I just accidentally hit “Publish” on a post that I did NOT mean to publish yet. So I deleted it, but that still means a ton of people got notifications. Sorry if you came here looking for a post that doesn’t exist.

We have two shrub-sized plants here with similar names: leatherleaf and leatherwood. Leatherleaf (Chamaedaphne calyculata) is the shrub that carpets the bogs, green in summer and russet-brown in fall and winter. Leatherwood (Dirca palustris) is a plant of the forest understory, and most of the year I walk past it without even noticing it’s there, but at a certain point in spring it catches my attention.

Its leaves don’t amount to much yet, but this is leatherwood in full flower, with tiny yellow-green blossoms along each twig.

Not every flower is big or colorful – just look at the flowers of the wind-pollinated aspen in my last post for another example. There are all sorts of different strategies for plants to achieve pollination, and there are all sorts of different flowers as a result.

I’m going to be leading another backpacking trip to the Porcupine Mountains from May 31 to June 4, so just like I did last fall, I’m putting out the call for anyone who’d be interested in writing a guest post for this blog during that time. (About two posts would be ideal to fill the gap.) If you’re interested, use the “Contact Me” link above to let me know. The guidelines are pretty broad – I’m open to posts on anything to do with the natural history of the place where you live or a place that you’ve visited, preferably illustrated with your own photographs, or posts on anything to do with the relationship between people and nature. If you have your own blog, I’ll link back to it when your post goes up here, but people who don’t have their own blogs are also more than welcome to contribute. Last fall I ended up with posts on water scorpions, a reader’s trip to Jekyll Island, Georgia, and the lizards a friend of mine saw in Europe.

Anyway, here is your semi-regular roundup of interesting nature and conservation links from the last couple weeks (bird-heavy, as always).

• The always-fabulous Julie Zickefoose on painting the extinct Imperial Woodpecker.
• Teddy Roosevelt’s checklist of the birds he saw in Washington, D.C. while president. Birder-in-chief!
• Six reasons why organic is NOT the most environmentally friendly way to farm. Not sure I’m totally on board with this – organic does have its benefits – but it gave me food for thought.
• This is stretching the “nature and conservation” theme, but astronaut extraordinaire Chris Hadfield returned to Earth from his five-month stint on the space station yesterday, and he marked the occasion by posting a music video of himself covering David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” IN SPACE.
• xkcd reminds us that not only are birds dinosaurs, T-Rex was actually more closely related to modern sparrows than it was to Stegosaurus.
• Whoa! Saw-whet owls glow pink under UV light.
• A mama wolf spider carrying her tiny spider babies on her back! Either adorable or terrifying, depending on how you feel about spiders.
• A 10,000 Birds post on Major Mitchell’s Cockatoos – seeing these was one of the highlights of my three months in Australia.
• The prairie wildflowers of early spring keep a low profile but are gorgeous when you get down and look at them properly.

That’s all I’ve got! After getting an inch of snow over the weekend (yes, really – my boss broke his record for the latest he’s ever been able to ski the trails) our weather is finally warming up again. Have a good week!

The trees are still bare, but that doesn’t mean there’s no greenery in the forest. The weather was finally warm and sunny again this afternoon, so I took off for a walk to see what I could find. These green shoots sprouting in the bog are the beginnings of blue flag iris (Iris versicolor):

In the slightly higher, drier habitat of the forest floor, the tiny partridgeberry plants (Mitchella repens) have been waiting all winter for the snow to melt and the sun to return:

And, on the way back from my walk, I got very excited to spot hepatica in bloom. Hepatica flowers are my favorite sign of spring.

After the long, long winter, spring is finally asserting itself. And I have a big transition of my own coming up – watch for a new post on Saturday with a major announcement.

P.S. Are you – yes, YOU – interested in writing a guest post for Rebecca in the Woods while I’m in the backcountry in a few weeks? If so, get in touch with me using the “Contact Me” link above. See the previous post for more details.

Photo by Richard Bauer, from Wikimedia Commons.

Above is a photo of the town of Long Creek, Oregon, population 197 soon to be 198.

Today, after two years of work, I officially graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s College of Natural Resources with a master’s degree in environmental education. The “graduation” is only theoretical; I’m not bothering to attend the ceremony, since I actually live about three hours away from campus. But now I can officially say I have the degree, despite the fact that my commitments to my graduate fellowship program here at the northern end of the state last for another month.

