Day 33: says hey

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OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT!

Says hey, Betty gets a lifer

Well, you don't always have to stay at home during this crisis. You can hop in your car and go look for birds. Cornell lists 2,059 species in North America. That should keep you busy until the pandemic is over. Just stay a safe distance away from other people. The experience becomes more intimate especially if they play a little cat and mouse with you.  

Betty Thompson, our eye-to-the-sky in Kansas needed a nature fix and drove to the Quivira Wildlife Refuge and found a bird she had never seen before. 

"The pictures are not the best, but it was great fun chasing it from post to post, down a dirt road, in the grassland," emailed Betty. "Such a tease this one, just as I was ready to zoom in, away it would go!"

Very much like our own Eastern phoebe, the Say's phoebe (Sayornis saya) is a flycatcher and nervous tail-bobber that darts out from a perch to hawk a flying insect. Thomas Say was the first trained naturalist to encounter the species in Colorado in 1819. The species honors Say. And it's a species with a penchant for lonely places. 

Betty's photo at the top perfectly illustrates their choice of habitat. Grasslands, badlands, sagebrush, open country, dry barren foothills are the desolate places you will find a Say's. And more than likely you and the bird will be the only two there.

A species that somehow must feel like we all do, isolated.

Ob-la-de, ob-la-da. 

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