Everyone Needs a Pewee

I have this fear of losing interest in my cherished pastimes and then having nothing I want to do; a sure sign that depression could take hold of an aging brain. My go-to activity for 45 years has been birding, but this spring has been the worst neotropical migration I can remember. I can count the number of transient migrant species I have seen on one hand. In short, migration has been a bummer.

An important component of birding for me has been immersing myself in the peace of a morning. I get up just before the sun, pour coffee and drive up to a one mile stretch of road, which at that hour is free. Free of the invasion of lawn blowers, motorboats, traffic, and other forms of noise pollution. After turning off the A/C fan in the car, I lower the windows and just listen. By stepping on the brake and engaging idle-stop there is only the woods and me. I now clearly hear the dawn chorus, the songs of the mix, and newly arrived birds. As a recordist I thirst for that now threatened free environment.

I may still be the only one in my state who regularly records bird song, and over the years I have accumulated all the right gear. When I traveled I used a lesson I learned from photography, standing on Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park, trying to get a decent shot of Half Dome. First visit, take in the whole scene. Go back again and work on your shot or your recordings, but only after you have soaked up the visual or auditory experience, and know where you want to go and when to be there.

Birds don’t sing to attract a mate during fall movement, so spring is the recordists’ moment. And there is one in particular that I need to hear; the simple up, then down-slurred song of a nondescript gray flycatcher, the Eastern Wood-Pewee. I don’t know why this bird, of all the others, is my tonic.  Bald Eagles, for all their majesty, have a rather wimpy call. Tiny, iridescent hummingbirds simply squeak. Thrushes, masters of beautiful song from deep in the green woods, are contenders to be sure, but when Pewees return, all is well. For me they are a jolt of adrenalin, a renewed spirit that gets me back in touch with a pastime I have had for almost half a century. I get my microphone and recorder ready to capture that sound, how many times now I do not remember. It doesn’t matter.