And after that? I’m moving to Long Creek. I’ve accepted a job with the local watershed council, where I’ll be splitting my time between planning educational and service opportunities for the local school and working with landowners on habitat restoration projects. After years of bouncing from internship to seasonal job to volunteer gig and back to graduate school, this will be my first real grown-up job.

It’s going to be a big, big change, and there’s a lot that I’ll miss about Wisconsin’s North Woods, but I’m excited. Anyway, I’ve got a few more weeks to enjoy the loons and bogs before I go…

Who doesn’t love Killdeer? These bold birds are perhaps the most habituated to humans of any North American plover, nesting in almost any open area. This spring a pair have nested in the corner of one of the wildflower beds in the school garden.

Even though they nest on the ground right out in the open, the nests can be surprisingly hard to spot – the eggs are very well camouflaged! If you do approach a Killdeer nest, the parents will try to lead you away with a distraction display, pretending to drag broken wings to make themselves look like easy targets for predators. That’s what the bird below was doing.

I like this photo because you can see the bird’s eyes even though you’re looking directly at the back of its head. Prey birds like this can have an almost 360° field of vision.

I’ll try to get some more photos once the eggs hatch. Killdeer chicks are cuuuuuuuute. Tiny little plover fluffballs!

Tagged: birds, killdeer, nature, nests, wildlife

Yep, I missed it because I was inside proctoring a test, but apparently we had some snowflakes falling this morning. On May 23. The low tonight is supposed to be 23°F. Naturally, I went looking for wildflowers this afternoon.

Specifically, I wanted to see if there was polygala in bloom along a trail where I found some last year. If it was there, I missed it, but I did find some other flowers in bloom.

Wood anemone, I think? I guess it’s closed up because of the cold weather.

Violet #1

Violet #2

Violet #3

There are something like twenty species of violet in Wisconsin, so do not ask me to identify these guys specifically for you. I did take the time to look up this old post on violet ID from Ohio Birds and Biodiversity, which describes a couple characteristics to look for – color, of course, but also whether the stems are caulescent (leafy) or acaulescent (not leafy, with the leaves on individual stalks). So we have here a white violet, a purple violet, and a light purple violet, all (as far as I can tell) acaulescent.

What’s blooming where you are?

I added three species of warbler to my year list yesterday afternoon – Magnolia, Blackburnian, and American Redstart. (Considering we’ve been doing almost all of our birding in the afternoons, not the mornings, my roommate and I have been doing pretty well this spring.) I love redstarts, and I was thrilled when this beautiful male posed for a couple photos.

I love that extra flash of orange on the underside of the tail! While going over these photos, I started to wonder where the name “redstart” came from, and Wikipedia has given me the answer: “start” goes back to an Old English word for “tail,” so it means a bird with a red tail. Accurate! North America’s redstarts are actually named after a genus of Old World flycatchers that share this trait.

These were the first nice photos I’ve ever taken of a warbler, so they made me pretty happy. Now I just need to go back out with my camera and stalk the feeder where the Rose-breasted Grosbeaks have been hanging out. Talk about your beautiful birds…

Tagged: american redstart, birding, birds, nature, wildlife

This winter I tried and failed to see the Upper Peninsula’s Bond Falls, foiled by the icy stairs. Well, yesterday I went back, and thanks to the recent snow melt the falls turned out to be very impressive.

Most of my photos came out a bit overexposed, but oh well, I was just messing around with friends. You know you’re hanging out with naturalists when you end up spending most of your time with your backs to the big waterfall, admiring the vegetation. Most of the wildflowers weren’t blooming yet so we quizzed ourselves on identifying them by the leaves alone – Canada mayflower, starflower, blue bead lily, Solomon’s seal, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, etc. etc. etc.

This was my last weekend free before I leave for Oregon, so I’m glad I got to cram in a bit more local sightseeing. Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday!

Tagged: bond falls, nature, plants

I don’t know if anyone noticed, but a while ago I added a little “What I’m Reading” widget to the sidebar of this blog. For the last couple months, a chapter or two at a time, I’ve been working my way through The Log From the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck. I assume everyone reading this has heard of John Steinbeck, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of this particular book – I never had until we read a brief excerpt of it during our Land Ethic Leaders training back in January. It’s a work of nonfiction chronicling a trip that Steinbeck and his friend biologist Ed Ricketts took to the Gulf of Mexico (aka the Sea of Cortez) in 1940 to collect marine invertebrates and generally go exploring. Before reading this, I wouldn’t have thought of John Steinbeck as a nature writer, but a lot of the passages in the book are beautiful, thoughtful reflections on the relationship between people and nature.

