Birder’s Nightmare

What’s a birder’s worse nightmare? Missing a plane connection from East Jesus Island back to the mainland and having to stay an extra day? Not hardly.
Paying a godzillion bucks for a once-in-a-lifetime trip only to discover it’s monsoon season when you arrive? Any day bad for flying is a good day for birding.
No. I think the thing we fear most is being alone and coming upon a totally out-of-place bird; or one that has been extinct since white men invaded the North American continent.
I rank this scenario just above being alone and finding a body stashed in the bushes of some remote park. I must say, the body thing used to really bother me. I often bird alone in places I’m unfamiliar with. Then the other day I crossed paths with a live, very live, alligator in Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge. The Zen moment was that in most places, any body would have been recycled by the time I found it. Except for maybe the baseball cap part. This enlightenment, resolving the mystery of how caps (and maybe shoes) turn up in remote places, took my mind off finding bodies.
My out-of-place bird is a yet-to-be-resolved problem. I easily studied a number of small birds working the trees in front of the nature center at Loxahatchee NWR last Tuesday. The center was closed. Even had it been open no one could have found it if they followed the directions given on the center’s Web site. As for maps of Florida, they might as well have provided a map of Nebraska. The directions were more than 10 miles off from the closest intersection noted. But that’s another story.
The point is, I was alone—except for the birds. Oh, and the ‘gators. So, leaning against my car I was ticking off warblers like I was walking the boardwalk at Magee Marsh. This was too cool. The most brilliant Prairie Warbler I’ve seen since … well, in a long time; Black-throated Blue; Common Yellowthroat. Man, this was easy.
Hmmm, Hermit Thrush, that seems odd. Then the nightmare. I of course did not realize it was a nightmare until I woke up. It was one of those tiny, nondescript birds working in the deep shadows. I applied my best pishing techniques and out he popped to see what all the silly noise was about. Oooo, a Red-breasted Nuthatch! Wow, that’s great!
Then it hit me—like getting out of an air conditioned car into the 96-degree heat and humidity too high to measure: Boy, you are way too far south to see a Red-breasted Nuthatch, especially at this time of the year. I watched the bird flit about the branches and disappear into the dense south-Florida underbrush.
A quick look at my field guide brought me up short. No nuthatch, red, white, brown or pygmy was to be found here. I checked the Loxahatchee list. None, as in zero, found here.
Oh boy, now what? My 2K memory bank searched for what else, anything else, it could have been. All the obvious birds were eliminated because this bird looked like what it was. Maybe it’s some exotic that flew over from the Bahamas? Nothing in the field guide qualified. I’ve seen an albino Yellow-bellied Sapsucker and partially albino American Robin that drove me to hours of page turning in field guides. This bird, however, left no (or little) doubt.
When I got back to my room I shot an e-mail off to friend Mauri Peterson, president of the St. Pete (Florida) Audubon Society, describing my dilemma. She was stumped as well. (I’ll leave out the part where she called me a weenie because I complained about the incessant heat.) She posted the sighting for comment to the Florida birders’ hot line. Nothing I’ve received from the folks down there has yet to change my mind about what I saw.
The bright point in all of this is that I no longer have to lie awake at night wondering what will happen if (when) I encounter an out-of-place bird. Maybe I should sign up for one of those group trips searching the swamps of Arkansas, looking for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. I have nothing to fear—now—but why chance doing it solo?