Birding is chancy!

Birding is chancy.

When I take a second loop around a trail or make a repeat pass at a spot visited earlier, it amazes me the things that I saw the first time that I did not see the second time (sometimes the second pass is better, and I feel lucky to have repeated my steps).

Birding is just like that. To connect with a bird, you have to be going in a direction that puts you in the path of a bird. Slightly different trajectories could cause the connection to be missed. For all the sightings I do make, there are probably many more that do not happen because a difference of a few feet of distance, a timing off by a few seconds or minutes, or a noise that calls my attention to the left but distracts me from the right. That birding is chancy is not a principle of birding that I stick by, but more a key understanding of how birding, and perhaps life, works.

I have been deepening this understanding since I started looking at birds, and even using that phrase, "birding is chancy," for years. Two recent experiences from the last couple weeks in the Bronx demonstrate the understanding perfectly.


Almost the right place and right time for a Bronx Pileated Woodpecker

I have been birding a lot in the Bronx over the last year, and to see the rarer things, you need to be in the right place at the right times.

The Bedford Park and Moshulu entrances to the New York Botanical Garden are about 600 feet apart. The BX26 bus drops you between these two entrances. On October 22, 2017, we exited the bus around 9:20AM and started heading for the Moshulu gate. On most visits, we start at the Moshulu gate and anyone who needs the restroom just walks a bit further. However, on this particular day, we decided to start closer to the bathrooms, turned around, and went to the Bedford Park gate.

From about 9:20AM to 10AM, near the bathrooms, we detected lots of bird activity, birded the Home Gardening Center area and then made our way over to the Tulip Tree Allee, where we wanted to see the blue ice-looking Chihuly sculpture one more time before the Chihuly exhibit closed. Had we started at Moshulu, we would have gone straight to the blue ice-looking Chihuly sculpture. We were in the Tulip Tree Allee area for around twenty minutes and then took a break for lunch at the food cart there.

Later in the day, I got an eBird alert that a Pileated Woodpecker had been observed around 9:23AM at the Tulip Tree Allee in New York Botanical Garden. For anyone reading outside of NYC, a Pileated Woodpecker is a rare bird to observe anywhere in the five boroughs or on Long Island. I have never seen one in the Bronx or in NYC. After the alert, I cut off my normal route and exploration of the garden grounds to go look for this bird (it was just a five minute walk away), despite having been there earlier in the day. No luck.

Pileated Woodpecker, not in the Bronx
(this one was at Weston Bend State Park, Missouri)

In thinking back on it, and reading the description of what was seen and heard, our timing entering at Moshulu and that Pileated's path almost certainly could have crossed (we are looking for birds, so there is a good chance to see something big like that plus the bird was apparently calling, so we could have heard it). We nearly entered at the exact right time and place, but on a whim, started just slightly elsewhere. We were within 1,000 feet of the bird for sure. By the time we were in the exact right spot, even just within a couple hours, the bird had moved on. We were in the right place at the right time, almost. Birding is chancy like that.

But sometimes, the unlikely connections go in your favor.

Exactly the right place and time for a Le Conte's Sparrow in the Bronx

On October 28, 2017, dressed in sandals and shorts for pretty relaxed birding at Van Cortlandt Park, I called an audible because early morning, weekend NYC transit is chancy too. There was a bus one block away, albeit heading in the complete opposite direction. Nice birds, particularly Nelson's Sparrows, had been reported several times in Pelham Bay Park over the last week, and because that bus was a guarantee right then, we took it in the direction of Pelham Bay Park. We made decent time on this early morning commute but when we arrived at the connecting train station, no trains were going to Pelham Bay Park. Not a great change of plan, I am thinking, especially because we would have been birding at Van Cortlandt already. We exited the train at Parkchester, took the shuttle bus to Pelham Bay station, and then took cab to Turtle Cove, as the best hours of birding were slipping away.

