Hi Tweets,

Bill's notes re finding a Say's Phoebe in the dead of winter in Hanford
recall for me my very first twitch in 1962.

It was the first week of February during a hard winter in southern Ontario
when I got a call from the guy who was teaching me how to bird (appeareth
here on Ye Scroll of All-Time Good Guys the name Bob Hayward of London,
Ontario) that a Say's Phoebe had been hanging since October the previous
autumn around a farm near Nairn, a village about 30 km NW of London. How
uncommon were they in the East? Well, this was Ontario's first-ever record.
I'd never seen a picture of one, as the only ID book I'd found was
Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds (the very same copy is beside me as I
write). I hadn't the slightest idea of what a Say's Phoebe, or any other of
those exotic western species in the back of the book under 'Accidentals,
was supposed to look like.

We drove up the next Sunday in through the rolling, snow-covered farmlands
in a cold brilliant sunshine. Birdwise, there's not much to see in the
fields in winter. A lone elm in the middle of a field might have a
Rough-leg sitting glumly in it; a south-facing bare field of brown,
iron-hard earth that had been sheltered somehow from the drifting snow was
covered instead with moving drifts of Snow Buntings; something torpedo-like
in the distance lunged across a ridge and disappeared into a copse, a
pheasant, maybe, or a goshawk chasing a pheasant. We never found out.

When we drove up beside the farmhouse, the farmer (whose name I've
forgotten, unfortunately but typically, but who I remember as being
cheerful and hospitable) invited us in for coffee and showed us to the best
window from which to see the phoebe. There it sat, on the wire, just
outside the window. I can remember thinking, "It's so dark!" and then,
"It's so small!" and wondering how this little urchin had survived the
usually evil Ontario winter. Though roughly the same latitude as southern
Oregon and northern California, southern Ontario is more or less still in
the middle of the continent: its winters aren't much better than a Plains
winter, 'warmer' being a relative, not very useful term at those
temperatures. The farmer showed us how.

He raised the kitchen window, opened the little slot on the storm window
(easteners will know what I mean), then reached down and got a bottle. The
bottle contained flies, large black buzzing nuggets. He picked one out and
carefully extruded it through the ventilation holes in the storm window. It
blundered off into the cold air. Swoop. Snap. Gone. Back to the wire. The
farmer explained that the barn was full of winter flies, comatose under and
behind things. Later we went with him to the barn and helped replenish the
bottle with logy, helpless bluebottles and houseflies unaware that their
forced awakening would be short (let me now, belatedly, sincerely
acknowledge their contribution to keeping the little celebrity in the yard
alive through weeks of subzero --and that's subzero *Fahrenheit* not that
sissy Celsius or Centigrade stuff-- winter weather) and their end violent.
It was a far, far better thing they did....

We fed it flies. It nailed each one, smooth as a good outfielder. Batter
up, said its bright, confident eye, hit 'em in the air. We did that for a
while, drinking more coffee in the warm kitchen, as the farmer talked of
carrying his Peterson guide with him everywhere, and wondering what this
odd little guy was that he could match with any picture when he first saw
it hanging around the farmyard. Finally, he called a more expert friend who
confirmed that the bird was certainly a flycatcher and suggested that it
was a Say's Phoebe.

I was thrilled by my first CMF rarity, tinged with 'but it's still just a
bird' anticlimax (which I've never escaped, just tolerated). I got to see
its dull chestnut underbelly and had my first disagreement with God --
Peterson said, and now I read it again, decades later, that "The black tail
and rusty *breast* give it the look of a small Robin,..." and got to see
its black tail, and got to wondering if I'd ever go out West when I grew
up.

Thanks, Bill.

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
mprice at mindlink.net