There is surely nothing more discouraging to the new bird watcher than the sight of a thousand gulls on a beach at low tide. This is especially true in an area that’s frequented by a dozen different kinds of gull, nearly all of which change plumage every year for the first four years. Some also change bill and leg color every year, and still others show seasonal changes in plumage.
No matter how often I shifted position and readjusted my binoculars, the gulls on the beach that morning all looked exactly alike to me.
Fortunately for my morale, there were other birds in the slough more easily identifiable: a dozen great blue herons, some snowy and common egrets and a black-necked stilt. The herons and egrets ignored me but the stilt pegged me as an intruder and announced my presence with earsplitting cries while he flew over my head, his long black beak sticking straight out in front and his improbable long pink legs sticking straight out behind.
The new bird watcher often thinks that the birds he or she identifies at the beginning are those which are common in that particular region. The very first identification of a friend of mine was a wood duck at the local Bird Refuge. She assumed that this species was as common as some of the others that hung around the refuge — coots, ruddy ducks, mallards, cinnamon teal. Five years have passed and she’s still searching for another wood duck. My experience with the black-necked stilt wasn’t quite so extreme, but I didn’t find a second one for almost a year.
A stilt, poised in a shallow pool on his incredible legs, looks so beautiful and so gentle that one isn’t prepared for his loud, piercing shriek. Many shore birds have noisy calls — gulls and terns, godwits and willets come first to my mind — perhaps because they must make themselves heard above the constant sound of the sea and the wind. Ken and I spend much time on our beach and there are very few days in the year when the tide is low enough, the waves small enough and the wind soft enough for us to be able to converse in normal voices. At the beach, if you want to be heard, you scream. So does the stilt.
The stilt’s manner of flying is also in contrast to his voice. It is rather slow and dignified. I was watching him in flight when a car drove up and parked beside the bridge where I was standing; and a small slender man stepped out. I recognized Mr. Rett, the instructor, but he didn’t recognize me and I hardly expected him to — at least thirty people had signed up for the class the previous day, all but two of them women.
Mr. Rett, too, focused his binoculars on the stilt. Neither of us said anything. Watching the stilt together seemed the only form of communication necessary. When Mr. Rett finally spoke it was not to me in my language, but to the stilt in his: “Key up, key up, key up.”
The startled bird paused above our heads and hovered for a moment with his legs dangling like strands of pink rope frayed at the end to form a foot and knotted in the middle to simulate a knee. (The Greek word himas, meaning thong, forms the basis for his scientific name, Himantopus mexicanus.) Then, with one final cry, the stilt took off over the bridge toward the other end of the slough. It was only after he had landed out of our sight that Mr. Rett turned to me.
“Are you in my class?”
“Yes.” I told him my name.
“Margaret Millar,” he repeated, watching me carefully as though making sure he would remember what species I belonged to. “You’re early.”
“I wanted to do some extra work on shore birds.”
“Extra work?” Now he was really staring at me. “Where do you teach?”
“Why do you assume I teach anywhere?”
“Most of the class does. These field courses in natural history are set up for teachers to earn a couple of quick credits without interfering with the regular summer session. No exams are given. All you have to do to get a B in this course is to keep breathing.”
“I’d like an exam,” I said, “and the chance to work for an A.”
“You mean you signed up because you’re interested in birds?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
It was such a shock to his nervous system that he completely forgot my name and kept referring to me for the next two weeks as Mrs. Whatchamacallit-who’s-interested-in-birds.
Few teachers have either the desire or the opportunity to live their subjects. The man who conducts classes in Shakespeare may frequently quote the bard but he doesn’t talk in iambic pentameters and wear long hair and a pointed beard. But for Mr. Rett birds were not only a livelihood, they were a life. He had been in museum work since his early teens. He was now in his sixties, a very small, spare man who bore a certain physical resemblance to a bird. He was light on his feet and his movements were quick and precise. Sometimes on very early morning field trips when he was hunched inside his sheepskin jacket he looked like a sparrow who had fluffed out his feathers to insulate himself against the cold.
