Great story Michael. A blue ribbon for best post of the month in my mail
box. Thanks for sharing. :-) --Richard

Richard Rowlett <pagodroma at aol.com>
Bellevue, WA, USA
------------------------------------------------

Michael Price wrote:

>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.
>
>