Life List: Pileated Woodpecker

The pileated woodpecker is the largest woodpecker left in North America, not quite the largest remaining species in the world.  They aren’t especially rare, which is nice.  I’ve only ever seen them from down on the ground, while they were high in a treetop, or on a power line or utility pole.  I’ve heard the call a few times.  It doesn’t sound like Woody Woodpecker at all.  I’ve been lied to!

Woodpeckers are in a freaky offshoot of birdkind called Piciformes, which includes some guys you might not expect, such as toucans.  The tell is in the feet.  They have two front facing and two rear facing toes, allowing them to cling to the verticals of tree trunks more effectively.  OK, they are far from the only birds that do this -see parrots- but they do all have this trait in common.  Parrots are more closely related to falcons and songbirds than to woodpeckers, so this is a case of convergent evolution in funky feet.

It’s pretty cool that tha king of woodpeckin’ is so easy to find.  I’d like a better look at them, but the cost is costly.  My bipolar pater went big into birdfeeding, with specialized lures for the big boys, and was rewarded with some good looks at them, some photographs to commemorate it.  By the time he successfully brought them to the patio, neighbors were getting angry about the bird shit and noise.  It was one of the camelborne straws that caused him to lose that place, always trading down for something worse.

Who’s seen the pileated woodpecker, and did it cause you any trouble?

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Life List: Downy Woodpecker

There’s this idea some woodpeckers evolve to look similar to larger / more dominant woodpeckers that live in the same area, to take advantage of rep established by a tougher beast, without having to invest in the body size to get tougher themselves.  I proposed in another article that “oregon morph” dark-eyed juncos may be doing the same thing with spotted towhees.  (My idea will be studied by actual scientists when hell freezes over.)  The go-to example in this area is downy woodpeckers trying to look like hairy woodpeckers.

They look similar enough, how can I know which one I’ve seen?  The one I distinctly recall was seen at a very great distance, which is precisely where my sense of scale breaks down.  Can I be sure I could tell the difference between a woodpecker six inches long and one that’s eight inches long, from seventy feet away?  It just seemed like such a small bird, I have to think it was the smaller of the two.  I could very easily be wrong.

Where was this rare beauty?  Near the top of a tall scraggly tree amid concrete on concrete, the Federal Way Transit Center.  There was more appropriate habitat for it in parks and residential area around lakes not far at all, as the bird flies, but that’s not where I saw it.  They could look almost like any old songbird, with more sparrowish proportions than most other woodpeckers, but they’re all black and white, not especially cryptic, and they hang onto trees vertically, without the flattened posture of a creeper or nuthatch.

Not an amazingly exciting bird, but it’s nice to know they’re around.  And that’s not a bad gig, impersonating a more successful person to gain their social cachet.  If I got a toupee and wore foundation, I could kinda look like Matt Damon, hawk crypto on Superb Owl Sunday, make a bank full of funny money.  Watch out!

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Life List: American Coot

Like Yurp, Amurrica has a coot.  A coot is part of a fucking weird group of weird birds, but is trying to pass itself off as something much more normal.  You see them on a pond and you might think, that’s kind of a duck, right?  It has some makeup on its forehead to indicate it’s an alien, like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but it’s a duck.  Right?

No, those toes are not webbed.  Those toes are lobed.  Each segment of each toe has laterally projecting flaps that help them paddle almost as good as webbies.  I haven’t actually seen coots in a long time, and I’m not sure why.  Throughout my life I’ve always seen mallards at rivers and small lakes much more often than coots, but lately…  Probably it’s just a coincidence.

Many of their cousins like swamphens and gallinules have very weird proportions, more leggy with just hugely long toes.  “He feet too big for he gotdam body,” so sayeth the meme.  That makes coots the boring ones, and appropriately they are grey and black.  Puritan birds with white beaks and blood-red eyes.

Coot is an american slang term for elderly people.  Really, it’s a slur, but one of the gentler ones.  It calls to mind a person who is losing their cognitive function.  Even if said with affection, best to not.  If you’re not there yet, I don’t think you can imagine how threatening the specter of losing your cognitive function is – or the awareness that it is already happening.  Some people might roll with it, some might be saddened or upset, whether they show it or not.

I’ve been thinking off and on lately – more within the last year – that I’d like to start writing about old characters, perhaps exclusively.  Why should I fantasize about youth, think only of the beauty of the young, when that isn’t me and never will be again?  The majority of my life will be spent looking old and feeling old, with various forms of age-related infirmity guaranteed.  I’m already experiencing them.  I’m bald, my remaining hair has been mostly white for years, and my spine is degenerating.

I enjoyed writing characters close to my own age in Centennial Hills, Shammy and Eliza.  Why not make them the MCs?  Murder She Wroteiverse.  Diagnosis: Murderiverse.  Just as a trans person would not want every story to be about the struggle against transphobia, a senior would not want every story to showcase the difficulties of age.  But I do think that can highlight another area for representation: disability.  Once you get over sixty, it’s sooo common to have multiple disabilities of varying severity, it becomes normal.  Normalize everybody in your story being disabled.  Shit’s like that, but we still abide, still have the best lives we can, as much as we can.

On the other hand, maybe I’m not quite qualified to write about that yet.  Maybe I need to experience more of it.  Not quite fifty.  And of course, it’s a hard limit on the commercial viability of a project, much like making the MC transgender.  Heh, like I should even be giving a shit about that, at this point in life.

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Life List: Grey Goose

One time around a green lake I saw a grey goose.  Green Lake is a good-sized puddle somewhere in all that stuff north of Lake Union, not super far from Woodland Park Zoo.  It’s kinda touristy, which is funny because there’s not much going on there.  Just park.  Trails.  Goose shit.

I was there to visit a veterinarian near by.  I do not remember why I ended up at the lake a couple of times back then.  I had a ride; you’d think I’d just get in the car and go.  But there I was.  On the lake itself, there were the usual coots and mallards and canada geese.  Cackling geese?  I didn’t know back then.  No small amount of waterfowl also patrolled the grass around the lake, keeping it fertilized.  And in that grass, I found a small flock of grey geese that I did not recognize.

Small flock. Was it only two birds?  A few more?  Memory is fuzzy, but they were at least as big as canada geese, and resting – maybe even sleeping.  I got real close.  As I recall, they looked like canada geese that forgot to have any black on them.  The grey ran up onto the neck and head, the beak was orange.  There was some kind of white near the tail?

Based on the birds found with any regularity here, 98% chance they were greater white-fronted geese.  Which is normally high enough odds I’d just title the post accordingly, but I wanted the chance to call the post “grey goose,” after the vodka.

I don’t drink vodka, but I have intentionally put it in my mouth before, for dental reasons.  Also hydrogen peroxide, for the same reason – kill bacteria, kill pain, until the dentist can sort something out.  If you have dental pain and no opiates, it’s pretty good for that.  Doesn’t last long, but keep swiggin’, and if you’re a teetotaler like me, spittin’.  While this vodka wasn’t “the good stuff,” how different can it be?  And to me, it really was a similar experience to swigging with hydrogen peroxide – foamy astringence, taste barely different from water, but with bizarre chemical aspects.

If you’re an alcoholic-ass drunky like James Bondage, you come to like the sensory experience of consuming booze, right?  My drunkest friend was a box wine boy instead of a liquor man, so maybe not.  But grey goose always makes me think of this article I once read, on cool reckless youths in Seattle’s International District.  Asian street racers, living 3 fast 3 furiously.

There’s an image in the story (if i’m remembering this right) of a heavy-set young dude with a shaved head, wiping sweat with a hand towel and saying something like, “The goose straight had me.”  This was a reference to my titular vodka drink.  Careful how hard you party, goose man.  Especially since your other hobby is driving.

Street racers.  I calls ’em racey boys.  They became much more of a thing in recent years.  Since covid mostly, but even before that, there was a huge uptick in children stealing cars for joyriding around here.  In my last apartment complex, I heard some young child had hotwired a car and just drove it around the parking lot demolition derby style, fucking up people’s cars.

I attribute this in part to the Franchise & Furious, who so convinced people of the carefree fun of driving too fast that one of the stars bought the glamer and bought the big one.  Goodbye Paul Walker, but honestly, it’s what you deserve for doing a hundred in a forty zone, fuck’s sake.

They obviously don’t care about other people’s lives, but primarily they do not care about their own.  It may seem silly to call this a consequence of environmental and political despair, but it absofuckinlutely is.  I hear kids say that kind of shit sometimes, online.  They have no hope.  Good job, crapitalism.

So.  While I hope the street racers take themselves out in a ball of twisted metal before they take any innocent bystanders down with them, I can’t hate them too much.  Tiny modicum or respect and sympathy even.  I pour one out for you, racey boys.  Or at least spit one out, next time I have a toothache.

Back to Green Lake, on one of these goosey occasions.  I had to use the bathroom, and walked in to see a naked dude standing there, talking russki to somebody on his cellphone.  Now this bathroom also had a public shower I think, for anyone disease-loving enough to swim in the lake, so nudity had an excuse.  He wasn’t erect and wasn’t jackin’ it.  But he wasn’t wet from a shower, and he seemed like he was just waiting in full frontal view of the door for somebody to walk in and see him.

I smirked or cocked an eyebrow, like, alright man.  Might have even been slightly aroused.  For some reason this didn’t hit me as bad as the dude that sexually harassed me on the bus that one time.  But it occurred to me later, absentminded and distracted as I’d been, that he may have been hoping for kids to walk in on him – which is decidedly worse.

The world is a vampire.  Makes you wanna drank a goose and hop in a muscle car.  But no, we abide.  Eye on the big peaceful bird, dozing the day away.  That’s where you’ll find me.

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Life List: Canada Goose

I may have mentioned this before, but on finding out the canada goose is a species complex with more than one in my neighborhood, I figured I’d never be able to clock the difference.  But I find there are two moderately easy ways to tell them apart, at least the two we get.

The canada goose proper is a big beast.  Not quite swan sized, but it holds its big long neck way up in the air.  Cackling goose might even have a neck that is proportionally just as long, maybe not, but they habitually have them crooked and short most of the time.  So if you were right next to the bird, in the kill zone, would it be able to stick its beak in your belly button and yard out all your guts?  Might be a canada goose.

They travel in a lot of the same places as cacklers, so you could feasibly see one after the other, illustrating the size difference for you.  I’ve probably done this, but don’t remember specifically.  The place tho, that would have been 1st Avenue in Federal Way, in the length between 320th and the WinCo.  Both can be found there, getting out in the street and occasionally getting hit.  There’s a “waterfowl crossing” sign on part of that road, appropriately.  The fools do not have appropriate respect for murder machines.

But something about these birds slows people down a lot more than squirrels, cats, raccoons, and opossums, which are seen as roadkill on that street more often.  Perhaps it is our primeval instinct to pay deference to the mighty dinosaur that once towered above our ancestors… That’s a joak yo.  #noevopsychbro

You know these birds.  Maybe not if you’re one of my readers from across an ocean, but they’re very well known.  Light brown body fading to pale grey-brown belly, black feet, very black neck and head with a bold white cheek mark which wraps around the chin.  The insides of their mouths are pink, which I think is kind of cute, aside from the teeth on the sides of their tongues.  Eww.  Despite the drabness of all things PNW, they are aesthetically pleasing animals.

And big.  Big, plentiful animals will be the first to go when the food supply gets fucked enough, so watch your web-toed steps, my dudes.  I am willing and curious, but not curious enough to do it until I need to.  Fingers crossed we don’t get that fucked by the dark absurdist comedy era of civilization we have entered.

The two places I see them the most are on the patch of grass between the WinCo and Southwest Campus Drive, and flying low by the huge rail yard that bisects South Auburn.  The scale difference is not something I’d ever be able to pick out when seeing them at elevation.  But much like seeing great blue herons in flight, it’s a treat to see a heftier class of dinosaur winging thru my world.

And geopolitically speaking, uh, #SlavaCanady?  If we went to war I have no doubt that Canada would win, just as Mexico would.  An underdog with sufficient resources can make it so costly for the big dog to finish the job that they have no choice but to give up at some point.  Honestly, I don’t expect shitler et al to ever get that foolish.  They may threaten to nuke some less populated cities to bully Canada into submission, if they get about 15% more weird-headed than they already are, but even that?  I doubt it.  It’s just going to be bluster and erratic trade until the fuckoes are out.

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Life List: Cackling Goose

Didja know most of the “canada geese” we see in Washington state are actually cackling geese, a smaller related species with fucken identical coloration?  There are two main tells: size, including a seemingly shorter neck they keep tucked closer to the body, and size of the group.  Cacklers mob deep.  Average group size of the canada geese I’ve seen is three to seven, average for cacklers six to a dozen or more.  I feel like these groups can come together and break apart with minimal fuss, and the larger the environment they’re in – say, a wide open field vs. the margins of a road – the larger the group.

It’s a good look for a beast.  Drab brown-grey body with an almost scale-like look where the pale margins of feathers create a pattern, contrasted with a head in full-on orca colors.  I have heard geese are violent and will mess you up, but I’d like to pick one up and hug it.  They’re one of those birds.  They look squeezably soft.