Our own interest lay in the relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational to the point where an Einsteinian relativity seems to emerge. And not only the meaning but the feeling about species grows misty. One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think of as non-life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. Then one can come back to the microscope and the tide pool and the aquarium. But the little animals are found to be changed, no longer set apart and alone. And it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

All this years before Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac was published! Steinbeck goes off on tangents about subjects like the effects of globalization on indigenous communities and the importance of using resources sustainably (although he doesn’t use those specific terms, probably because they hadn’t been coined yet) and other very modern-seeming ideas. Parts of the book are also incredibly funny, such as the running joke about the “Sea-Cow,” the outboard motor they brought to power their skiff which develops its own malevolent personality and only deigns to run when they don’t urgently need it to.

Part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophy, The Log From the Sea of Cortez may not be typical summer beach reading but it’s worth checking out. What good nature-related books have you read recently? Share in the comments!

Friday I leave for a backcountry trip that I’m co-leading for work. I’ll be back next Wednesday, but in the meantime watch this space for some snazzy guest posts!

Howdy! I’m leading a backpacking trip in the Porcupine Mountains today through next Wednesday, so I’m away from my computer, obviously. However, I have some great guest posts lined up for you while I’m gone, starting with this one from Kenyon Moon.

I lived for a number of years in California, near the coast in Santa Cruz, doing field trips for schools and, later, organizing a big invasive species/environmental restoration project. While I was there, I chanced upon a rather curious thing about which there is no current answer (or wasn’t the last time I looked a year or two ago).

Come on a walk with me in my old stomping grounds. We will start at Roaring Camp, an old-timey town complete with period buildings, costumes, and a working steam train.

California Poppies (Escholzia californica) can be seen below, growing next to discarded steam train parts. I like the contrast of the vibrant green and orange in contrast with the old discarded (but still sturdy) train parts. These bright orange poppies can be seen all over California in almost every type of soil and region. But these are not the oddity–this picture is here to give contrast. Keep reading for the twist.

Hi guys, it’s me, Rebecca – here’s another picture that shows the orangey color better. Photo by Cliff Hutson.

Just a short hike up into the hills from Roaring Camp, close enough to still hear the train whistle, is this scene:

I like this picture because the poppies seem so wild, yet so caught–and yet so content. Sitting in the fence, looking over the quarry with the town beyond, they are growing as though there were not a care in the world. There is something curious about the whole thing, and it is beautiful. Despite the yellow color, these, too, are California Poppies.

Here is another picture:

Technically it is a California Poppy, the same as the orange ones we saw a few minutes ago. There are a couple possibilities here–it could be a genetic issue causing the yellow color, or it could be something in the environment. This batch is not the only yellow one, they are scattered broadly across the hills around Santa Cruz. They seem to prefer sandy, open areas, but are not strictly limited to these. They may also occur elsewhere in the state, but I have no concrete knowledge of that. (And no, not any “yellow” poppy counts, I know there are other yellow species! A species is determined by a host of factors that I skipped over here in the interest of time).

This poppy has, under some basic tests, been shown to have a genetic basis for its color rather than a reason such as soil makeup, sun exposure, etc. With the potential of being a subspecies, this has been dubbed the “Sandhills Poppy.”

• Is it a new species? This is unlikely, notice the mixed colors in the first picture.
• Or (more likely) a sub-species that could some day become its own species?

With more testing and some careful investigation, we may find out. As to whether or not they will ever break off on their own, only time will tell. Speciation happens, or we would not have the diversity on Earth that we see today. And it happens frequently, all over the globe, but it is not so often that we can watch the process occur right in front of us!

