Oh my God! I just made a most shocking discovery in the yard a few minutes
ago. So shocking as to be downright exhilarating! As absolutely and utterly
tiny and simple as this may seem to the more enlightened of you than me,
this may in fact be the highlight of MY whole year, decade even, maybe even my
life! How can something SO BIG be SO SMALL?!!?

All this time (years!) I've heard this mysterious loud ear piercing barking
sound emanating from something somewhere with a seemingly quite ventriloquil
quality that I could never pin point much less see. Something that forceful,
that loud, so much so I often hear it from as far as one or even two blocks
away! Something that forceful, that loud, surely must be some kind of
mammal. Chipmunk, no. Douglas Squirrel, no. So I finally settled on Aplodontia
since I have had a long running battle with them for years. Or, I'm just
prejudice and need a scapegoat. I figured they were probably barking from a
tunnel entrance but couldn't explain why sometimes they seem really really close
and above my head in a clump of rhododendron. Inches! I could never spot
the source. It usually happens on nice warm days, and even nice cold ones
(like this one), and even not so nice ones and year round. I have even posted
about this alleged 'Aplodontia' bark on Tweeters in years past. Boy, have I
ever been wrong, wrong, wrong; so soo wrong, I will probably be excommunicated
from the nature community.
So, here I am around 10:30am standing around in the backyard doing what else
but working on my contribution to the "Great Backyard Bird Count" when my eye
catches a sunlit moth / dragonfly like glint of something hovering way way
far high in the cold blue sky. I put my bins on it and low & behold, it's a
male Anna's Hummingbird hovering way up there. A moment later, it plunges
earthward toward the top of the rhodie swooping up at the last moment which
coincidentally resulted in that all too familiar loud barking sound. Who did
that I wonder; coincidence? It repeated several times, same thing same sound,
as I was mentally adjusting myself to just what exactly was going on. Was
there an Aplodontia up there in bush top responding to being buzzed by a
courting Anna's Hummingbird? THAT seemed a little far fetched. Or, was that loud,
ear piercing, bark actually the Anna's Hummingbird? THAT seemed a little
far fetched too but becoming maybe plausible. Once the hummingbird stopped
the diving, so stopped the barking.
So, Anna's Hummingbird courtship flight note it is me thinks, which left me
with another vastly vexing question. Why have I never heard or at the very
least been aware of this now way too familiar, if not sometimes annoying sound
anywhere else? [Read: "annoying" in the context of one of those
exasperating and largely invisible Aplodontias hell bent to ravage the rhodies and
undermine the hillside]. I mean I am very much aware of Anna's Hummingbirds
anywhere along the West Coast when I see them, whether from just around western
Washington, or from southern BC to southern California, yet to my recollection,
I have never heard this bark anywhere else but in my own backyard. As
distinctive and deeply ingrained familiar as the bark is and with my now seemingly
incorrect assumption shattering now in what I had long thought was an
Aplodontia, I would naturally pick up on it instantly if I ever heard it anywhere
else. Why this sound so specific to just my yard and nowhere else? Anna's
Hummingbirds must be doing making the very same sounds everywhere else but I
just don't detect it or am aware. OTOH, maybe..., I just feed mine so well,
TOO WELL, that here they just EXPLODE rather than subtly going 'pop' and if
they are just going about 'popping' somewhere else, I don't hear them or they
don't register as anything out of the ordinary.
So, this new discovery and suspicion temporarily scuttled the 'Great
Backyard Bird Count' which was shaping up unfortunately to be quite busy at that
time, and sent me rushing off to do a little research. A quick google search,
"Anna's Hummingbird courtship flight" instantly brought up as item #1, a most
enlightening piece of information from none other than our very own Seattle
Audubon Society's website, specifically at:
_http://birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?id=262_
(http://birdweb.org/birdweb/bird_details.aspx?id=262)
which in part reads as follows:
"Behavior:
One of the most distinctive behaviors of the Anna's Hummingbird is the male's
courtship flight dive. He flies high in the air and then plummets. At the
bottom of the dive, he makes a loud, distinctive popping noise, called the
"dive noise." The origin of the dive noise is not fully understood, but is
thought to be mostly vocal. The vocalization may or may not be supplemented with
noise from air rushing through the feathers. In addition to the dive noise, the
very vocal Anna's Hummingbird makes a variety of buzzes, chips, and
chatters. Both males and females defend feeding territories, although males defend
them more diligently and for a longer period of time."
"The dive noise?" Interesting choice of not very scientific sounding words
for a description which kind of hints to me that I may not be the first
person in the world, scientist/ornithologist even, perplexed by this strange loud
forced barking sound initially attributed to a mammal or some other critter.
I have issues with the words, 'popping noise' too. This ain't no simple
'pop!' This is a very loud large rodent like bark! I have read the
descriptions in bird guides and life history material about the 'popping or snapping'
of wing maybe combined with voice that Anna's and other hummingbirds make at
the bottom of their courtship swoops and dives, and a simple little barely
audible 'snap' registers in my mind as something entirely different from some
ear piercing loud rodent like 'bark' audible from as far as ONE BLOCK AWAY!
How can something so small and so delicate as a tiny little bejeweled
hummingbird make such an explosive racket as this? It's clearly audible through the
walls of the house even with the radio, tv, or stereo cranked up and I can
hear it right now as I write and KING-FM is on. I can't even hear my neighbors
insane Great Dane's ceaseless barking through the walls, but maybe that's
only because it's drowned out by the courtship diving and wall piercing
'exploding' Anna's Hummingbird(s).
So, mystery solved, case closed. And maybe I was successful after all in my
live trapping Aplodontia campaign last winter / spring in rounding up 8 of
those fascinating but pesky critters and transplanting them to the Cascade
foothills east of North Bend. As for today's Anna's Hummingbird experience,
whatever you want to call it, it just goes to show, that sometimes, the most
exciting discoveries are there awaiting as close as in your own backyard.
Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, the Great Backyard Bird Count. I guess I'll
have to start all over.
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Richard Rowlett
Bellevue (Eastgate), WA, USA

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought" --Albert Szent-Gyorgi (1893-1986).
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