The Last Word On Nothing

We, the People of LWON, write whatever the f*** we want. But on days when we just can’t, we rerun an old post. Today, I just can’t. And yet rerunning old posts is against my personal religion. So today I am excavating the blog post that I partially wrote in the summer of 2021 and then left sitting at the top of our content management system for two and a half years, where all of the People of LWON could see “Birding – DO NOT PUBLISH” every time they logged in. Now, their nightmare is over. Here it is, with notes.

A partial list of the birds around my friend’s lake house in Leelenau County, Michigan.

Common loon
I haven’t seen one of these yet, but I’ve heard it – the haunting, rising call. Just as I imagined the north would sound like. In all my years in Minnesota I never heard one; now Michigan has delivered. fingers crossed that I see one before I go home. (note: I did. several! I was so excited!)

I wasn’t sure, the first time I heard the loon, if that was really what it was. So I kept checking the Cornell bird website to listen to recordings, and it kept showing me an annoying pop up about the new bird ID capability of the Merlin app. I heard a different bird call that I couldn’t identify. It sounded kind of like a gull, I thought. I posted the audio for friends on Instagram – no luck. So finally I gave up, downloaded the Merlin app, deleted a couple of other apps to make space for its massive quantity of files, and that’s how I learned that I’m sharing space with a…

Merlin
Yes! That’s right. The very first bird that I used Merlin’s Sound ID to identify was, in fact, a merlin. A merlin is a small raptor that lives along water. And it sounds kind of like a gull, to my undereducated ear. The other day I spotted it, perched high in a dead tree. The Cornell site tells me it will occasionally catch a dragonfly, and there are some big juicy ones here. (note: this whole episode was so exciting, it eventually got its own blog post)

Black-capped chickadee
Having discovered the power of the Merlin app, I started using it for everything. That extremely familiar pair of descending whistles? This morning I figured out that it belongs to the extremely familiar black-capped chickadee.

American robin
This is one of the birds I learned to identify by ear in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic stopped traffic and had me wandering the streets of my town, marveling at all the nature I don’t usually stop to see.

Belted kingfisher
A block-headed bird took off from its perch and went chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk! while it flew along the lake. Unmistakable.

Song sparrow
This is a bird that I kind of know but always doubt myself, and the app gave me reassurance. (note: a year later I went on a first date with a guy and we heard a song sparrow, and that’s how I found out he was an extremely accomplished birder. unfortunately, it turns out, that’s not enough to build a relationship on.)

It gives me a lot of joy to be able to identify the living things around me. The app is teaching me new bird songs this week, on top of several that I’ve learned in recent years. What will I do with all this random nature information that I’ve acquired? Write it down, I suppose. And hope that you care, too. (note: and occasionally use it on first dates.)

Well. There you go. Was it better than rerunning an old post? I hope so. What amazing new thing have you learned in the last four years, dear reader?

Photo: Forest Service Northern Region, via Wikimedia Commons