The rock dove, aka the rock pigeon, the common pigeon, the dove, winged rats, etc etc, this is a feral domestic animal found all around the globe – especially around humans.  They’re on the “life list” of birds I’ve seen, and they’re on yours too.  Along with Canada geese, they’re the biggest purveyors of bird feces where you don’t want them to be, in much of the USA.  But still, they’re ours -we made them- and I do like them an awful lot.

Pigeons are a cool group of birds.  Different species are found all over the world, and it’s surprising to me what they have in common.  Some diverse far-flung groups of birds like woodpeckers have more variety in proportion and shape than pigeons do.  For some reason, doves all have that broad powerful chest, stretchy neck that narrows at the top, and a lil’ head with pigeon beak.  How do I describe that beak?  You know what it looks like, and it looks the same from ivory-colored desert beauty on one side of the planet to upside-down parrot-colored jungle freak on the other.  Dodos were the one outlier in that beak shape.  I know the cloning projects have been scams and bullshit, but I’d love to see it happen.

In my neighborhood there are only two species of pigeon that I know of:  the one this article is about, and invasive Eurasian collared doves.  I do like the invaders, as rarely as I see them, but this article is not their time.

Domestic doves are known for coating the cities of the world in guano.  At one time in the Middle East, silo-shaped dovecotes had chutes designed to spill fertilizer into fields of crops.  Smart.  Now people remember after the fact that anything humans can build, pigeons can perch on, and they have to cover unintended landing strips in bird spikes.  I heard anarchist cockatoos in Oz are tearing up that hostile architecture; good job.

Lingering traces of domestication syndrome haunt the gene pool of these animals, some over a thousand generations removed from active human care.  You see it in their lack of fear around humans, of course, but also in their mottled colors.  Many have reverted to natural enough color schemes, like if feral domestic cats had achieved higher rates of brown tabby in their numbers, but many pigeons are missing a category of pigment, or gone leucistic or piebald or polka-dotted.  I like the natural colors, but the mutants can be very pretty.

The first place pigeons became important in my life was as supporting actors in John Woo movies.  Some other random experiences:  Seeing them puffed up to the size of bowling balls, trying to hunker down for the freezing weather in the International District bus tunnel.  Seeing their fucked up malformed feet, and seeing an article on the subject just as my curiosity about it was reaching its peak.  Seeing a baby pigeon ganked by crows on Mother’s Day.  Seeing baby pigeons close up for the first time, in a nest at the Federal Way Transit Center.

I’ve wanted to have a pet bird I could easily snuggle with, and if I ever get over the annoyance of cleaning the cage etc, pigeons are on my list.  They’re domestic animals so would feel less nervy about it than 99% of parrots, and they’re less scratchy / bitey than chickens.  I wouldn’t even get a fancy pigeon.  Plain ol’ winged rat is good enough for me.  I would hold it under my arm like a football and get gross stains on all my clothes.  Worth it?

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There are some birds that are so successful I have to wonder if they’re out of balance with nature.  It may be an indigenous species, but is it overpopulated because humans messed something up for them?  Causing problems for less human-adapted cousins?  Crows are known to have had a major population spike in the Pacific Northwest.  How about chickadees?  How about dark-eyed juncos?

Dark-eyed juncos are in the New World sparrows, or Passerellidae.  They could be the most populous bird in Western Washington, or a close contender to the more obvious ones.  But you might not know it.  In parking lots and urban centers, invasive starlings, house sparrows, and house finches are much more obvious.

It’s when you get into areas with a little less pavement, like the apartment complexes across the street from the grocery store, that the native mobs give them a run for their money.  As ground feeding birds, juncos are more visible than chickadees and nuthatches, and they are just everywhere.  So many of them, making a call like a wobbling wire, flashing the white feathers on the sides of their tails like flamenco dancers, as they flit from bush to beauty bark to bush.

Passerellids are LBBs (little brown birds) that can be hard to ID, but hereabouts the dominant morph of dark-eyed junco is the “Oregon,” which has a strongly black hood.  The only ground-feeding bird you might mistake them for is a spotted towhee, with black hood and reddish flanks, but they have very different habits and calls, the towhee with a dramatic blood-red eye and white spots.  Juvenile juncos make a cricket-like chirp when begging for food and attention, following around a parent.  They can distinguished because the hood is less strongly black and the flashy white tail feathers are short.

I didn’t look up anything outside of the genealogy.  I just picked all this up from observation, which was easy as hell because there are so many of them.  Still, it’s nice to see a native bird doing well, and they are very cute.  Their little white beaks have a lavender hint which is more obvious in photography than in flyby.  They do fly by, almost like barn swallows, in front of your bicycle wheels or your car grill.  Is it to show off for potential mates?  A daredevil routine?  The must do it well; I’ve never seen a dead one.

