You know how they have birding apps where you can record bird calls, and have them identified?  Great.  And how people would play recordings of calls off their phones to attract birds and get a better look at them?  Not cool.  Scientists have said “stop doin’ that.”  I knew of these things.  But still…

One day I got “Merlin” from Cornell Labs on my phone and used it to ID all the birds I couldn’t see at West Hylebos Wetlands Park.  Some of those birds I have, to this day, never seen – only heard.  There were at least three species of warbler alone that showed in the recordings, plus all sorts of other beasties.

Warblers are tiny passerine / perching birds, which mostly come in combos of yellow black and white, with some green made by combining black and yellow, grey from combining black and white.  The yellowest warbler is just straight yellow, and wilson’s adds to this a jaunty little black cap.  The black cap of a black-capped chickadee doesn’t look very cap-like because it attaches to and mirrors the black on their chins.  The black cap on wilson’s warbler looks very cap-like, or maybe like a little hairdo, because the rest of the bird’s head is very bright yellow.

Warblers have a more “hunched” look than chickadees, almost like they’re shading toward the body language of trunk-climbing birds – creepers and nuthatches – but they’re not all the way there yet.  They’re shy enough I’ve almost never seen them, hiding in summer foliage of bushes and short trees.

On the occasion of first getting Merlin and seeing it recognize all the calls, I was quite excited.  Also frustrated that I couldn’t see any of the birds, but pleased to know they were out there.  When it IDs a bird, you can click a little information profile on them.  That profile includes a few pictures, and also some sample calls you can play back.  I didn’t even think about it before pressing play, and a wilson’s warbler appeared in the trees nearby.

The sun was shining in the fresh green leaves, making them appear yellow.  The bird was just about the same size as the leaves, and you wouldn’t think bright yellow good camouflage, but it was.  Only the movement and song caught my eye.  Was it looking for a lover or flexing on a rival?  I don’t know, but I do know I was wasting its precious calories.  But damn, that’s a cute little bird.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist.  I tried to summon some other species by playing their songs, to no avail.  I’m naughty, but at least I had the decency to not play the wilson’s song again.  Give ’em a break.  And since that day, I have not done that again.

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My brother was living in Kansas with wife and kid.  He helped with air fare so I could visit.  His favorite thing  is going to zoos, so we went on big long car rides to visit Wichita and Kansas zoos.  During one of these rides, in the great distance, flying over those “amber waves of grain,” I saw a lone, massive, white bird.  Based on an impression of its form and flight, I decided it was a white pelican – the only one I’ve ever seen, assuming the ID was even right.

I’ve only ever seen the smaller brown pelican on a trip to Ocean Shores, a tourist spot in my state.  They looked like pterosaurs in flight, and I saw a few very long flight feathers shed on the beach.  Very cool.  But I never have gotten a close-up look at a pelican, even though it’s apparently a pretty easy thing to do.  In internet videos they do not seem at all shy.

Like the herons I mentioned, pelicans are ridiculous eaters.  You can find videos of them eating random birds the size of their own heads, trying to eat things that won’t even fit down their own elastic gullets, or just staring menacingly at humans, as if to say “give up the goods.”  Not every creature needs to be thinking deep thoughts.  That’s fine.  Live to eat, if you will.  If they were about anything other than cramming stuff in their throat, what would that even be?  Pelican poetry.

Not much to say; this bird was a glimpse.

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I’ve been reminded recently that glaucous-winged and western seagulls hybridize in my region so heavily there’s a common name for the hybrid swarm – olympic gulls.  But I’m relatively sure the most populous seagulls in my ol’ stompin’ grounds of Federal Way are pure glaucous-winged.  Their wingtips look straight-up white, and they are pale as ghosts, gliding through the treetops.  Or chilling in the parking lot of the mall.

The gullish mallrats are nice-looking.  I like the sound of their calls.  I think they nest at the largely abandoned park & ride behind the mall, and when traffic clears out in the evening around the mall itself, they like to sit right on the ground.  Not sure what they get out of the concrete beach, but it’s cool to see wildlife that close up.

