us, we can't stop and walk now we have to show them their cheering is working, keep running. Fuck. Keep running."
But I have had occasion to see birders cheer odd things like actual life and death instances. I was co-leading a trip to Kearney, Nebraska to see a million snow geese and about 40,000 sandhill cranes pausing in their northward migration to their arctic breeding grounds. The highlights are going to the roost at dawn and at dusk to see the massive congregations of birds. When you aren't in the crane blinds you drive around to watch the birds forage for waste corn in the surrounding farm fields. Our group was watching a large flock when the birds suddenly spooked and took to the sky forming a huge gray crane tornado.
We soon saw what panicked the birds--an adult bald eagle was making tracks for the center of the tornado, its sites clearly set on one particular crane. The eagle made contact and clipped the crane, the bird flipped, the eagle rounded again and went to catch it. Meanwhile, everyone in my group was cheering. Half the group was cheering for the eagle and the other half were cheering for the crane to get away. As opposed to a football or a basketball game, they were literally cheering a life and death situation. One bird was trying to avoid starvation, the other bird was trying to avoid being eaten.
The eagle again dove for the crane and this time made actual contact. The crane was literally upside down and the eagle had at least one foot-full of talons lodged in the crane's belly. Bald eagles and sandhill cranes are roughly the same weight, averaging about ten pounds (give or take a pound or two). Even if this had been a twelve-pound eagle, it can only carry half its weight in flight. The captured crane flapped its wings and was able to dislodge itself from the eagle's grasp. The crane managed to right itself and fly away from the eagle.
Then it did something interesting—the crane made a beeline for our cheering group. The eagle turned and was in hot pursuit. The crane left the flock and flew right over our bus, meanwhile the eagle paused and went around our screaming group giving the crane some much needed distance to try and flee the eagle. In hindsight I wondered if the crane sensed the eagle would be wary of humans or was just so terrified of being eaten that it didn’t notice us? The surrounding din of thousands of cranes would have easily drowned out our voices. Eagles do not like to fly over anything dangerous so our group would have given it pause. But the eagle increased speed and continued after the crane. Both birds flew well out of sight and we never saw the finish but that adult eagle seemed determined and depending on how injured that crane was, it was very likely the eagle caught up to the exhausted crane and finished it off.
The adrenaline of the group wore down but we all noticed how strange it was to cheer and shout for that battle. What did say about each other and the side we chose?
I wondered if there were instances of birds cheering. I scoured my bird books and wondered if perhaps parent birds cheer on their kids when learning to fly?
No, not really, they either kind of sit aloof watching what happens. If anything, they taunt their young by not feeding them. And then perching some flight distance away starving the kids into flight.
Birds definitely scream and yell, usually when a predator is present and they are screaming and yelling: “Hey guys, there’s a thing right here that’s trying to hide and kill us!”
But I think the closest I came to finding a bird cheering is from a book called Mind of the Raven by Bernd Heinrich (which is a fantastic book).
The story is about a 98 pound woman who didn’t even clear five feet in height. One evening she was working behind her Colorado cabin. For about twenty minutes a raven had been annoying her because it was “putting on a fuss like crazy.”
“I never paid much attention to ravens,” she told me, but this one was so noisy it was downright irritating. The noisy raven kept coming closer…Hannum had never before noticed ravens “cackling like crazy.” Was this raven trying to say something? She started to listen more closely.
The raven was close, and it made a pass over her calling raucously then flying up above her to some rocks, where she finally saw a crouching cougar, twenty feet away, ready to pounce.
The lion moved his head just a bit as the raven flew over. That’s when I saw him. I never would have seen him otherwise. He was going to jump me. That raven saved my life.”
The event was declared a miracle in the news.
Heinrich saw a miracle but not the way Hannum saw it. Ravens have no interest in helping people, especially someone who never paid them any attention or fed them. That raven wasn’t warning her. That raven was cheering on the cougar. The idea is that the raven saw the woman as a source of food. Not having the talons or teeth to kill her itself, it noticed a cougar nearby and called it in to kill her. The cougar wouldn't eat her all but would open her carcass enough and leave enough behind for the raven to feed on.
That raven noticed a cougar nearby and a small human that raven was cheering that cougar. Perhaps it sounded something like this:
“Hey, you could kill this right now!
Go Cougar go!
Pounce Cougar pounce!
Kill Cougar kill!
Go! Pounce! Kill!"
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If you don't win the book, buy something from Mincing Mocking bird--his stuff is great and a perfect gift for birders of all abilities. How can you not love this cardinal?
We are also giving away notebooks and honey in this podcast.
