Part II: In Search of the Glossy Ibis

So, when we left off, I may or may not have developed a full-blown birding habit that started innocently enough 20 years ago in Africa but then eventually had me standing on a frigid bridge in Maine looking for a very lost eagle.

That’s how it goes. No one sets out to be a birder; it just sneaks up on you.

And then one day you wake up and find yourself in muck boots; up to your ankles in mud; and somehow weirdly happy about that because it means spring is here and the migration is coming. Regardless of what you see or don’t, you’re OUT THERE again; and you have a big-ass plastic casino cup full of quarters and have a whole new season to play nature’s slot machine!

And that’s the exact state I found myself in on Sunday. Muck boots. Mud. Delighted by that.

I had been to that spot a bunch of times before. It’s the place where I took this picture.

I have never seen another birder there. I’ve never seen another photographer. My kind of place!

I know of only one other birder who goes there but we’ll get to her soon enough. She’s actually the star of this part and will enter the story in ample time to really steal the show in Scene V.

Rewinding back to the early pre-addiction days though when you made your first walks down to the town lake and met some other birders… Invariably, some of them mentioned other good spots which you didn’t know even existed and that made you think “Jeez, I had no idea there were so many birding spots near me. I wonder if there are others…”

And then you remembered someone casually mentioning iBird, so you downloaded it and pulled up the map of “birding hotspots” and…

Sweet. Fancy. Moses. You can’t swing a great blue heron around here without hitting, like, another heron or something.

So, you hit up some of those spots and come to really like a few of them. Invariably, they’re the ones where you saw some birds for the first time; but they’re also the spots that seem to attract the right sub-species of the one animal that can make or ruin a birding trip: other birders.

Birders are almost universally nice, friendly people. Just like in any large population though, there are certain little subpopulationss. You’ve got the Happy Go Luckies, the Life Listers, and the Warbler Watchers.

Happy Go Luckies are just happy to be out there and delighted to see things. They can see a cardinal for the hundredth time and be happy as a clam about it. They’re a cheerful sort. They chat openly and excitedly about what they’ve seen. They’re just nice, fun people to bump into. I like the Happy Go Luckies.

Then there are the Life Listers (LL). They’ve got a checklist of species they’ve seen and could see and are damn focused on adding to it. The super hardcore LL’s can be a little over the top. I met one dude who had only three birds left to see from the 300+ species found in my state. It was an accomplishment he was clearly proud of but all I could think was “Jeez, that sucks. Then you’re done… There’s nothing new anymore.”

Nobody does a jigsaw puzzle a second time; I’m in no hurry to be down to the last three pieces. I keep a little list; I don’t rush to fill it.

And then there are the Warbler Watchers. These are the folks who are pretty into the wild array of colorful little migratory birds which all look varying degrees of the same to me. I can see the same damn type of warbler fifty times in a day and still be like “Oooooh, that one might not be another yellow-rumped!” when in fact, it very much is one. Every time.

Plus, I’m pretty damn close to Mr. Magoo, so whenever I bump into a Warbler Watcher, I’m like “See anything interesting?” and they then rattle off a list of 37 different songbirds and then I’m like “Cool. I saw one that might not have been a yellow-rumped warbler. I have to check when I get home.”

So, I’m somewhere in the neighborhood of a Happy Go Lucky… but I’m also a photographer; and that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

Just like no one sets out to be a birder, absolutely no one sets out thinking “I bet a rewarding pastime would be wading ass-deep into a tick-infested thicket of marsh grass carrying a camera with a lens the size of a bedpost to take 300 blurry frames of swallows that just. will. not. fly. in. a. straight. line. for even two goddmaned seconds.”

Nope, that, too, is an addiction you get sucked into.

One day, you’re a middle-aged dude buying a camera to shoot your kid’s soccer games. The next, you’re parked illegally on the shoulder of a winding road standing out in a cold rain with your camera under your rain suit because you thought you saw a blue heron hunting for fish.

(Not to brag or anything but it was a blue heron and it was hunting for fish and it caught one and I got the picture and sure I couldn’t feel my toes for a while but, damn, worthhhhhhh it!)

Bird photographers fall into two easy buckets:

There are birders who take photographs; and there are photographers who take pictures of birds.

The former are people like me. They got into birds, got into photography, and brought them together. They may want to take great pictures but they’re birders first and are happy getting even a bad shot of a cool sighting because, hey, man, cool sighting!

The latter, photographers whose subject is birds, are a problematic population. Not every member of it. There are plenty of good folks who are just all about the good picture. But there are also some absolute Grade A fuckwads who don’t actually care about the birds, nature, the rules, or even the law.

They do all kinds of bad shit like not only sneaking past a taped off nesting sight even though that might cause the birds to abandon their chicks, but actually tearing down the sign that explained all that. These people are complete fucksticks. I hate them.

And that app I mentioned in Part I – the one where people can report rare sightings and the location right down to the exact spot – well, it attracts those kinds of asshats like a suet cake attracts downy woodpeckers. Meaning, like, a whole lot. Put a suet cake up in your yard. You’ll see.

Bird photographers like me, kinda hate those apps and absolutely hate when someone reports something rare at one of our regular places - because we hate to see the jerkoffs who do shitty things rolling in... and we hate that because first and foremost, we love our regular places and get attached to them. We walk softly in them, tiptoing about as reverential visitors lucky to enjoy them and tasked with leaving no mark.

I wasn’t always a bird photographer. This little twinned addiction started a few years when I already had a six-robin-a-day bird habit and a son playing soccer (which I very much wanted to capture in pictures. Next thing you know, I had bought myself a starter digital camera… which I promptly dropped three weeks later and smashed to hell.

Now swooning under the withdrawal of one addiction in service of another, I then talked myself up the ladder higher and higher until I had replaced it with this sweet-ass Nikon D500 that had an autofocus so smooth and fast, if my initial excitement had lasted any longer, I would have had to call a urologist.

I have never loved an earthly possession more than I love that camera. I’ve toted that thing all over hell and creation; taken a million pictures; and met a whole bunch of other bird photographers in the process.

When bird photographers meet for the first time, there is a sort of an unofficial feeling out that occurs. You suss out their birding… Are they a Happy Go Lucky? A Life Lister?

What you’re really feeling out though is whether they’re someone you’d be happy to see again and have in your little informal circle of fellow birders.

You are so far past that first walk down to the town lake, you are legit now in an informal bird gang… and you tell people your gang’s colors are very bright in breeding season but then get drab over the winter because, hey, you are a complete bird dork now and that’s the kind of dumb joke you actually find sort of hysterical.

In those little chats, you’re looking for your people. The ones who are like you and have the same reverence for wildlife and nature - and birds - and the very act of getting out into their habitat to sometimes see them.

Somewhere on a dusty road during COVID, I met one of those kinds of people.

Her name is Cheryl. She’s a birder and photographer like me. We each frequent one of the same spots. We each have about the same caliber of gear. We aren’t Richie Rich’s with a $20,000 rig. We’re regular folks with gear we can afford.

The first few times Cheryl and I met were literally just bump-into’s. Each out walking the same road at the same time. Brief stops to chat about what we had seen and had heard from others. That’s pretty typical birding chit-chat.

Eventually, you get past that though and establish mutual trust that the other person isn’t a selfish asshat bird photographer - or, possibly even worse, a Facebook Frannie who will run right to the web to blab about having seen an owl and exactly where others could find it after you mentioned the eastern screech owl that lives in that one tree past the bridge between utility poles 0674 and 0675.

Once you have that mutual trust, you share more. You talk about the places you go and like and care about enough to want to protect them.

And if you’re like me, a bunch of those places are little gems hidden in plain sight that you found by literally scouring Google Maps to find spits of water or open land wedged into densely urban areas.

There’s that boring park nobody thinks to go to with the nesting peregrines. There’s the former quarry that’s sort of behind a bus depot but you have to park at the school and sneak over to a cut-through.

And then there’s the industrial waste sight with ankle-deep mud.

Cheryl is the only other person I know who knows about it.

Somehow, we got to talking about it one day and were just laughing our asses off as two people who know the place intimately because it is… umm… very Sopranos-y.

To get to it, you have to weave through a set of industrial buildings, parking lots, waste areas, and then a full-on graveyard for heavy equipment, until you get to a dirt road that kind of just dead-ends in the woods.

I’m a six-foot tall dude who literally scolded a black bear last year for walking directly up to me, so I don’t intimidate all that easily… but this place creeps even me out as a possible mafia body dump.

Once you know the place though, you just hastily run the gauntlet through Tony Soprano Memorial Acres and get to the back and out of sight… and then you put on your beloved muck boots and tromp your sweet fancy ass out to a pretty cool little wetland.

And it was at that very spot on Sunday where I saw an Suburban Nessie… a vague, blurry shape in the distance captured in terrible light.

Now, birding has an inside-y little acronym for exactly that kind of sighting-but-not-sighting… and it is probably the very worst acronym ever adopted in any hobby of any kind:

GIS… pronounced “Jizz”. It stands for “general impression and shape”.