All I can say definitively is that if you visit Santa Cruz someday, take a few miles to enjoy watching the process of speciation in action. :)

Kenyon Moon currently works for a wildlife clinic in Denver, CO, but has been intrigued by the world in all its natural forms for a long time. He grew up in Michigan and still has his extensive middle school leaf collection, boxes of animal track casts and rocks, and sketches of ferns. His parents encouraged him to go so far beyond the requirements of school assignments and scout projects that he could sometimes not find space to store my collections. It paid off, and after graduating from high school in 2001 he went on to earn a degree in Outdoor Education and then worked as a naturalist doing (primarily, but not solely) environmental education in California and Washington. He has also worked on a variety of projects, from a senior thesis studying a newly reopened cave that had been closed to humans for 20+ years to a major invasive species removal and restoration project dreamed up by himself and a few other naturalists in 2008. He is planning to start his own blog sometime soon.

I’m still backpacking with my students in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, but some guest writers are stepping up in my absence. Today, blogger Erin Gettler shares the story of her “spark plant.” Read on to learn how she coined this phrase.

Growing up in a suburb of Northern Illinois, I somehow got the idea that plants only bloomed ecstatically in gardens. Tame plants, I reasoned, are coddled more than wild ones, so they flower in abundance. I only rarely ventured into the woods as a kid, so my theory wasn’t refuted until recently. Now I live on the east end of Long Island, where a wide variety of ecosystems are preserved and open for exploration. And what I’ve learned about woodland plants in the past few years has revised what I thought I knew.

There’s always a “first.” Birders call it a “spark bird,” and I guess we could also coin “spark plant,” to describe the initial instance that grabs your attention for life. In my case, it was a brittle, draggled evergreen shrub that resembled the rhododendron bush in a relative’s front yard. I first visited this wild mystery plant in March, and the narrow, leathery leaves were among the few green things relieving the dull landscape. The buds swelled noticeably from visit to visit, March to May, in tandem with the rhododendron buds in the yard. When the rhododendrons finally bloomed, I made a beeline to the woods to see if the mystery plant had bloomed as well.

It had, but it wasn’t a rhododendron.

My mystery plant turned out to be Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia), a tough shrub belonging to the same family (Ericaceae) as the rhododendron, as well as the blueberries that thrived in those woods. Mountain Laurel is easy to admire when it’s in bloom: blankets of rosy-white flowers transform the dingy green bushes into cloudy puffs floating in the woods. Dark pink anthers lodge in tiny pockets in the white petals. The stamens are spring loaded, and bounce up when you touch them, which I did over and over again for the fun of it. And then I stood back and breathed the whole thing in.

Since that first time, I’ve made a pilgrimage back to the park whenever late May swings around. With repeated trips into the woods, I’ve plotted other blooms on my annual calendar. The first week of April I go hunting for Trailing Arbutus. Mid-April is for blueberries, early May for Shadbush, then the Mountain Laurel. June brings back the Swamp Azaleas, and so on through the summer. It doesn’t get old, and each individual plant grows more familiar to me. It’s like I’m visiting friends.

What are the blooms that draw you out into the woods, fields and swamps where you live?

Erin Gettler takes pictures and writes about the natural world on the east end of Long Island, New York. She hopes to know something about everything someday, but she still has a long way to go. She blogs about these pursuits at The Familiar Wilderness.

The view from my tent flap this morning. Yes. Really.

I’m back from my backcountry trip to the Porcupine Mountains. I never seem to take many photos when backpacking – I’m too focused on putting one foot in front of another on the trail and on getting all the necessary chores done in camp. This morning I remembered to take one of the view from where my tent was pitched on the edge of the Escarpment, though. That’s the “Upper” Carp River down in the valley, upstream of Lake of the Clouds.

Highlights:

• Finding a toad orgy in a clear still pool by the Presque Isle River on the first day. Several pairs in amplexus, the females laying their longs strings of eggs, while unpaired males looked on and trilled sadly.
• A hummingbird appearing out of nowhere and landing on the hand of one of my students as she stood in our first campsite. Yes, this really happened!
• A beaver swimming by our cabin on Mirror Lake on the third night. A number of our students had never seen a beaver before and got really excited.
• Keeping a running tally of all the wildflowers I saw in bloom. Blue bead lily, trout lily, Dutchman’s breeches, Canada mayflower, starflower, spring beauty, jack-in-the-pulpit, false Solomon’s seal, sunbursts of marsh marigold, multiple varieties of trillium and anemone and violet, more that I couldn’t put names to…
• Standing on the bridge at the downstream end of Lake of the Clouds and watching the bright sparks of Yellow Warbler, Wilson’s Warbler, and Canada Warbler dart from alder to alder.
• The two birds we heard calling on our last night – the soft booming of an American Bittern drifting up from the river valley below (goonk-glunk, goonk-glunk, goonk-glunk), and, after dark, a Whip-poor-will (whip-poorWILL! whip-poorWILL! whip-poorWILL!) calling from close by our camp.