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Non Birding Bill's other podcast: Movie Date With Bill.
Here's a great video of humans cosplaying as the Superb Bird of Paradise:
Here's a video showing the actual bird and it shows how the feathers create the shapes.
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Birdchick Podcast #199
Wisdom the albatross has returned and at age 64 she's mating...will she lay an egg?
Best birding headline of the year.
Taylor Swift and the dotterels.
Owl lands on a birder's head and everyone got pictures.
Podcast #198 Pigeon Mammograms For EVERYONE!
Apparently pigeons can be quite adept at interpreting mammogram results.
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Things get weird in France when conservationists try to stop poaching.
Three kiskadees in South Dakota...that is nuts.
Non Birding Bill's other podcast--Movie Date with Bill!
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Podcast #197 More Snowy Owls,
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Audubon takes a firm stance in favor of collecting the mustached kingfisher for science.
Also, here is the article that "literally" make a reader sick. #NotTheHummers.
Project SNOWstorm is up and running and here is their first blog post about this winter's snowy owls.
I'm up for a blog award over at BirdWatch...vote for BirdGirl.
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Podcast #196 BIRD DRAMA
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New Birder Advice
I was recently on Jekyll Island for the Georgia Ornithological Society annual meeting and I had a blast. What really impressed me was not only the diversity of birders but the mix in ages. I met Evan who runs the Georgia Young Birder Club and he asked me what is the one piece of advice I would give new birders. I had to resist the smart ass part of my brain that wanted to answer, "never drink scotch under 15 years of age" or "avoid the clap" but I managed to retain a modicum of adulthood and gave what I hope is a better answer.
My initial advice is always to try and find a place and do your own informal bird survey. Whether that's picking a spot or a few nearby spots and doing weekly 20 minute point counts or visiting it as much as possible. You learn so much about about the birds that visit, pass through and breed there. That's been my big takeaway doing bird surveys over the years. I've now adopted that with my local patch.
I discovered my patch not long after we moved a year ago. I ran into a fellow eBirder not too long ago and they said, "You're always turning in lists from this spot when you should really do this other spot, the birding is better."
That may be, but I love my patch because it's in easy walking distance from my home. If I find myself with a spare hour, I have time to not only bird my patch but add over 5000 steps to my step tracker app. It's a win/win.
My other advice is that if you do not have children and you have a choice between birding and responsibility...choose birding. Always. I've never regretted that decision (my credit cars maybe have, but me personally, no). My classic example that I've pointed to before is the time years ago when I random day off of the bird store and though I should have used that day to do things like clean the kitchen and tackle the piles of month old laundry, I decided to take a day trip up do Duluth to see Hawk Ridge. The winds were supposed to be perfect for a good broad-winged hawk flight, right out of the northwest. Even as my car reached the outer suburbs, I almost turned around, "You're an adult now, you should really do laundry," but my bird side won out.
It ended up being a record day for Hawk Ridge and over 100,000 broad-winged hawks were tallied that day. It was magical. And I would have hated myself had I chosen to stay home and do laundry instead.
And unless I'm just home for a very hardcore birding trip or survey, I generally try to avoid laundry, vacuuming, cleaning out the fridge, etc as much as possible and go birding. Last night I was biking through my patch and almost hit a Harris's sparrow that flew in front of me. I knew that if I went to bed before midnight and got up at 6:30am (or about) I'd have enough time to walk my local patch, get some birds and get cleaned up for a day at the park service. I was hoping to digiscope the Harris's sparrow but also I just like looking for sparrows in the fall. All those lovely combinations of brown, rufous, gray, buff and heck if I'm lucky enough to find a Nelson's sparrow, even pumpkin color.
I did get some yellow-rumped warblers and palm warblers but there all kinds of great sparrows: Harris's still (though none were obliging enough for a photo, swamp, fox, white-throated, Lincoln's and quite a few song sparrows.
At first glance, I really wanted to turn the above bird into a clay-colored sparrow when I first saw it but my patch isn't really clay-colored habitat. After a bit more observation showed the bold eyeline of a chipping sparrow and it lacked the white "muttonchop" look of a clay-colored. Chipping sparrow makes way more sense for this habit anyway. A bummer to not add a new species but I do enjoy sorting out tough species. If you've never noticed how similar these two sparrows can look in the fall, check this out from the Sibley app:
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If you are 62 or older you already qualify for a Senior Pass which for $10 gets you into any federal park (NPS, BLM, US Fish, etc) for free but Thursday, October 8 you'll be able to get the lifetime pass for free.
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Congrats to Noah Stryker for seeing the most birds in the world in a year and still has a couple of months to go.