I don’t have a lot of stories about them.  The one time I saw brood parasitism in action, a junco was the victim.  I once did a series of four small mixed-media paintings, birds with roguish accoutrement and nicknames.  Gangster birdies – a house sparrow, house finch, dark-eyed junco, and white-crowned sparrow.  The only one that sold at the gallery was the house sparrow, for thirty-five 2010 dollars.  The junco lost that contest, but they still win every day.

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The largest bird I can see with any regularity is the great blue heron.  Technically there’s some overlap in wingspan with bald eagles, but I see those less often, and I do think they are smaller overall, for not having a heron’s snake neck and long bill.

They’re pretty cool.  The way color and texture of feathers varies over the body lends interest, but the dominant color is low key blue-grey.  Classy.  Herons, egrets, and the hilarious bitterns are in the Ardeidae, united in having the long legs, snake neck, and stabbing beak.  They skulk, they wade, they snap up a small animal, and they swallow it whole.

I once saw one put away a very chubby rodent like this.  Grab it, toss it in the air, then swallow.  Freaky.  I’ve read that they are so voracious they will die from swallowing inadvisable prey.  There was a case in California where one had swallowed an eel that produces choking mucus, and died.  Then the heron next to it grabbed another eel and went out the same way.  C’mon, guys.

More random experiences…  On a birding trip to the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, I got my best view ever of one, through the free mounted telescope.  The bird had landed on a rail further down the walkway, and through the scope was as easy to see as a pet cat in your lap.  Cool details, beautiful animal, but when it defecated, it looked like somebody chucking a coffee mug full of liquid paper out the backside.

One time I took a vacation all by myself when I was alone in life, no friends family or lovers to bring along.  It was the dark of winter, cold and abysmal, taking a ferry from Seattle to Port Townsend.  The weather kept me from seeing as much wildlife as I would have preferred, but I got to hear the call of a heron for the first time – a great croak, like you’d imagine coming from a man-eating toad in D&D.  Nice.

Right after that I returned to art school on the Seattle waterfront, the early class having me there before dawn.  I heard the call again, and looked down just in time to see one gliding between the masts of docked sailboats, illuminated by amber street lamps.

A few times at beaches in South King County I was able to wade within thirty feet of one while it fished.  Not as good as the telescope view, but kind of fun.  One time while birdwatching in Ballard, I saw one across the locks in a park where they are known to nest, feeding a chick what looked like a four foot snake.

I just like to see a big-ass bird in flight.  They’re not the truly big ones, but respectable, and they’re what I’ve got.  Watch the big angel wings beat the sky, and if you’re lucky, hear the big devil croak.

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TLC said they don’t want no scrubs, and it was clear when that song debuted that it was about me.  I was born further south than where I was raised, so I am a California Scrub.  I’m just one descriptor shy of being this bird: the California scrub jay.  CSJs are on the boring end of jay styles, with a very generic bird profile, and more brown and grey than most other jays.  But they’re a cool bird.  Decent size and a tendency to briefly alight on fences and awnings, so easy to spot.

Less chonky and clumsy than crows, they don’t stick around for long.  Blink and you’ll miss them, and when I was a kid, I did a lot of blinking, because I only ever saw them once, and not close enough to ID.  I had assumed they were the blue jays known as blue jays, which, as it turns out, do not live in the region at all.  I am only confident those were CSJs in retrospect, because I am once again living on the very same street where I was at the time of that encounter, and CSJs are everywhere here.

Speaking of awnings, that was the only time in my life when you might have caught me lounging on a roof.  I was living in squalor and family dysfunction, but I was living on the second floor, and outside of my window was some rooftop.  I didn’t spend much time on it.  One night my brother and I saw something like the aurora borealis, but it didn’t make sense, middle of summer?  I know jack about shit.  I was skinny with long hairs, and I sang the Misfits’ Last Caress in the garage of that apartment, with my homies on instruments.  White people foolery.  Make the neighbors hate you.

CSJs only came back into my life again within the last couple of years.  I was living up the hill in Federal Way and commuting to work in the valley, at a building surrounded by scrubby fields of the exact kind you’d expect for them.  And yet I didn’t see them the first year I worked there.  Don’t know why.  When I did start to glimpse them, they were at long distance, shy, flighty.  Took a long time to get a positive ID, but once it happened?  Some pretty nice close encounters.

Sadly my work moved out of that building, which is surely slated for destruction by whoever it was sold to.  The enshittification of everything continueth.  But just as my work moved uphill to Fed Way, I moved downhill to Auburn, and CSJ City.