There were some less-great moments, too (a thunderstorm with nickel-sized hail while you’re in the backcountry and responsible for other people’s children? fuuuun), but it was nice to have this last immersion in the North Woods before I move.

More to come. Mom and Dad, I’ll call you soon – right now my phone is charging and I think we’re going out to dinner later.

Northern Starflower, Trientalis borealis. Normally they have seven petals (an unusual number). I didn’t notice while I was taking the photo that this one has eight.

Packing, cleaning, wrapping things up – it’s been two years since the last time I moved across the country, and I’d forgotten how involved it is. The plan is to get at least one more Northwoods post up before I leave on Wednesday. Said post will probably consist of me walking out to Inkpot Lake one last time and getting all sentimental about it. In any case, just trust me that normal blogging will resume… eventually.

Tagged: nature, plants, starflower, wildflowers

A couple weeks ago I posted about a Killdeer nest in the school’s butterfly garden. Well, sometime within the last twenty-four hours, the chicks hatched, so this afternoon once I finished up my cleaning and packing I headed to the garden to snap a few last photos.

Family portrait – mom with two of the four chicks.

There are basically two types of bird babies: altricial and precocial. Altricial chicks are those born naked and helpless, needing constant parental care, like these guys:

Photo by Qatar&Me, via Wikimedia Commons.

Not Killdeer chicks! These babies are precocial, born fluffy and ready to run – think “precocious.” And they are cuuuuuuuute. Their markings are very similar to adults, except that chicks only have one dark band across their chest instead of two.

I may be leaving tomorrow, but life here goes on – a new generation of baby birds growing up, more wildflowers coming into bloom, fields buzzing with insects. Goodbye, Wisconsin. It’s been an education.

Hey, I’m not dead, I’m just crazy busy settling into Oregon plus I lost my laptop power cord which throws an additional wrench into things. (A new one is on its way, don’t worry.) Regular blogging will resume eventually. In the meantime, enjoy my favorite Walt Whitman poem.

Miracles
by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

So here I am.

Walking through the woods here is like having passed through the looking glass, into a world where everything has been tweaked slightly, everything is familiar but strange. I know larch and pine and fir, but here it’s Western Larch and Ponderosa Pine and Grand Fir, not the eastern species I remember. I recognize thimbleberry and bead lily, but the flowers are different colors from the ones back home. Bird songs sound familiar but I can’t quite place them. It’s hard to know where to start.

It’s like the difference between meeting new people and hanging out with old friends. Meeting new people is great, but for an introvert like me it’s also a little stressful.

I took a bunch of photos yesterday, mostly of wildflowers, and blog posts here should be returning to something resembling their regular pace over the next week. Thanks for your patience.

Last Thursday I found myself in a section of the Umatilla National Forest a couple hours’ drive north of where I’m living now, much closer to the border with Washington. It was beautiful – endless ridges covered with Ponderosa Pine, Western Larch, Grand Fir, and other majestic western conifers. However, I kept getting distracted from the trees by other, much smaller plants.

Mountain Lady’s Slipper orchids (Cypripedium montamum)! They were all over the place, and the people I was with stepped right past them like they were no big deal, but as a newcomer to the ecosystem I was flabbergasted.

I love lady’s slippers – I wrote about my first encounter with Pink Lady’s Slippers in a bog in Wisconsin last summer. Obviously the shape of the big petal pouch reminded some historical botanist of a woman’s shoe. Bumblebees crawl inside the pouch, attracted by colors and scents, only to discover that no reward of nectar awaits them. Then they bump up against the flower’s reproductive parts on their way out past the lip and hopefully carry the pollen to another orchid in bloom, where they’ll be duped all over again. (They do figure it out pretty quickly, though.) Fact of the day: the word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for testicle!

Mountain Lady’s Slippers grow in high elevation forests in western North America. If you ever come across an orchid in the woods, please, please leave it alone – one of the major threats to these showy flowers is overzealous collecting by plant lovers.

Last week I snapped my first photo of an Oregon butterfly.