I didn't even have my binoculars out until stepping onto the metallic bridge in Turtle Cove and started birding at 8:47AM. My plan was to just park on the bridge to avoid poison ivy and maybe ticks that I might encounter on the overgrown Turtle Cove trail. Some other birders likely had read the same reports and were also walking the trail. An aside, I must emphasize that encountering other birders in the Bronx is kind of chancy too, as many times you will bird without meeting anyone else with binoculars. I asked if they had any luck with the Nelson's Sparrows, and they pointed me just west on the trail, maybe 100 feet from the bridge where they said they had observed them about 20 minutes before.

We meandered over, trying to ID everything that moved. The other birders were also heading that way again, as birds were landing in a small tree, which would make these little birds much easier to see than when they descended into the marsh grasses. At about 9:03AM, six of us were standing there looking over pretty much every bird that popped out, when an Ammodramus-looking sparrow flew into the back branches on the left side of the tree. Although in the open, it was half-covered by shadows and the small twigs between the bird and us made focusing the cameras a challenge. The bird turned and flew to the right and down, then briefly popped up in the front lower branches near the base of the tree. Then it was gone.

Le Conte's Sparrow, Pelham Bay Park, Bronx, NY, 
October 28, 2017

None of us knew what it was immediately, but we did get some clues as we were specifically looking for sparrows. I somehow managed two pictures and one of the other birders got one picture. Judging from the timestamps on my two photos, we had between 2-3 minutes with the bird. We narrowed it down to the genus Ammodramus quickly, while looking at the bird when it was there. One of the things first noted in the field was that there was contrast between the yellowish on the breast/flanks of the bird and the white belly; however, we also noted that the streaking on the flanks was crisp (not blurry). Three of the people had been looking at Nelson’s Sparrows about 40 minutes previous (the same folks that first pointed me near this tree), and felt confident this was not the same as what they had been seeing. Fortunately, from the three photographs and the solid detective work of these other birders, it was determined to be a Le Conte's Sparrow.

Picture #2 of Le Conte's Sparrow, Pelham Bay Park,
Bronx, NY, October 28, 2017

A Le Conte's Sparrow is a small bird, described as highly secretive, difficult to observe, and usually limited to a range in the grasslands of the Midwest/south of North America; it is nearly always of interest to birders. The only time I have ever seen one was a brief view in flight in a bizarre move by the Audubon group I was with, where they had all of us form a circle around a patch that they thought the bird was at and we all closed in on it. It flew out and that was my only previous look (I don't think I would ever take part in that again as it seems much more intrusive to the bird than just walking a trail and watching). No previous eBird records for the species in the Bronx showed up in my query, and only a handful of records, separated in some cases by multiple years, exist in NYC at all.

Although the bird was observed later in the day, it took hours of searching by many people and to my knowledge, no other photographs emerged.

So on a whim, I boarded a bus, took a train, caught a shuttle, got in a cab that took us to the area, and somehow managed to converge with other birders on a single spot in 2,800-acre park to observe a super-rare bird as it popped up and rested in a tree in two spots for less than three minutes. And somehow we managed to photograph it. I think that we did not find this bird so much as it found us. In the more than two hours we were in the same section of trail, we did not see this bird (or the Nelson's Sparrows) again.

On a side note, a friend of mine had other birding plans for the day that almost certainly would have precluded him from getting to this bird. After jumping on the change-of-plans bus, I texted him. In response to my plans, he changed his plans so we could rendezvous, and as it turned out, he got to see the Le Conte's Sparrow that day too! Birding is chancy, there is no doubt about it.

One of my birding principles, also touted by experts like Kenn Kauffman, is that chance favors the prepared. Hours of study over weeks and years go into my birding. Even with all the study, however, you never know exactly what you will see, in what order you will see it, or what other variables may change the course of your experience. There are many reasons humans enjoy birds and birding, and the chancy nature of it all may be one of the main reasons.