Hey tweets, With the Olympics coming up in a few short weeks, I've been
thinking about the concept of winning and losing. Supposedly, sports
contests are a displacement activity for our chimpian desires to hunt and
fight. I dunno. It seems to me that most of the chimps I know prefer to
quietly pick fruit. Oh, I've read Jane Goodall's writing about nasty chimps
who sneak off to commit mayhem. But as we birders who encounter belligerent
dog-walkers or paranoid property owners know, every species has its yahoos.

Even if the need to have winners and losers is innate (and I dispute that),
surely we would be better off to adopt Kate Hepburn's admonition to Humphrey
Bogart in "The African Queen": "Human nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were
put on earth to rise above."

I bring this up because of the trip my husband and I took to the Blue
Mountains over the weekend. We went because we wanted to find the
green-tailed towhees touted in "A Birder's Guide...." We also wouldn't have
minded finding northern pygmy owls, also mentioned in the guide as being so
common as to fail to raise even a faint pulse of excitement. Ho-hum. Both
would have been life birds for me. Between the pygmy owl convention and the
towhee Morris dancing festival, we expected to find these birds stacked up
in an avian holding pattern above our heads. A mere craning of the neck, and
we would add two great birds to our list.

So off we went, with high hopes. For two days, we fought sudden
thunderstorms, hail, dense fog, bone-numbing cold and icy hillsides that
seemed to burble up water direct from a previously unknown underground river
that must be connected to the Arctic.

Or, to put it another way, we rambled over the greenest slopes I've ever
seen - unless you count Ireland - with rainbows that came and went on a
minute-by-minute basis. The hills were covered with a riot of wildflowers in
such abundance that at times whole mountains appeared to be crayoned in
magenta, yellow or blue.

Great birds were everywhere. Bullock's orioles flashed by like self-lit
campfires. Black-headed grosbeaks climbed up onto wispy branches, flung back
their heads, opened their big beaks and let 'er rip. One male sang so
enthusiastically that he vibrated clear down to his lemon-yellow tummy.
Swainson's hawks came in every color variant, including some that actually
did look like the pictures in National Geo, wonder of wonders. Up against a
wooded hill, a flock of wild turkeys froze into immobility when we drove up,
and then with a comical gobble-gobble made for cover. I guess my binoculars
looked too much like gunsights to them.

(As an aside, I've been reading the new biography of Alexander Hamilton,
which details the beginnings of our modern United States, and I must say,
I'm rather glad that Benjamin Franklin's suggestion to make the turkey our
national bird was defeated. I was telling our Micronesian sponsoree, Glenn,
about our Revolutionary War history. When I mentioned Franklin's idea, I
thought Glenn was going to crack a rib, he was laughing so hard. Thomas
Jefferson and John Adams were wrong to think that the bald eagle is a noble
bird, when in reality it's a fish-eating kleptomaniac that doesn't mind
dining on the occasional carrion. But the turkey? On the other hand, maybe
we should have a national bird that makes us laugh at ourselves now and
then. We may very well be in dire need of some humility.)

All these thoughts and visions were parading through my mind while John and
I soaked up the silence along with the rain, the majesty and the sheer
vibrant abundance of life that is the Blue Mountains. But, there were no
green-tailed towhees or pygmy owls to be found.

So my question is, did we win or lose?

It would be so easy to feel disappointed that we failed to see our target
birds. We set a goal, and we didn't meet it. What losers, right? Vince
Lombardi would think so.

But my husband and I don't feel bad that we didn't hit our goal. On the
contrary, now we have a great reason to get back to the Blues and spend a
week or more there. After all, everyone knows that's the best place in the
state to see green-tailed towhees, so we *have* to go back. And even if we
had seen the towhees, we would have felt no different (okay, we would have
been jumping up and down doing a victory dance, which luckily, on account of
the remoteness of the site, no one would have seen us, and if they had, they
wouldn't have known who we were). What we really "won" by going out into
nature was a peace of mind that we sorely needed, a sense of renewal, a
realization that there are bigger things in the world than our troubles, a
bedrock belief that no matter how wrong the world appears, there is
ineffable, ecstatic glory in it, too. A glory that has nothing to do with
the limiting idea of winning or losing.

Here's everything we found, beginning at dawn in Othello and ending at dusk
in Seattle:

great blue heron
Canada goose
mallard
gadwall
ruddy duck
redhead
lesser scaup
common merganser
American coot
killdeer
California gull
northern harrier
red-tailed hawk
Swainson's hawk
osprey
prairie falcon
American kestrel
California quail
ring-necked pheasant
wild turkey
rock pigeon
mourning dove
great-horned owl (a family of five!)
Vaux's swift
rufous hummingbird
black-chinned hummingbird
calliope hummingbird (all in Tom Lamb's yard; a great guy in Dixie)
northern flicker
eastern kingbird
western kingbird
dusky flycatcher
horned lark
violet-green swallow
barn swallow
bank swallow
cliff swallow
northern rough-winged swallow
black-billed magpie
American crow
common raven
red-breasted nuthatch
Bewick's wren
rock wren
Townsend's solitaire
hermit thrush
American robin
European starling
yellow warbler
yellow-rumped warbler
orange-crowned warbler
black-headed grosbeak
spotted towhee
vesper sparrow
song sparrow
lark sparrow
chipping sparrow
dark-eyed junco
western meadowlark
yellow-headed blackbird
red-winged blackbird
Brewer's blackbird
Bullock's oriole
brown-headed cowbird
western tanager
house sparrow
American goldfinch - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com