Handsome creature, isn’t it? I recognized it as some sort of checkerspot, a group of butterflies I’m not very familiar with, and figured I would identify it to species using my field guide when I had a chance. However, as sometimes happens, this turned out to be more complicated than I expected. The best match in my book was the Variable Checkerspot, Euphydryas chalcedona, but none of its illustrated, er, variations perfectly matched the patterns of colored dots on the wings of the butterfly in my photo. Luckily, thanks to the wonders of Twitter I recently “met” a lepidopterist who used to do a lot of collecting in this part of Oregon, @AndyBugGuy. I tweeted the photo for him to see and he told me it was a male Euphydryas colon, the Snowberry Checkerspot. That species is not even listed in my field guide! What gives?

Turns out there are a lot of different populations and subspecies of the Variable Checkerspot, some of which may or may not be actually be distinct species of their own, depending on who you talk to. (And it doesn’t help that each one seems to have more than one common name. Euphydryas colon can also be called the Colon Checkerspot, and Euphydryas chalcedona can also be the Chalcedon Checkerspot. Argh!) So I wasn’t really wrong. Andy the tweeting lepidopterist says I need to buy a whole other butterfly book devoted solely to the many variations of the species found in the Cascades, but in the meantime I may just keep pestering him with my photos when I get stuck. In any case, butterflies are confusing, and I have a whole new diverse set of them to deal with now that I’ve moved to the other end of the continent.

On the edge of the small town of Patagonia, Arizona is a small, nondescript house with some bird feeders in the backyard: Paton’s. This may not sound unusual, but what’s remarkable about Paton’s is that the feeders there regularly attract southeast Arizona specialties – especially hummingbirds – that are hard to find elsewhere, and that the owners are more than happy to have birders park on the street and skulk around their backyard. There’s a donation box to help keep the feeders filled and some seating under an awning. It’s a tiny impromptu bird sanctuary.

I visited Paton’s with my parents on a trip with my parents this spring. We had eaten lunch at the picnic tables at the Nature Conservancy preserve down the road, watching swarms of Black-chinned Hummingbirds coming and going at the feeders there, and someone had mentioned that Paton’s had a Violet-crowned Hummingbird visiting regularly. The Violet-crowned is one of those special birds whose range only crosses the border into the U.S. in the far southeastern corner of Arizona, and I was anxious to see it and add it to my life list. We found a space to park in front of Paton’s and walked around to the back, where several other birders were already intently watching the feeders. After about thirty seconds, a hummer with an orange bill, white front, and purple cap appeared, took a drink, and then returned to the bushes.

Check. We had places to be, so we immediately left and went on to our next destination.

My Violet-crowned Hummingbird sighting does not reflect my usual approach to birding. As much as I enjoy birds, I have an ambivalent relationship with listing. I keep a life list—currently approaching 600, a respectable total—but I’ve never kept the detailed state, county, and year lists of many birders (this year’s attempt notwithstanding), and I usually don’t treat new species as just another check mark, ticking one off and immediately moving onto the next. I literally am I birdwatcher, in that I like to actually watch and enjoy them. However, there are people for whom the hobby is all about the list and nothing but the list.

I just finished the book To See Every Bird On Earth by Dan Koeppel, which is the true story of one extreme lister as told by his son. A lot of the information about the history of birding included in the book wasn’t new to me (I could already have described the contributions of John James Audubon, Frank Chapman, and Roger Tory Peterson), but the story itself was interesting—the glimpse into the psyche of someone obsessed with the list. What amazed me was that the author’s father claimed he didn’t particularly like birds, he just like adding to his list. Another “Big Lister” described in the book didn’t even know anything about bird identification; he just paid guides to lead him to new species and tell him what they were. Many of the people in the book kept also kept lists of things that had nothing to do with birds, of the registration numbers of planes they’d traveled on, of different kinds of cheese they’d tried on their travels, things like that. Big listing sounds like a completely different hobby from the kind of birdwatching I do.

If you’re only ever going to read one book about competitive birding (and I wouldn’t blame you at all if that’s the case), I would still recommend The Big Year over this one. However, if you’re interested the psychology of what might drive someone to travel the world in search of six, seven, eight thousand different species of bird and how their obsession affects the rest of their life, To See Every Bird On Earth is worth checking out. Me, I’m content with having a list well below one thousand and continuing to enjoy every meadowlark and nighthawk I see as much as I did when they were lifers.

Anyone else read any good books lately? Share in the comments!