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| Nerds, birds, and the dead |
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| Easily amused |
I spent the last two days in a cemetery, with a man called Dance. We were looking for a small grey bird, the evocatively named Townsend’s Solitaire. They usually hang around the Rockies, but this one was hopelessly lost. We spent Saturday morning and afternoon wandering among the tombstones along with a dozen other twitchers, with no luck.
Today we returned even earlier. I hate mornings. So we drifted aimlessly among the dead, again, in face-freezing weather. We split up to cover more ground, and I ended up zoning out and reading tombstones up in the hills, having completely forgotten about birds. Suddenly my phone rang, and it was a dude named Gilles, who I had absent-mindedly given my phone number to earlier. He found the Solitaire. I sprinted down the hill and got lost real bad, but I eventually hooked back up with Dance, and we soon found a flock of birders gawking up at a tree. The Solitaire was singing away in relatively plain sight, and then it came down and posed for us. Good twitch, yo.
Looking at the pics, it looks almost exactly like an Asian Brown Flycatcher from the shoulders up. I guess birds are in fact shoulderless. Wing-shoulders?
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