Other times I’ve seen seagulls in the past, they’ve probably been the hybrids, or western gulls, or I don’t even know.  Seagulls are notoriously difficult to tell apart, save for the species that have the most extreme differences.  Hybridization doesn’t help the issue, so mostly I don’t even bother trying to get a positive ID.  Don’t care enough.

I will continue to like seagulls until the day one shits on me, and may that day never come.  They are pretty and their sound is iconic.  It’s the music of a place like Puget Sound.  I wanna grab one under my arm and give it a hug.  Bitches can steal my ice cream any time.  I just hope I get a good look at them.

I heard most of the seagulls in Australia are tiny things.  Around here they are mighty big.  When I was a small child and saw some flying in front of cathedral’s stained glass windows, I fancied they were so huge that they must be albatrosses.  No, odds are that I have never seen an albatross.  Seagulls here tho.  Big ‘uns.

Seagulls fly by “dynamic soaring,” where they rely less on broad wings catching all of the air than on long narrow wings making the best use of whatever air they can get.  The result is that they fly in pretty distinctive ways.  Usually, it looks something like a hawk’s flight, but lower altitude and much faster.

Like many prolific wild animals, it’s easy to see tragedy in their lives, all over the place.  Injury, death, illness.  I’ve seen a juvenile wandering around a parking garage in SoDo with no parent in sight, unable or unwilling to fly away.  Come here, birdy.  I pick you up like a football and take you home…  No, I’ll never do that.  But they make me want to.

There are a lot of good internet videos of seagulls being funny.  Probably no small amount of cruel videos as well; tread carefully.  One of my faves is a smaller gull in the UK using the cat door to run into this little cottage and eat cat food.  Also winning, the little steppy dance some do to raise edible creatures from the sand.  Check ’em out.

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House finches are a very common bird in urban and suburban areas here.  As befits the name house finch.  I suppose they may breed in rafters; I wouldn’t know.  I do know they don’t belong here.  There are closely related indigenous finches that are surely being hedged out by them.  House finches are boring LBBs.  Some are streaky (females? juveniles?), some are just beige, but they have a kind of red that magically appears when the sun comes out.  Sometimes kinda pretty.  More noteworthy is their elaborate song, which is nice to hear, since the other common perching bird in their territory is the much less musical house sparrow.

Let’s talk about places.

Mexico?  Some animals that are out of balance with nature spread naturally with the increase of human populations, like coyotes and anna’s hummingbirds and opossums.  Some are actively imported, like house sparrows and starlings were to the US.  I feel like I’ve read that house finches in america were descended from pet bird trade, but I think they’re from Mexico?  So they could’ve just gradually moved north, being better adapted to city life than their cousins.

Seattle.  The first place I took note of these birds was in downtown Seattle, near the Cornish* campus on the edge of the South Lake Union neighborhood.  I saw and mostly heard a flock in the little trees down there, making the world sound a little nicer.

Federal Way.  We tried feeding birds on our balcony for a while.  The house finches had an interesting behavior that set them apart from the rest.  Whenever my husband sneezed, even from indoors on the other side of a pane of glass, they’d get scared into flying off.  They’d come right back, but it was a level of caution that even smaller birds like chickadees didn’t bother with.

Auburn.  My current employer used to have a cool building in Auburn, not far from the railroad tracks, surrounded by big fields, edged with some nice tall trees.  Goodbye wildlife, they moved.  On the old campus, there were some disused buildings that served as nesting grounds for a lot of birds, and I think primarily for house finches.  For the moment, the current owners of those buildings haven’t torn them down, and I suspect that when you see house finches at the mall, they were born and bred next to my old call center.

They’re a common bird where I live now, though I think they don’t come down to the ground level in my cul-de-sac as much as others.  I usually just hear the song or see them fly between trees.  I don’t think much about them, but they’re fine.  Bird it up, homies.

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*Cornish College of the Arts has waxed and waned over the years.  Early this millennium, they worked hard to get accreditation, and build up their program.  But they’ve always been primarily a dumping ground for the rich kids that were too indolent to be business majors, and the bullshit student body conspired with the bullshit administration and the bullshit rich donors to squander that work, the graduating class dwindling from dozens to a handful, in the space of ten years, the classes going from at least half-assed intellectual fare down to “finger-painting, if you feel like it today.”  They were recently acquired by a better university, and they fucking deserved it.