California Scrub Jays are blue on top, white on bottom, with a little reddish brown vest.  I’m not usually close enough to see this, but they have a bit of a black mask and white eyebrows.  They’re not the only jays in this neighborhood, but Steller’s jays prefer the cover of trees, are out in the open less often.  But I saw Steller’s pretty often during a decade of Federal Way, so scrub jays feel fresh and cool to me now.

I want to see scrubs
Scrubs are some birds that can get the love from me
I hear them inside when they have to cry
The sound down my chimney

Eh, needs work.  Not happening.

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My “life list” as a birder is unremarkable, but the wee beasties make me feel some type of way, so I thought, articles about them.  First entry…

I always liked nature, liked birds, but I somehow just didn’t pay attention to them – at least, not enough to notice just how many were around me, what they looked like, acted like, sounded like.  I’d see chickadees one month and by the time I took any note of another bird, forgot enough that I assumed house sparrows were the same species – then not noticed another bird for two years.

The first bird that sparked an abiding interest for me, at about age thirty, was the northern flicker – a very humble woodpecker.  Most woodpeckers in North America are bold black and white, with pure red flashes.  Flickers and their cousins are a tawny brown, where the black and white on them turn into “cryptic” camouflage, and the red ranges from rust colored to salmon to yellow, in the eastern end of their range.  Dull.  But still.

I used to see a brown bird on the ground with red bits and assume it was just an american robin (i’d rather call ’em the anglicization of their binomial, “migratory thrush,” because bitches do not look like real robins).  Until one day, I saw one of those birds take off, and reveal red all over the bottoms of its wings – then proceed to land on the side of a tree, in a way that was impossible for robins.  I stalked that bird all around Meridian Playground in Wallingford, hoping to get a better view, but the cryptic plumage and nervous demeanor kept it out of reach.

I went home and scoured the internet until I got my ID.  Despite my having never noticed them, they are extremely common.  There are no doubt tens of thousands of them in the region, maybe hundreds of thousands.  When you come to recognize their CHEEE! call, you realize how many there are, whether you see them or not.  And they aren’t that hard to see, because unlike most of the woodpeckers here, they feed near or on the ground.  I’ve seen them in the middle of a paved expanse, no trees in sight, flicking moss out of a sidewalk crack to get bugs.  They’re everywhere.  How did I miss them?

Now I try not to miss birds.  To honor the northern flicker, I got one tattooed on my left shoulder.  Still haven’t been able to get it colored.  Speaking of which, as plain as they are, they really are very cute.  They have these brilliant black polka-dots, a black crescent bib, red teardrop shapes sliding off their cheeks, and of course, the red under their wings.  Most birds are pale under the wing, for countershading, so it’s very cool to see a bird buck that trend in bold style – even if the red isn’t as pure as it is in their flashier cousins.  Compared to a lot of other brown birds, they are more tawny and pale, which makes their eyes look more dark and sweet.  They are about the same size as an american robin, but as woodpeckers, can easily move around on the sides of trees.  Powerful feet with two toes facing forward and two back.

I haven’t gone as deep into describing all the cool details about them as I could.  Check them out sometime, if you can.  Northern flickers.  Cool guys.

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There’s this stretch of 320th Street in Federal Way, a bit east of I-5, just business parks trees and gas stations.  Probably just a bit out of sight is water – tiny plots of wetland maintained by the city, maybe a little lake?  I don’t know the neighborhood that well, but I pass through it a lot.

Anyway, for the second time I have seen these birds I cannot identify.  It’s hard to get a good look at them when driving past, even from my spot in the passenger seat.  I see them flying over the street or near it, thirty to sixty feet up, in a tight formation of several birds.  Colorwise and regionwise, I would assume glaucous-winged gull.  After all, just west of the highway at the mall, they’re so numerous that I imagine they’re nesting.  These are very white birds.  I feel like a glimpsed just a little streak of black from the coverts or the body.

But their wings are too short, their wingbeats too fast.  Not waterfowl fast, but close.  Maybe they fly more like big gulls when they get to higher altitude.  Still, they have me so flummoxed I looked up all the waterfowl with white bodies.  My views of them have been so fleeting I think it’s possible I missed a dark head or legs.  But all the significantly white ducks have too much black on their wings, couldn’t be them.

I’ve even thought, a flock of white pigeons?  They are smaller than glaucous-winged gulls, but I think still too large to be pigeons.  After all that, I am thinking they are one of the smaller gull species, like ring-billed.  I can’t rule out tern, but again, don’t most terns have very long wings?

The reason I was so specific with the location is that if, by chance, an expert birder remembers driving through that spot, and what they saw there, this might be an easy answer.  If I can’t work it out, I’m just going to have to commit a day of my life to camping out at the side of a busy road with the hobos, and watching the sky.

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