5:12 a.m. (sunrise one minute earlier than yesterday). 61 degrees, wind W 4 mph; looks like summer, feels like summer, sounds like late April. Where are all the red-eyed vireos? Sky: big moon in the west, a sliver off full, the same color as the ground fog, which rises out of marshes, lakes, ponds, seeps and springs, wet meadows, rivers, and streams. Below the moon, a hint of lavender. Permanent streams: last night's cold front birthed a series of thunderstorms, resetting the valley's hypothalamus—the Hollow flirted with 90 degrees yesterday afternoon—ending landscape delirium, added lots of ground fog . . . but very little water. Wetlands: an arch of mist above the green reeds, far canopy screened by a haze. Gray treefrog trilling. Red-shouldered hawk, unseen, impales the morning with a single squeal—long, high, compelling. Pond: still surface, rising mist. Pileated laughs (not hysterically like a flicker), louder and fewer notes, a disturbing laugh, the voice of the profoundly unbalanced, then drums, a powerful riff—tree becomes a tuning fork. Good morning transforms into a better morning.
DOR: wood frog
AOR: June beetle on its back, legs sculling air. I perform a mitzvah. Flip it over. Beetle waddles off, six legs, a chorus line of one.
Starflower (Trientalis borealis) blooming, an array of nine sharp white petals and whorl of long, thin leaves. Plant hugs the ground, clusters brighten pinewoods. Starflower, a perennial, grows in poor, acidic soil around the crown of the world. As a boy, I meet starflower in the swales of Fire Island, flanked by sand dunes, growing alongside moss and cranberries, shaded by pitch pine, serenaded by gulls, terns, and whippoorwills. Now, whenever I see one, I am reminded of the ocean, my childhood, the freedom of summer . . . walking the beach, rooting for the Yankees from the bleachers.
Take note, it's tough to look for mushrooms and birds simultaneously. Find one morel, a straight-up pinecone of a mushroom; hear two Nashville warblers. A small accomplishment that propels me into the day.
Where are all the red-eyed vireos? (I thought I'd never say that.) Every spring is different. Water levels are high some years, frog choruses deafening. Other years, water levels are low, choruses politely quiet. One spring, a moose. Another, a northbound golden eagle. But this spring (so far), a silence of the vireos. May 2020, pandemic birding, I'd walk through a tunnel of red-eyed vireos songs, small overlapping territories, one after another. Woodland elevator music. A gradation of vireos, the most abundant songbird in The Hollow, the most abundant songbird in eastern North America. For the moment, the valley belongs to ovenbirds, emphatically screaming out of mosquito-invested shadows.
Yesterday, I read an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled "Global abundance estimates for 9,700 bird species." That's out of approximately 10,500 species currently recognized. The authors believe there are 50 billion birds on Earth, six birds for every human, an estimate quantified from eBird, an online citizen science database. To check for accuracy, eBird data was cross-referenced with more rigorously scientific data collected from Partners in Flight and BirdLife International.
The authors note that nearly twelve-hundred species, about twelve percent, have populations less than 5,000 (Among the struggling: great spotted kiwi at 377 individuals; Javan hawk-eagle at 630. Nowhere do they mention Californian condors, whose wild population has barely crests 300.
What amazes me most about the paper is the list of the ten most abundant species in the world. The top two, house sparrow at 1.6 billion and European starling at 1.3 billion, are no surprise. However, numbers three and four, ring-billed gull at 1.2 billion and barn swallow at 1.1 billion, are. Number six, alder flycatcher (896 million), number eight horned lark (771 million), and number ten savannah sparrow (598 million) are also surprises. Big-colonied, pelagic birds—glaucous gull, black-legged kittiwake, and sooty tern—round out the top ten. Missing from the list: rock dove, dark-eyed junco, red-billed quelea, a Sub Saharan weaver, whose population has been estimated by other biologists to be a billion-and-a-half.
I'm not sure what to make of the list—Coyote Hollow at its most productive hosts six alder flycatchers. Where are the other 895,999,994? Are they jammed onto the Canadian muskeg? One flycatcher for every couple of black spruce? Competition with boreal neighbors and close relatives, yellow-bellied flycatchers and olive-sided flycatchers must be severe.
A billion barn swallows, coursing over the fields of Earth! Now that would be a sight—birds of the wind, graceful and free.
A broad-winged hawk whistles. I rush outside. A blue jay flies away . . . oh well, duped again.
I took a recording today of what might be a vireo...
I love your musings on the bird census and trying to imagine 1.1 billion of your birds of the wind in flight. Audubon lists the red-billed quelea as the most abundant species at 1.5 billion. I'd never heard of it and looked it up. Great-looking bird! Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Ted.