~ by Sumalee~
We do love birding for its own sake, but a wee part of both of us also wishes for that public affirmation, the imprimatur of the establishment--aka eBird, the real-time earthwide birding checklist produced by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology--which would be an appearance on the Oregon Daily Rare Bird Alert email.
A word about eBird--it's huge and it's addictive. In 2020, 169 million bird sightings were logged--think of all the eyes and ears involved in spotting that many birds! On a single day--Global Big Day, May 9, 2020--50,000 birders submitted 120,000 checklists from 175 countries.
Now, I don't particularly care for counting, listing, naming, etc. For instance, I tell people I like jazz, and I really, really do like jazz but I'm not interested in knowing the titles of songs or the years of albums or the collaborations that, say, John Coltrane has produced. I just enjoy listening. My relationship to eBird started out in a similar vein, and I believe V. would state the same, though to a lesser extent as she is a lot more minutiae-oriented as a photographer should be.
How short-lived was our laissez-faire approach. We started out posting checklists as an afterthought, sometimes, or thinking about it, maybe. Then we got serious and began identifying, counting, and posting checklists on "worthy" occasions, which means: most vacations; planned hikes and explorations in the vicinity; a particularly nice walk in the neighborhood park or amusing front/backyard birding afternoon on the stoop; anytime something strikes us as birding-worthy. That is, a sighting that contributes to the serious side of eBird, which is the Lab's ornithology research and data accumulation.
Our first encounter with the Gray Catbird falls into the last sort. One recent evening, after we were finally free from our 12.5 hour shift day, we were walking toward the employee surface parking lot when I spotted a bird in shadow creeping beneath some sad corporate landscaping shrubs between the parking lot and the massive construction site. I exclaimed out to V. as I knew she'd appreciate this happy sight in such dreary surroundings. But I didn't know what I was looking at nor did V.
We were puzzled by the bird, which, upon our approach, flew up to sit on the chain-link fencing that circumscribed the construction site headquarters. We didn't recognize the fellow, so we quickly kicked our observation skills into gear, noting as many characteristics as possible before he flew off. We compared notes: he was all grey, in particular, a smooth airbrushed grey with a sharp black cap. His eye was black and beady. He had a sharp black beak, almost metal-like. He was larger than a sparrow but smaller than a robin. On the fence, his tail pointed down and seemed longish for a sparrow.
After a brief few seconds, our guy presumably had had his fill of staring humans so he flew off and disappeared into the trees. We went through all the grey birds we knew and excluded them. No, not a Canada jay as there was no white on him. We knew he wasn't a Dipper because WE KNOW our Dippers as a previous post proves. The Northern Mockingbird, which we've never seen, would be too large, long, and lanky and also has quite a bit of white, including wing-bars. We returned home and used the Audubon app to try to identify our short-capped cipher. And there he was, the dopplegänger of each featured photo of a Gray Catbird. Unfortunately, our guy deprived us of a view of the trademark red undertail but we vow to catch this at the rendezvous, and there will be a rendezvous.
V. searched eBird and found that the Gray Catbird had not been spotted in the area for some time, so it was truly rare this far west. The most recent sightings were on Ona Beach on the coast, with some great photos, but this was a large group of people ostensibly on a single-day birding foray with many collaborative eyes and ears. With ticklish hope and glee, we uploaded our checklist to record the spotting and waited for the reviewer to verify the spotting and, we hoped, post it to the Oregon Rare Bird Daily Alert. Days went by and our spotting failed to show up on eBird or in the email Alerts.
Now, this had happened before to us, not that we're getting paranoid. Last year, we happily caught a spotted sandpiper on camera at the edge of a small inlet in Jarrell Cove State Park, WA. This was also a new species for us, and we ran the whole gauntlet of identification before posting the sighting, with photograph, detailed description of location, and characteristics, to eBird. This failed to show up on eBird and the Washington Rare Bird Alert, but when another person's sighting the following day at the same location with insignificant commentary and no photograph featured on both, we were nonplussed and very annoyed. Digging into the area's eBird, we were able to construe that this person was a birder familiar to the regional reviewer, who ostensibly took the sighting at face value and waved the birder through the verification process whereas our sighting sat, and sat, unpublished. We finally resorted to appealing for help from another reviewer from Oregon who had challenged one of our early sightings, simply because we had his email address. Our spotted sandpiper was belatedly verified thereafter and appears on eBird now, but we never made the Alert.
And likewise our Catbird. Nearly a week after we posted our sighting, the reviewer verified our sighting and it now appears on eBird with the red (i.e., recent sighting) location marker in Salem. However, it never made the Oregon Rare Bird Daily Alert since the sighting was so many days past. Two instances does not make a pattern, and we do hope that these were just unfortunate and coincidental oversights. We look forward to our next rare sighting, and if it were a new species again, that's even better. What we've learned is that our identification skills are getting sharper, we're able to quickly observe and note characteristics of a flitty, flighty, and/or frenetically moving target and even our ears are slowly learning to distinguish between similar-sounding chirps and alerts. We might not be sitting in the catbird seat yet, but we're more than gratified to see it rightly occupied.
Vicky's note: Intro photo is a composite
Thank you for reading, and glad to hear you are looking out for the next posting.
I really enjoyed that posting and have high expectations for the next.