2017: favorite nature moments #5

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Two hundred years ago, 1817,  British artist Robert Wilkinson Padley produced a painting titled "Dun Diver," a.k.a The Goosander or Merganser. It's a lovely natural history painting of one of the most beautiful female ducks in North America. Normally, female ducks are drab to better hide on the nest.

Hold that thought.

Laura Twilley and Cindy Moffet are best friends and they both are graduates of the TN Naturalists@Ijams program at the nature center. In December, Laura wanted to give Cindy a special birthday present, she wanted me to take them birding, hoping that Cindy could add a few new birds to her life list.

I routinely do this sort of thing for Ijams in my role as a nature guide. Laura was also interesting in sparrows which very few birders are. They are generally dismissed as LBJs or "Little Brown Jobs."

On a heavily overcast, misty, damp day we drove to Seven Islands State Birding Park home of acres and acres of tall grass meadows. We soon found dozens and dozens of lively yet sodden sparrows, always moving and bobbing about in search of a morsel of food. It was a real mishmash of species all with subtle field markings: spots, streaks, no streaks, crown stripes, no crown stripes, eye rings, no eye rings, rusty, buff, brown, black parts. The only true way to get a good look is to trap one in a mist net and hold it in your hands. But, that of course, is something we did not do.  

At Seven Islands in the winter, song sparrow, white-throated sparrow, field sparrow, white-crowned sparrow, swamp sparrow, fox sparrow, savannah sparrow, chipping sparrow and grasshopper sparrow are all possible. (Don't worry about taking notes, there's no quiz at the end.) And in those squishy fields we found a sparrow whoop-de-do. Cindy added swamp and white-crowned to her life list.

After we slogged through to the backside of the old farmland and to the French Broad, it was pleasant to be looking at something other than tall wet brown grass and fidgety brown sparrows. Padley would have used an entire tube of burnt umber to paint the scene. Luckily, the river held something quite extraordinaire: a beautiful strange duck unknown to us. We scrambled to check our field guides both modern-day digital and old-school Peterson's, yet it was the latter that revealed the answer to our puzzlement first.

A female common merganser or goosander in Eurasian (Mergus merganser) like in the Padley painting at the top of this post, two centuries after he painted her. Further checking revealed that although common is in her name, as she is in the west and Eurasia, she is certainly uncommon here, only listed as being rare in East Tennessee in the winter.

BAM! A life bird for all three of us! Happy birthday, Cindy.

Thank you, Laura.

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