If you are passionate about birds, all birds are newsworthy all of the time, especially those ones you might’ve seen just today, like that First of Year tree swallow or black vulture or perhaps just that cardinal outside your window that was so close you could see the guy’s tonsils as he belted out his springtime territorial tune. Do birds even have tonsils?
Despite your enthusiasm, you probably well know by now that your excitement and/or pleasure regarding these matters is not shared by everyone, in fact not by a great many people out there in the wide world, at all (and you who are reading this right now might be muttering, “wait, that includes me too!”, and if this is the case please bear with me for just a bit longer – you won’t regret it but then again you might).
Except for the twice weekly Bird Sightings column in the local wonderful Boston Globe, news about our feathered friends is a rare thing in the general media, which is maybe as it should be. There might be ornithophiles who consider this a travesty but even many who love birds might also acknowledge that much that is newsworthy does not involve birds, at all. Let’s get real, folks!
So it is notable that not one but two birds have made it to the front pages in the past few months, and we’re not talking about some item at the bottom of page ten regarding what is happening with this or that particular species – hawks taken down by wind turbines or migrants getting poisoned by pesticides or the usual bad news of such ilk – but two specific individuals with very personal stories. Calling them media stars might be a bit of a stretch, but then maybe not, especially if you’re one of those aforementioned ornithophiles (if the term seems too ponderous for you, try aviphile, which means the same thing but remember that use of these terms risks confusing your listeners).
If “media star” doesn’t quite nail it, “big deal” certainly does, at least in the case of Exhibit A, the Steller’s Sea-Eagle, a bird of eastern Siberia and northern Japan and sometimes Alaska. An example of which turned up in March of 2021 sitting on a tree stump in the middle of a reservoir in Texas! of all places. The two couples fishing from their boat who made the sighting must’ve puzzled over what it was, no doubt, as a Steller’s is most huge and imposing, but like all folks nowadays they had their phones and they got pictures and some expert who saw those pictures might’ve just fallen out of their chair. We will likely never know.
Aside from the general unlikelihood and total weirdness of this event, there is also this to consider: how does one of the biggest eagles in the world, at 20 lbs with an eight-foot wingspan, make it from Kamchatka and the Sea of Okhotsk all the way to Texas, in a world full of binocular and camera or at least cell phone equipped people, without being seen or reported, even once? Birding has become a popular pastime for many folks nowadays, and even if you might not be one of them there are a whole lot of people on the lookout for anything feathered and rare.
It gets better: three months later the bird shows up in New Brunswick, Canada, again with no reports since the one in Texas, and proceeds to be seen here and there for two months, disappearing for another three until two days of sightings in Falmouth, Nova Scotia, in early November. Then nothing. So what else is new? Who’s scripting this thing? And don’t they know there are limits to believability? Is this all animatronics or a hologram or CGI?
Finally the bird (or are these all different birds? do you wanna go there? rest easy as it has been established that it’s been the same individual throughout) turns up just before Christmas, 30 miles south of our house on the Taunton River which, as they say, is front page news. And the local birding world goes nuts, just like they did with that red-footed falcon, a European wanderer that caught grasshoppers all summer at the Martha’s Vineyard airport back in 2004. Walter Cronkite was there, among thousands of others; where were you?
We happened to be familiar with Dighton Rock State Park where the bird was spotted, which is not only a lovely spot on the river, with a museum housing a mysterious stone hauled from the river that is covered with mysterious inscriptions (native American? Nordic? Phoenician?), but which is also a great starting point for a bike ride, one we’ve done many times. We were tempted to make the trip, joining the frenzy of so many others, all hoping there would still be a bird when we showed up, but a lousy track record of previous attempts of this nature (rare birds often just fly away without warning) made for a calculated decision to stay home. Cars parked for miles on all the narrow roads surrounding the tiny State Park was not an appealing prospect, either.
In the end, a few locals chased the bird around for a few days before word got out to the whole community, who mostly all showed up for one magical morning at the Rock. Then after about six hours, this eagle had had enough of the limelight, took off towards the north, and was gone. There are no doubt several million images to prove it had been here: birders like to shoot at about seven-frames-a-second or more, and there had been hundreds working away at this. Do the math.
As of early April, it was up in Nova Scotia again. Whether the Gulf of Maine is more congenial to a Steller’s Sea-Eagle than the Sea of Okhotsk and thereabouts is anybody’s guess, and the eagle ain’t tellin’. It also ain’t leaving, at least for now, which tells you something. It would not be nearly as celebrated back in Asia, though these birds draw a lot of birders to that neighborhood, count on it.
The other bird in the news is not only of a very different feather but quite a different story, as well, thought provoking in its own way. This story’s news value rated it a place on page three, down in the middle, as opposed to the eagle’s front-page-with-big-picture star treatment. This bird – a flamingo – is visually spectacular all on its own, but flamingos suffer some from overfamiliarity, as opposed to the rarity of gigantic eagles. They’re not exactly a ho-hum bird, but hey, they’re in zoos all over the place and even kept on people’s tropical estates to add a bit of color to the landscape. The particular flamingo in question here came from Tanzania, though unlike the eagle had a bit of help getting here, coming on a plane to be part of the collection of the Sedgwick City Zoo.
Where it no doubt did fine for three years until that windy day in March of 2005 – the month arriving like a lion, as one would expect – when some mixup regarding #492’s wing-clipping regimen meant this opportunistic bird, along with fellow jailbird #347, suddenly and most unexpectedly (if you’re a zoo employee) rediscovered long forgotten lift and buoyancy. Was it a thrill? We homo sapiens can only guess. Is flying like riding a bicycle, if you’re a bird? It looks that way in this case.
Things get a bit poignant here: after four months of hanging around in nearby hayfields, both birds lit out for the territory, so to speak, 347 heading north, 492 south. On the Fourth of July, no less, an Independence Day to remember. Almost predictably, and somewhat sadly, north was not the way a savvy tropical bird should’ve headed, and #347 disappeared for good by the following spring.
And #492? He was newsworthy because he’d just made another annual spring reappearance down on the Texas Gulf coast, as he has done most years for the past seventeen. Flamingos in the wild can live to 40, so with any luck this bird will keep going for awhile. As Maritime Canada may as well be eastern Siberia to that eagle, Texas may as well be Tanzania to this flamingo. Home is where you choose to make it, so long as you don’t starve. Or freeze.
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And as for these pictures: can you believe they were all taken right here in the neighborhood? The Franklin Park Zoo just up the hill is home to a genuine live Steller’s Sea-Eagle in captivity, one of very few facilities housing this bird in the US. The serendipity continues with the fact that the plastic flamingo was invented by Don Featherstone of Worcester MA and manufactured in nearby Leominster from 1957 to 2008, making it another “local” bird, so to speak. As for the real, living #492? I was not about to travel to Texas as who the hell knows where that wily bird is right now? which is just the way he/she wants it, I am sure. The irony of showing pictures of a captive giant eagle to illustrate the story of perhaps the most free-spirited such eagle in the whole world is not lost on me and I hope it’s not lost on you either. Sometimes life has almost too darn much meaning, wouldn’t you say?
PS By the way two of the above pictures also depict a species not mentioned in the story. Can you spot it, and do you know what it is? Hint: it is the largest bird that flies, and hails from S America