My bird records for the next few months are interspersed with reports on Brandy’s development. Watching a German shepherd grow is much like watching a time-lapse sequence in a nature movie, only there’s no trick photography needed to improve on nature. The Brandy that got up in the morning was noticeably larger than the one that had gone to bed the night before. At the end of July he weighed in at twenty-three pounds, a month later he was thirty-six pounds and by the end of October, sixty pounds. (Now, at maturity, he weighs 105 pounds and at low tide he leaves tracks in the wet sand like those of the Abominable Snowman.) These changes did not go unnoticed either by Brandy, who became increasingly bold, or by the willet, who kept a more respectful distance.
Every day our visit to the beach began in the same way. The willet, much keener-eyed than mere dogs and people, would spot us getting out of the car and acknowledge our arrival with a scream of outrage. Hearing it, Brandy would respond with a bellow and go charging down the stone steps in pursuit, taking me with him if I happened to be attached to the other end of the leash.
At first both bird and dog played their parts with wild enthusiasm. The chase was intense and earnest, the escape hairbreadth, the sound effects ear-shattering. But as the weeks passed and the game remained a scoreless tie, the players began to show signs of flagging interest. In the middle of the chase Brandy would catch a scent and go ambling off to investigate a dead sand shark or a decayed lobster claw; and the willet, no longer pursued, would stop to probe for a sand flea or stalk a hermit crab; and the game would be over. The willet could then proceed with his bird business, and Brandy with his dog business, each aware through experience of the other’s habits and capabilities. Eventually the whole thing boiled down to the merest formality.
The willet, catching sight of Brandy at the top of the steps, would shift his feet and open his bill slightly as if to say, Ho hum, here comes that hairy beast again.
And Brandy would answer with the smallest excuse of a bark: I see that feathered fool is still around. Well, so be it.
Left alone to cope with problems of adjustment, animals often do a better job than humans.
Birdwatchers coming to southern California for the first time invariably arrive with a list of birds they most want to see. Some of these most-wanted species, like the acorn woodpecker and Anna’s hummingbird and band-tailed pigeon, are all over the place and could only be missed if you kept your eyes closed and your ears plugged. Others can be found in the right places in abundance, such as the yellow-billed magpie and Laurence’s goldfinch. Still others must be searched for in particular habitats, but can usually be located. Among these are the white-tailed kite, California condor and phainopepla. Others are completely unpredictable and among them I would include most of the pelagic birds.
These creatures have the remoteness and mystery of an element alien to us. Some Sierra Club members are as familiar with Santa Barbara County’s back country as they are with the city — they know every peak and potrero in that vast, rugged wilderness, and every roadless valley and barranca. But even the keenest sailor is a stranger to the sea. A thousand things happen under his keel which he will never know about. The wave he passes which floats a marbled murrelet he will never pass again, and once the ashy petrel fluttering in a water furrow disappears from his view, he could spend a year looking for it and never find it.
It seems impossible for anyone to write as intimately about the pink-footed shearwater or the pigeon guillemot as about the kingbird or the house finch without adding sea water to his veins and eel grass to his diet. (I suspect R.M. Lockley of meeting both these conditions while he was doing his marvelous book on shearwaters.) Simply locating them is chancy enough. We have gone out after shearwaters and found half a million, and we have gone out another year, at the same time, to the same place and under the same conditions, and found none.
Once a pelagic bird is located, the business of identification arises. If the seas are rough — and in our channel they often are — it’s not easy to hang on to the railing of a boat while focusing binoculars, balancing a field guide and trying to keep both them and yourself dry.
There are additional problems. If a black-footed albatross is in the vicinity he can readily be seen since he’s about three feet long and has a seven-foot wingspread. But a great many of the pelagic birds are tiny and the boat has to be practically on top of them before they’re visible floating in the trough of waves or barely skimming the surface of the water to cut down air resistance and conserve their energy. The sailor’s old prayer, “O God, Thy sea is so large and my boat is so small,” should have a birdwatcher’s addition, “and Thy sea birds should be a lot bigger.” The least and the ashy petrels are the size of myrtle warblers and white-crowned sparrows, respectively. Our rare winter visitor, Cassin’s auklet, is no larger than a kingbird. Murrelets and puffins range from the size of towhees to the size of flickers.
A male red-shafted flicker, at fourteen inches, may look pretty large and conspicuous perched on top of a telephone pole. Surrounded by a 63,985,000-square-mile expanse of water he would change considerably in relative size and visibility. He would also, if he were to become a sea bird, lose his fetching red whisker marks and his handsome wing and tail linings. The plumages of sea birds are confined to somber greys and whites and blacks, and brilliant colors appear only in the hard, horny parts like the red-orange-yellow beaks of puffins and the carmine feet of pigeon guillemots.
For some time I wondered if the albatross, which was the nemesis of a certain mariner, was destined to be mine, too, but after a dozen pelagic trips I finally found one. Meanwhile, my real nemesis has been identified. He is nothing so imposing as an albatross, being only ten inches long and not noted for any special display either in the air or in the water. I have seen all the other members of his family which frequent our area. I have even been on boats when my nemesis was spotted by practically everyone on board, but I missed him by a fraction of a second, the blink of an eye, a sudden lurch of the boat, a binocular lens fogged by salt spray, an ill-timed sandwich in the galley or snatch of conversation in the stern. Whatever the reason, I’ve repeatedly missed seeing the ancient murrelet.
I am prepared for him. I know, without consulting the field guide, exactly what he looks like and how I can instantaneously distinguish him from the two brothers he closely resembles. Even if I sincerely wanted to forget this information, I couldn’t. I am the lifetime victim of my own mnemonic devices.
Birdwatchers used to begin their hobby at a very early age. They had to. In the absence of adequately illustrated field guides and moderately priced, easy-to-carry binoculars, learning about birds was a lengthy process, not unlike learning in general before the invention of the printing press. Then the second quarter of the twentieth century brought vast improvements in color photography and reproduction and in the uses of lightweight metals; the Japanese started manufacturing precision optical instruments within the average man’s price range, Roger Tory Peterson introduced the first of his field guides, and suddenly it was no longer necessary to begin birdwatching at seven or eight. You could begin at forty-five. As I did.
Well aware that I had many years of study and observation to make up, I decided to avail myself of all possible memory aids. I’ve always used mnemonic devices, especially those involving rhyme, so when I was confronted with two pages of warblers to memorize I did the natural thing. From the check list of local birds I picked the warblers seen in our area, omitting those easy to remember, like the yellow, the orange-crowned and the black-throated grey. The rest I put into a poem: