Yet another species with intercontinental distribution, depending on how you define species, barn swallows are the easiest swallows to meet.  They feed low to the ground, favoring open fields like mowed parks, school grounds, golf courses, and graveyards.  This is how I see them where I live; probably they have more natural circumstances in more rustic areas.  Swallows take insect prey in flight without even slowing down, flapping and whooshing everywhere at extreme speeds.  Their mouths are huge, open like a windsock when they suck down the bugs.

As common as they are, they are very beautiful – one of the stereotypical tattoos of hipsters for years.  There are color variations, but mostly they have orange bellies and iridescent blue on top.  I’ve only ever seen them sitting still at a considerable distance, drinking from a mud puddle at Point Defiance Zoo, or resting on the streetlamp in front of my condo.

Seeing them in flight, on the other hand?  Real easy to do.  It seems swallows partition their niches in part by elevation, and barn swallows feeding closest to the ground, you’re not unlikely to run into them.  My husband told me that when he was very young, about seven or eight, a boy in his school accidentally kicked one.  It survived, but that couldn’t feel great.

They do it to themselves.  For some reason they are daredevils, intentionally flying in front of cars and bicycles and humans.  This might be why they like cemeteries – the obstacle course – and moving obstacles are so much the better for demonstrating their agility.  …Or they are trying to eat the bugs that are stirred up in front of us.

The first place I took special note of them was at Game Farm Park in Auburn, years before my current interest in birds began.  They also made an impression at my husband’s uncle’s funeral, zipping through headstones.  And once I saw a few in actual barn territory, when I went to rural Kansas for my brother’s wedding.  His father-in-law took us out to some scratchy fields to look at dilapidated barns that had been in the family since colonial days.

Barn swallows?  In my barn?  It’s more likely than you think.

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I know fuck-all about diamond doves.  Is that even what they’re actually called, where they’re from?  I just remember seeing them in cages at the pet store.  Picture a pigeon but smaller and pastel.  Very nice-looking.  If you could get one to be hand friendly, I bet they’d be very pleasing to hold.  Are they just a fancy pigeon breed?  I don’t think so?  I have a vague impression most fancy breeds are the usual size or bigger, not that smol.  Could be wrong.

Anyway, diamond doves makes me think of Diamond Dogs by David Bowie, which was kind of a cheap rip-off a Rolling Stones song.  Turnabout’s fair play and the Stones did a transparent ripoff of Diamond Dogs called Saint of Me.  I wonder could I hum one of these tunes well enough that yewchoob’s algorithm can auto-detect and copyright flag it?  Suck up my non-existent ad revenue to pay the RIAA some fractional pennies?

The last time I went to the pet store, they didn’t have diamond doves anymore.  Did they get busted for trafficking protected animals?  Did they go extinct in the wild?  Did they just become too pricey or inconvenient in some way?  Goodbye diamond doves.

My favorite pet store animal is the bearded dragon.  Problem is, the ones in the store are literal babies.  I’m given to understand adults are a foot long and produce copious stanky shits.  The moar u kno.

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Barn owls are one of those species with “global distribution,” where one could consider the barn owls of Europe to be the same species as the ones in Texas and Kinshasa and Kwangtung.  Are they tho?  I’m sure there are “cryptic” species hidden within that range, noteworthy subspecies, etc.  They are the most visible members of their branch of owlkind, the Tytonidae.  Tytonids are less likely to have feather “ears” than “true owl” strigids, and generally look like “shy guys” from mario brothers.

I’ve personally seen one in a zoo and one in the wild.  I used to walk back and forth across Auburn in the middle of the night, often between two and four AM.  Once – I think this was when I was living in the adjacent tiny town of Pacific – I was walking the Interurban Trail and saw a ghost white headless-looking thing float above the trail, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other.  A fleeting glimpse, but enough to – in conjunction with range information – positively ID the suspect.

My dad used to know this shitty neonazi who dabbled in “vulture culture” before that term was coined.  Barn owls are not infrequently hit by cars, and this dude randomly hit barn owls twice within a pretty short time on the exact same stretch of road.  He preserved the bodies in some way, I don’t recall – skeletonizing or taxidermy, whatever.  I never actually saw them.  When this particular neonazi hadn’t fully turned but was beginning his descent, he gave my dad his Dead Kennedys tape, and that’s how I came to receive my first hardcore punk rock album, In God We Trust, Inc. (prior to this i only had dead milkmen CDs).  I guess as the punk became nazi, he felt the need to fuck off.

When I was in junior high, we got to dissect owl pellets.  Some may have come from barn owls; impossible for us to know.  But it was super cool and interesting.  I don’t normally like anything to do with excretions – piss, shit, vomit – but dry owl pellets seem rather sterile.  Bleached white by stomach acid, they are little blocks of compressed fur and bone that came out the front end of the bird, so they didn’t have to waste digestive resources on the hard bits.  Pick apart a little block of fur and find interesting tiny bones.  The skulls of those rodents looked so cool to baby Bébé.

Anyway, being a massively successful species, they provide some hope to me for the biosphere.  Whatever we do to this world, barn owls will probably pull through.  Shine on, you funky ghosts.  Keep eating rodents and puking up the cool parts.  I’m down.

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Anna’s hummingbird is pretty much the only hummingbird you will see in great stretches of its range.  You don’t even have to look it up or carefully scrutinize blurry photographs, or lure them with a feeder and bust out the field guide.  If you see a hummingbird in Seattle, it’s a fuckin’ anna’s, with a very outside chance of the very different and unmistakable rufous hummingbird.  I’ve never seen the latter, I’ve seen tons of the former.

The reason it’s often the only hummingbird in town is that it has had an incredible expansion of its historic range, moving farther north than any other hummingbird alive.  Some people in my household claim to have seen them in Alaska years ago; that paper I linked only mentions them breeding as far north as British Columbia.  I’ve personally watched as an Anna’s had a snowflake land on its head, proportionally the size of a fancy hat.  When we lived in the U District, somebody in the courtyard of our apartment building, right on The Ave, had a feeder, and the lil guys would perch in a small tree there in easy view of anybody coming and going.  They persist all year, doing their thing.

It’s hard for me to believe this is all on the back of feeders and flower gardens, but that must be the case.  If so, when the humans go bye-bye, so do the birds.  Hopefully they’ll find a good place to be when the biosphere comes to grips with us, and with the size of their population, they’ve got better odds than a lot of hummingbird species.

Their main song is a quiet grindy sound, but it has an amazing power to carry over great distance.  I’ve heard the call, then looked to see them in trees up to a hundred feet from where I was standing.  Learn it and listen for it whenever you’re around feeders or blooming flowers – especially fuchsias and other deep pink things.  You might just hear it in places you didn’t expect.  It carries much more effectively than the humming of their wingbeats.

I could write more about how wild and freaky hummingbirds are, but it’s pretty common knowledge and I don’t have much time.  But I’m glad this particular species is keeping us company, in places where other hummingbirds fear to tread.

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What’s that thing you spotted at the treeline?  Is spotted towhee, comrade.

Some articles out there will copy-paste the idea that spotted towhees are timid and hide from people, but I don’t think it’s actually true.  One time my husband nearly stepped on a spotted towhee while we were walking to the bus stop.  We had an amazing view of it.  Black hood and back, rusty blood red eyeball and flank, pale grey belly.  Larger than chickadees, more the typical size range of emberizid sparrows.  And of course, they have a lil’ spatter of pretty white spots.

They might just seem easy to miss because they favor thick, short trees – especially evergreen pines.  However, even in those trees, they aren’t too hard to spot, because they like to perch near the top.  One time I went to the beach at Dash Point and a towhee begged for food from us.  On another PNW beach, out on one the islands, I came across a bunch of short pines with a bunch of towhees in them – more than I’d ever seen before.

Spotted towhees are perching birds, which are united in having a very long backward-facing toe called the hallux.  They use this to grip tree branches.  Small passerines like this sometimes feed on the ground by poking through leaf litter, making little backward hops.  The hallux pushes the leaves apart, and they grab any grubs they see after the sweeping move.  My husband pointed one out to me that was doing this.  Since then I’ve also seen another species do it – I think dark-eyed juncos?

It makes me think of James Brown.  Jump back, wanna kiss myself.  Ungh!

But yes.  Spotted towhees.  Cute.  Common.  They screech like a little pterodactyl.  Sometimes they make a “cellphone” call similar to a dark-eyed junco.  Keep an ear out and you’re more likely to see them.  And enjoy.

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EDIT:  Forgot to mention, dark-eyed juncos have varied color over their range, but in the PNW, their colors are oddly similar to a spotted towhee.  They both have a cellphone call, and it makes me wonder, are our local juncos impersonating towhees?  This would be similar to how downy woodpeckers look like hairy woodpeckers, which has been postulated to help them benefit from the reputation of or avoid aggression from the larger birds.  Juncos being smaller than towhees, and locally more similar to them than elsewhere, the samey call…

If I had time to science it, I would attempt to observe if juncos make the cellphone call while doing anything else junco-ish, or while acting territorial.  Also whether juncos in other regions without the “oregon” markings make that call.  Or whether they look similar to other birds in their respective areas.  That kind of shit.

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I had no idea what I was seeing.  I had no idea when the day began that I’d be up a mountain, getting snowed on in October.  But it was a good time.  Canada jays are Perisoreus jays, which I think are more closely related to Eurasian magpies than to American jays?  I dunno.  I’m no scholar about this stuff.  It’s all google if I feel up to it.  But on my honeymoon, we randomly went up to a lookout at Hurricane Ridge, in the Olympic National Rainforest, and saw these birds.  Never before or since.

They’re bold.  I heard that they are so used to getting food from humans that you can hand feed them, and I regret not trying that while I was up there.  They seemed bold enough.  I saw one buzz within three feet of another hiker.  It took me a while to work out the ID.  I certainly hadn’t expected them to be corvids.  They seem a bit smaller than other jays, which themselves are smaller than crows.  Maybe about robin sized?  Mostly grey-white, a little bit of black around the back of the head and more on the wings.  Dark grey beak, dark button eyes.  Nice.

Based on where we were, this was most likely the “obscurus” subspecies, which sounds cool, whether or not it’s actually at all interesting.  It isn’t.  Pay it no nevermind.  To me, this bird will remain associated with my honeymoon, like ravens, like red-tailed hawk cries, like peacocks in the road.  Much more personally interesting, even if that doesn’t transmit to y’all.

I have to imagine that somebody in my readership has much more experience with them.  Holler at ya dogg.  I’d be interested to know more about them.

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Stellers Georg was some kinda colonial naturalist who mushroom-stamped his name on tons of beautiful and rare creatures, some of which were famously driven to extinction by colonizers.  The push to rename birds like the “steller’s jay” … I really hope it works out.  Fairly certain some needledick mosquitofucker from le Fed will firebomb any university that endorses it tho.  One thought on these guys was just to call them the stellar jay, which seems appropriate enough.  They are exemplary creatures, with a head black like the cosmos and white streaks for eyebrows like shooting stars.

These jays are the only ones I’ve ever seen in Federal Way.  No scrub jays up there, no blue jays in this part of the state.  No big deal!  Stellar jays are enough.  They are very deft and sprightly, bounding and elegantly flapping up and down the canopy, jacking your peanuts, screeching whenever it’s screeching time.  Jays are corvids, but next to crows, they are supermodels and olympic gymnasts.  And yet, who is dominating in the colonized landscape?  I favor this analogy – jay is to crow as gibbon is to human.  A gibbon is brightly colored and very talented, cute and cool and amazing.  But humans win.  Brute force and pointed sticks.

I’ve wondered before in the comment section of a much smarter person than myself, could stellar jays be the result of a hybridization event between crows and blue jays?  They look like a blue jay that slipped and fell in a puddle of crow black, immersing their upper body in it.  Hence another suggested name, the black-crested jay.  I know some very distantly related bird species can hybridize.  This happens more commonly with waterfowl than with perching birds.  Still, I’m less inclined to believe it now.  Blacker color schemes can easily arise by convergence, and there’s no reason to doubt that happened.  But if genetics prove that crank theory right someday, I will be crowing about it.  haha.  crow.

Can I get through even one of these posts without mentioning american crows?

Anyway, I’m now in a two-jay neighborhood, with both stellar jays and california scrub jays.  It’s very cool.  At least, it will be until the icecaps melt and my condo is below sea level.  Until that day, let the jays screech for me as often as they please.

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The peepingest marshmallow peeps.  A bug of a bird.  There’s a trend in evolution that the adaptable base of a family tree is drab brown things that lack extreme specializations.  Merely being a minuscule flying dinosaur is a pretty extreme specialization, but within that, there are some birds that are more flexible than others.  For all I know, a bushtit is so specialized they’ll go extinct when left-handed buttercups fall to invasive ultrageraniums.  But colorwise, this feels very basal.  Everybody knows tits (haha, heyo heyo) have strong black and white marks on their heads and showy songs, fierce attitude.  So how is this timid tittering beige bug-bird a tit?

I looked it up.  They are not tits at all!  They’re in a mostly Eastern Hemisphere group that includes other bushtits and long-tailed tits, which are not even in the same branch of Passerida as the bold and familiar tits.  Sheisty.  American bushtits are the only members of the clade in North America, in all their beige glory.

I can’t emphasize enough how drab these birds are.  What color is their head?  Slightly reddish beige.  No, slighter than that.  It’s the Lacroix of reddishness.  It’s essenced.  How about the belly?  Yellowish beige.  No.  Less yellowish than the reddish essence on the head.  It’s all beige, man.  With beady lil black eyes.  If you don’t demand color in your birds, this is a cute look.  They have a nice shape – a borb with a long tail, just about kinglet sized.  Puny as hell.  They fly like those practice footballs with the little rocket part sticking out the back, almost always in a small flock.

I don’t remember the first time I took note of them, but while working as a security guard way back in the elevatorgate era, I started noticing them flying from one short tree to another, usually in the winter and usually when it was less busy with traffic or people on foot.  I have seen them in other seasons.  Maybe they’re more obvious in winter because that’s when they flock the hardest?

They don’t even sing boldly.  They squeak, like a chickadee that isn’t brave enough to get past chicka.  Not a lot to say here.  Cute little birds are cute, but unremarkable.  This series calls for remark and now I remarked.  Mark another one down.  American Bushtit.

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Which white cockatoo?  Hell if I know.  Apparently there are a number of white cockatoo species kept in captivity.  I suspect the ones I’ve personally seen were sulphur-crested, but white cockatoo / Cacatua alba is possible as well.  They’re fairly large parrots, comparable in size to corvids, and among the more intelligent animals in the world.

Unlike corvids, parrots come equipped with some powerful tools – a beak and strong hands with two opposable thumbs.  These powers combined have them tearing up anti-bird spikes like some antifas going after hostile architecture, as well as opening trashcans – which, again, can help other urban birds do their thing.  Also famous for dancing to Backstreet Boys and screeching at horrific volumes when mildly neglected.

I sometimes watch one on yewchoob, owned by video game musician Hideaki Utsumi.  It’s not his most famous bird, but it shows up.  Very mild mannered and quiet, which suggests to me it is well treated.  The one time I’ve seen a white cockatoo in person that I can distinctly remember, it was doing that shriek – nearly identical to one I’ve heard in a smaller cockatoo species, the cockatiel, but a lot louder.  That was in a tiny pawn shop in downtown Everett, where I was buying a cartridge of the original Tetris for a newly acquired Game Boy.

That was twenty years ago.  I don’t see much of these birds.  But they’re pretty cool.  If any of you have cockatoo stories to tell, have at it in the comments.

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I’ve never seen a budgerigar in the wild, but my husband and his mom have, years ago.  A pet budgie had gone feral, and was living among a flock of absolute non-parrots, in the suburban municipality of Fife, Washington.  Between them, they are not quite sure what the other birds in the flock were, but lean toward invasive starlings.  Starlings and budgies are both screechy little guys with some amount of mimicry, that can feed on the ground, that don’t belong here, and that naturally hang out in big flocks.  Seem like reasonable company for each other.  This unremarkable green parrot gave them a magical moment, and went on its way.

There was an early British heavy metal band called Budgie, whose lead singer had one of those Geddy Lee-Dennis DeYoung helium voices.  I understand he lost the ability to sing in that range in later years, but still performed.  Going from memory here, I think Budgie wanted to do heavy heavy metal, but without the satanic element.  Bowdlerizing?  Budgerigarizing.  Anyway, Metallica sorta famously covered their hit “Breadfan,” which was about how being greedy makes your life hollow.  Real shit, buddy.  I mean, budgie.

Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, for reasons not quite clear to me, have a little aviary devoted to budgies.  Just regular little pet store animals.  You get some seeds on a twig, hold it out, and watch them go.  Last time I actually went in the zoo (was it my last birthday?), the budgie spot was closed – but you could hear them screeching it up.  The budgening does not stop.

I have to confess, I don’t find most parrots to be attractive birds.  Their colors are on the boring side of clown crap, to me.  But budgies put together an unusually nice ensemble for a parrot.  The ultraviolet cheek spot is cool.  The contrasty elements vary in shape and boldness over the body in a way that makes for a nice composition.  While they are a dime a dozen in pet stores coast to coast here, I think they look nicer than some much more prestigious parrots.  Respect.

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