25 crows in a trenchcoat

okay so when i said "i'm gonna cut back on the details" i was a lying liar who lied

my final's right around the corner, so its time for more bird orders!!! more to come soon ;)

it is bird time once again!! only 6 more orders left to go :)

The funny thing about this story is that it will be very, very normal to someone who isn’t me. I know this, and soon you will know this, because this is solely a story about a bird I saw the other day.

Now, I’ll be up-front here: I’m a hobbyist birder who is still a student (I’ll be moving to college in the fall). I don’t have a wild amount of experience, and I make mistakes on occasion. However, in this particular case, I know that I’m right, and I ask you to believe that I’ve judged the situation accurately here.

When this whole ordeal began, it was a perfectly ordinary day where I was having breakfast at the dining table. It’s a very solid, nice, constructed of a dark wood (I don’t know enough about wood types to name it), and it sits in front of some windows that look to the backyard. We have a small one that’s most frequently enjoyed by our two dogs and the birds that come by in the morning (we leave out seeds and halved peanuts for them), and I enjoy scanning the yard to see if we have any interesting visitors (a vibrant painted bunting, an eccentric woodpecker, really anything that’s somewhat uncommon.)

That day, we did, though I didn’t know it yet. Today’s peculiarity looked mostly like a northern mockingbird, though it was a bit small and seemed a little off-colored (darker than usual). Still, that wasn’t wildly out of the ordinary and I thought nothing of it until I saw it again the next day. It had hopped a bit closer to the window and I got a better look at it. Finally, I was able to register that it was a very strange little bird and that taking a picture would be a reasonable course of action. I went back upstairs to get my phone and hoped it wouldn’t fly off, but alas, I was not fortunate enough to see it thrice. 

Personally, I pride myself on being able to identify local birds for my friends. I was only thinking of the bird as a puzzle to be solved at the time, and I utilized every trick I knew to try and discover what it could be: I used eBird, Merlin and some other nearby sites to see if anyone else had chanced upon a better vantage point for it, I tried to look up the northern mockingbird’s close relatives to see if it was one of those, I checked if there was anything similar migrating through the area… nada, nope, zip, and zero. 

Of course, I couldn’t give up hope! I waited and waited until it came back, and when i did, I finally had my camera at the ready. Finally, I had a perfect picture, and it would take nary a few clicks to send it off to the fine folks online to get a professional opinion on the bird’s words (or lack thereof, I hadn’t actually seen it calling yet.)

There’s just one teensy, tiny problem that remains.

Everyone there is calling it a northern mockingbird.

I do want to provide a bit more context for why the bird is such a problem, though. See, even though I’m pretty set on game design now, I used to think I wanted to spend my life doing ornithology (way back in middle school and early high school). I had my internships lined up, I knew my major, I’d picked out a grad school and researched the professors there… at the time, it was perfect, and I knew everyone around me thought the same. I loved seeing the looks on their faces when they realized just how well I had it made. I loved feeling like I was better for having made those choices, arbitrary as they were for the time. 

Naturally, this began with an interest in birding. It wasn’t too dissimilar to how I saw the strange mockingbird, actually: I saw a bird outside the window and wanted to know what it was. The bird from back then was a mourning dove (beautiful little things with a sort of dusty, rose tan coloring and a call that can trick people into thinking they’ve got an owl in the neighborhood)! I wouldn’t settle for anything less than being right at all times. I don’t think I’ve ever broken that habit, in all honesty.