Geese are famous for shitting damn everywhere, slimy green-brown-grey.  I’ve read they make up for having less room in their guts than cows by eating their own feces to give the nutrients a second pass through the pipe.  Yum.  There’s supposedly only one species of bird that is functionally a ruminant, which is the hoatzin of Central and South America, so plant-eating emeffs gotta make do.

Still, respect.  Pretty animals make the world a nicer place, if a dookier one.

My question tho, do they really cackle?  I don’t think so.  Shit just sounds like the usual honking and squonking.  A proper cackle is the province of the Halloween witch.  Halloween witches say Ree Hee Hee, with optional additional Hees, like chickadees have a variable number of Dees.  Cryptkeepers are closely related organisms, but you can tell the difference if you listen closely.  Their call is more like Nyee Hee Hee, again with the optional gratuity of Hees.

There are birds that are proper cacklers.  I would’ve named these guys something else.  Junior canadas, maybe.

Happy Halloween everybody.  It’s time.

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Life List: Snowy Egret

I don’t remember this well enough to be 100% on which egret I saw, but it was a cool encounter.  The kind of moment that makes you wish memory was a stronger thing.  It was in San Francisco which on cursory googling narrows it down to snowy or great egret, and it was a small bird.  Can’t remember the beak or leg color, which would be a better tell.

It was a blustery overcast day with random shafts of sun, and who knows why but we were the only people in the entire San Francisco zoo.  Maybe my brother could explain that; he was a regular at that time.  We walked the artificially twisty paths, in and out of areas with short trees.  We saw an interspecies lemur cuddle pile which was very cute, but the best thing was that the free birds – the ones that weren’t even part of an exhibit – were cool characters that I do not get to see in WA state.  Or can only see in glimpses at a distance.

There was a belted kingfisher just sitting on a branch, close enough to get a good look.  I haven’t been within fifty feet of one in the PNW.  Cooler still, there was a perfect and beautiful little white bird wading in a fountain, looking to my eyes like a pet-sized origami crane.  It had been eating frogs or koi, I don’t know, and didn’t appreciate our company.  Lucky us, that meant we could watch it fly away, see the whole beautiful mechanics of its body in motion.

Man I wish I could remember that shit better.  Human frailty sucks.

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Life List: Eastern Kingbird

My favorite encounters with dinosaurs are the ones that are incidental to my life.  I was just out doing something else, and there they were.  But still, expeditions specifically meant for birding can be very productive and a good time in their own right, if you don’t fuck yourself up doing them.  I haven’t been on a ton of these trips, so I sound like a broken record when I recommend the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge.  The paths will keep you from twisting your ankle like you would on an undeveloped hillside or a rocky beach.  I dearly hope orngdolf shitler and apartheid junior haven’t fucked it up too much yet.

My brother was living in Kansas and every time we went out was a chance for me to see something I can’t see where I live.  But he wanted to see things that were new to him as well, so he’d take me to some odd spots.  I don’t remember where this one was, but I remember the tableau.  We were on a path, might have been paved, like a regular walking park for dogs and joggers.  Down a grassy hill there was some kind of water out of sight, and a very small tree sitting alone just on the visible side of that crest.  Sitting in the tree was a single bird, maybe robin sized?  Dark on top, white on bottom.

Absolutely unexciting, uninteresting.  It did nothing interesting and made no interesting sounds.  I pointed it out and my brother said it was new to him as well.  Not too hard to ID, looking at passerines in the area for something with the right colors.  Eastern kingbird.  Woohoo.

What exactly is the point of paying this much attention to little creatures?  Sometimes, if you put your findings into publicly available data sets, it can be citizen science.  Sometimes, you may see something you didn’t know was there before, and be filled with a sense of wonder at nature.  Sometimes, I dunno, it’s just not that thrilling.

I have been posting these without googling the animals, trying to go off memory alone because it can be more fun that way.  I might make an ass out of myself, but I give readers a chance to siwoti at me for their own amusement.  But I caved on kingbirds.  I read the wiki, trying to find any connection to anything interesting.  Zilch!

They are part of a clade of passerines that is absolutely massive, the most speciose in the americas – tho much more variety below the US.  I skimmed those birds and had not heard of any of them.  Some looked like birds I knew but only because of convergent evolution; they were not the same guys.  What are kingbirds all about?  What do they do?  I dunno.  Eat a bug.  Have a nice day.

Even a drab and conventional bird can be a person’s fave if they have personal experience with them.  If you love eastern kingbirds, holler in the comments.

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Life List: Northern Mockingbird

I don’t get mockingbirds where I live, so this is, once again, a bird I saw on vacation.  In Kansas.  I’m glad my brother finally moved away from that state, but I imagine the birdwatching might be slightly better there than at his new place in Chicago.  Not sure tho, I have yet to visit.  All I’ve ever seen of Chicago is the airport, whose bathroom stall dividers went all the way to the floor to keep closeted gays from hooking up, were made from aluminum to reduce odds of someone drilling a glory hole.

Birds!  Kansas.  We were trying to find some kind of bird I don’t even remember, and found mockingbirds instead, near a random elementary school – so we didn’t want to hang around for long, ugh.  But they were amazing.  I had no idea they had the big trailing tail feathers and remarkable dark grey and white patterning, mostly visible in flight.  Prettier than I expected.  I didn’t get to hear any notable calls, don’t remember what they sounded like.

You ever hear them do the mimicry for which they are named?  I presume.  For all I know they are just called mockingbirds because their default call sounds like they’re making fun of you.

That’s it tho, the only time I’ve seen them.  So I must blow up the word count with a lil’ more.  There’s the nursery rhyme.  “Hush little baby don’t say a word, mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”  Was that the song the first possession victim in the first Evil Dead movie sang?  I’m sure it’s been used like that a lot.  The Munsters lived at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, right?  Does that mean mockingbirds have a spooky association?  Are they psychopomps, winging souls to the underworld?

Munsters were a knockoff Addams Family, and I feels like Addams Family were a knockoff of something Ray Bradbury created in like 47 Anno Domini.  Spookhouse families.  Hey, they could coexist.  I wonder how much Addams/Munsters crossover fic there is.  In real life, spookhouse families are few and far between.  Who likes Halloween the mostiest?  I’m reminded of this pic that sometimes does the rounds, a family photo of a goth mom and dad, with a goth daughter and a randomly sunny-looking son.  I believe he was wearing a blue sweater, like a blue jay adopted by a family of crows.

Spookhouse families can be cool, but sometimes they are very much not cool.  The most halloween’d out house I randomly passed last year was also ultra-maga.  Eww.  Nazis shouldn’t be allowed  to be spoopy.  I revoke their spoop privileges.

I suspect the spookiest people are not breeders, and therefore cannot manifest a spookhouse proper.  It’s the province of gay uncles, and other sundry LGBTetc family members.  One day, may our condominium live up to this promise..

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Life List: Blue Jay

The famous american blue jay.  Iconic bird, famous.  Star of cartoon network’s Regular Show.  Mascot of Toronto stickball.  Festive blue and white raiment with an artful dash of black stripes, white face with black dot eyes for Hello Kitty points.  Unfuckwithable.

And indeed, I’ve never really seen them.  I’ve glimpsed them briefly at a distance, only able to tell what they were by context, and by my brother calling out when he saw them.  I get the impression our california scrub jays are less shy.  After all, I’ve seen them on my lawn and the roof of our carport.  I spent a combined total of a few weeks in Kansas and only saw the more famous jays flitting around trees and hiding the second my brother spoke.

So technically, yes, there are on my life list.  But I’m not personally familiar with them.  Talking about jays more broadly, they’re the more graceful, slightly smaller cousins of the crow family, with similarly harsh calls and opportunistic habits.  They’re often blue.  It’s a… oh what was the term… poly-somethin’… polyphyletic.  It’s an artificial grouping like “fish,” not a category describing a natural grouping based on common descent.  As I discovered while looking at info about canada jays, some are more closely related to magpies.  And magpies aren’t even a natural grouping!  Whatever.

I’d talk about Canadian stickball but I don’t know a thing about it.  How about Regular Show?  That was a cartoon on the TBS-owned cartoon network, about a blue jay and a raccoon that work incompetently for a city park?  If I remember correctly.  Mordecai and Rigby were their names.  They got up to hijinks that would not be terribly out of place in a 1980s comedy movie, but leaning more into the unreality possible in drawn media.

They also had relationship problems, which is weird for a kid’s show, right?  The raccoon was dating a beaver and the blue jay was dating a red and white bird that was shaped like blue jays are shaped in that universe.  Does that make her a red jay?  Is there such an animal?  Googled, seems it’s an occasional name for Cardinals.  Nonsense!  I refuse.

Anyway, the blue jay breaks up with the red jay and dates a storm cloud for a while.  I don’t know if that show was at all watchable for ten year olds, but it worked OK for me circa age forty, watching basic cable while I cooked, back at the old apartment.

That’s all.  I’m done.

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