Spark Bird by JC Clancy

Birds are everywhere. Why would anyone spend a lot of

time and money running around the state or the country or

the world looking for different ones?

The first bird I remember sang in the garden at twilight as

I watched my mother picking vegetables. Mom listened to

a couple of trills, then sang it back. In a minute, a redbird

landed in a tree nearby. We always called it the redbird so

everyone would know which bird we meant. Later of

course we learned to call them Cardinals. They were

beautiful and sang well. My mother was the star of this

show though. She was beautiful, sang well, spoke bird

language, raised vegetables, carried me inside and tucked

me into bed. I loved the cardinal, still do, but at 3 years old, I

didn't feel any spark.

Another bird stays in my memory for its haunting voice.

When it was corn planting time in Kentucky, we could sit in

the front porch swing at dusk and hear this bird call, “whip-poor-

will, whip-poor-will!” We never saw this bird, which

apparently slept all day in the shadows. We liked to hear it,

but nobody ever said, “Let's go look for it!” No spark.

Fast forward through a few decades of work life in

Cincinnati and Detroit and what should come into my life but

– a bird-watcher! She wrote environmental stuff for the

Detroit Free Press where I worked, mostly stories about

polluted rivers and Superfund cleanups, but occasionally

something about the endangered Kirtland's warbler. She

called my attention to a pair of Peregrine Falcons nesting on

the window ledge of a city skyscraper. About that time, too, I

watched a PBS show called “The Vertical Environment,”

about the birds and wildlife that thrive on the walls of the

Snake River canyon. Peregrines and more, definitely birds

worth watching if they were in your neighborhood.

But as always, there was too much life happening for me to

think a lot about birds. My first husband died, my co-workers

and I got caught up in a long and bitter newspaper strike, I

eventually got engaged to a new guy. In 1996, I found

myself jobless in Boise and volunteered at the World Center

for Birds of Prey, where they were breeding peregrines in

captivity. We lived on a couple of acres with dogs and

horses, my new work outfit included irrigation boots, and I

found that birds loved our man-made oasis. One day I found

a flock of black birds with yellow heads buzzing around me,

and I took the ID question to the World Center

for Birds of Prey. They're Yellow-headed

Blackbirds, I was told. I liked it; it took me back to

where a redbird was a redbird.

Soon after, I looked up from my barn work and saw a couple of birds wading in irrigation water, Pink-headed Long-Beaked Black and White Birds I

guessed. I soon learned to call them American avocets,

still one of the most amazing birds I've ever watched.

Maybe they were my spark birds. But they were still just

there. It was another 15 years before I joined a birding club

or thought about just going out to look for birds. I'm a slow

starter. Maybe in my next 15 years I'll actually do a birding

tour.