My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

One Good Tern…

Late one fall afternoon, a flock of cedar waxwings descended on our backyard. I get excited by a bird with a crest. They’re the royalty, the showstoppers. I barreled into the den to get my binoculars. Ed was watching the game. “Cedar waxwings!” I yelled.

“St. Louis Cardinals!” Ed yelled back.

I paused in the doorway. “Have you ever even seen a cedar waxwing?”

“It’s a bird,” said Ed. “I’ve seen birds. They fly, they sing a little ditty.”

I was raised by bird-watchers. My mother filled bird feeders and cadged hunks of suet from the A&P butchers to hang on trees for the woodpeckers. At a young age, I learned the simple satisfaction of identifying a new bird all by myself and then making the decisive check mark on the life list in the back of the bird guide. No one notices birds in my husband’s family. They view bird-watching as a sort of quaint, perplexing mental illness. I have heard Ed refer to birders as people who pull their pants up a little too high.

When I first went to Florida with Ed and his daughters to visit his parents, I tried to drag everyone out to the Wakodahatchee Wetlands to see the storks and ibises. Wakodahatchee is a native word meaning “swamp that serves as a major mosquito breeding ground for the greater South Florida region.”

“Do we have to go?” Lily would say.

“It stinks there,” Phoebe would chime in.

I once dragged them out to the Everglades in search of the roseate spoonbill, a large storklike item with a bald green head and a long spatulate beak.

“Imagine trying to eat with no hands,” I said to Lily and Phoebe, hoping to spark their interest. “Imagine trying to pick up a fish with a set of mixing spoons that have been stuck to your face.”

Phoebe swatted a mosquito. “Imagine getting the hell out of here.”

Lily yawned. “Imagine going back to Nana’s and lying out by the pool.”

The late-afternoon sun had deepened the waxwings’ colors. The last quarter inch of a waxwing’s tail feathers is bright yellow, as though it had been dipped in paint. I don’t know why this should thrill me so, but it does. “Are you sure you don’t want to come see them?” I said to Ed. He was sure. I told him birding would be good for him. He could use another active hobby, something that gets him out into nature.

“That’s true,” said Ed’s friend Brian, who was watching the game with him. “Like me. I’m taking up golf.”

Ed frowned. “I’m taking up space.”

I recently bought a software program called Handheld Birds—a bird guide with birdcall audio files and checklists built in—which can be loaded onto a PalmPilot. While it was nice to have the birdcalls with me in the field, the appeal of a handheld device, for me, was more basic: Fewer people would peg me as a birder and think derisive thoughts about me. Instead, they’d think, There’s a successful businesswoman checking her many pressing engagements while standing in the woods at 6 a.m. on a Saturday.

I soon went back to my bird guide. If I’m trying to identify, say, a new tern species, I need to see all the terns at once, laid out for comparison on a page or two. The handheld limits you to viewing one species at a time, though it does provide a lot more information on each of those species. You can zoom in on a blowup of the bird with its distinctive features pointed out—the blue bill of the ruddy duck, the white underpants of the pigeon guillemot. It’s possible I misread this and that what it says is “white underparts.” But I prefer to picture the guillemot standing out on the rocks in a pair of white underpants, no doubt pulled up just a little too high.