JFC, could they not have workshopped that one a little bit and come up with literally anything else?

Once you’ve seen your ten-thousandth robin or mourning dove, you know their unique little shape and flight patterns. You can identify them without even really seeing them well.

By contrast, when something is REALLY out of place, you notice that too… and then you get all excited.

“MAYBE THAT’S A SHOEBILL CRANE WHICH IS NOT REMOTELY INDIGENOUS TO HERE BUT OMG WHAT IF IT SOMEHOW IS A SHOEBILL CRANE?!”

And it’s never a shoebill crane.

But a person who has been pressing the lever feverishly hoping for a pellet tends to get excited when that last press right might actually have been the lucky one.

That shape I saw all the way off at the far end of Soprano Lake… it did not belong there. It was neither a resident nor likely visitor. I know that little wasteland paradise and I know it’s habitants. This was not one of them.

This, my friends, was something NEW!

In fairness, I have felt that way to lesser degrees about approximately two million other birds which all turned out to be just house sparrows. So, I tried to temper my enthusiasm.

Got home, ran the fuzzy pics through a birding app that can identify birds through pictures.

Glossy ibis.

The first app ID’ed it as most likely a glossy freaking ibis.

Disbelieving, I downloaded the higher resolution images from my camera, cleaned them up a little bit and then ran them again.

Glossy ibis.

And then I ran it through the most accurate of the apps.

Glossy Ibis: 99%

What the mother-flipping what?!

Glossy WHAT THE WHAT?!

Checked the state’s rare bird reporting site. Not one single glossy ibis had been reported in the entire state in the prior week or two.

Come on, no way. Did I just lever my way into the fattest food pellet a rat ever found?

So, I reached out to the one person I could trust with the info… who also happens to also be the one and only person who happens to have a soft spot for the Racketeering Reservoir where I spotted the alleged ibis.

Cheryl.

I haven’t seen Cheryl much lately. We’ve both been busy. But I know part of her busy has been caring for her ailing father as his health declines largely by herself. She doesn’t have a chance to get out as much as she used to… and I suspect now is a time when she could actually use those breaks even more.

When she does get out and we happen to bump into each other, I can practically feel her palpable relief at having a few hours away from things that are heavy and hard. I entirely get what that feels like. Moments of calm in a hurricane. Chances to just breathe a little.

So, if there is one person I’d be happy to transitively pass along my little secret rare bird sighting to, it’s Cheryl.

Sent her a message.

She messaged me back to tell me she was going to go look for it the next day.

The next day, she did; and I did too.

And it was… gone.

Damnit.

That’s the problem with birds. They have a stubborn tendency to fly off.

Who knows where that damn alleged ibis could have flown off to; it could have been two states away by then.

Each of us had tromped all around that mucky little bathtub at different times and had each seen… nothing. Sloppity-slop-slopping through mud the consistency of brown marshmallow toting fifteen pounds of gear. For nothing.

A birding habit is a birding habit though… so, I tried again the following day. And again, nothing.

I saw plenty of muck boot prints in the mud though… Cheryl had been there too.

Between the two of us, we scoured that damn place like an FBI team doing a grid search for the body of Vinnie “Big Glossy” Scarpelli who an informant had claimed was buried with “the other rats” in “Bye-Bye Bog” - which is the kind of name I imagine the mob would give this place.

Nothing.

And then I got home and there was a text message waiting for me from Cheryl.

In it was a picture. A picture of a picture really.

Let’s gooooooooooooo!

Hell effing yeah!

Glossy Ibis!

And then Cheryl eventually got home and downloaded the pics and sent me this…

Oh, hell yes!

An absolutely beautiful picture!

Cheryl tromped all over that place; saw that ibis; and took that picture.

And that is what it is all about:

That one moment every now and then where you see something special and cool and actually get the picture – and you know you worked for it and earned it.

A Glossy Freaking Ibis.

Look at that bird!

I have no idea what other ibis’ look like but I feel quite comfortable going out on a limb anyway and saying that’s a damn fine ibis as ibis’ go.

Y’all, I am just so damn happy that my little stop-by which looked like it might be a wild ibis chase worked out this way.

Happy for my friend. Happy to have seen a cool bird. Happy my friend got the golden pellet.

Congratulations to my friend, Cheryl, on capturing a damn fine snap!

[BTW, you can see that photo and Cheryl’s many other great bird pics on her Instagram.

Her IG handle is @cherylsbirds. She had thousands of followers until last week when Instagram inexplicably deleted her account without reason or explanation. She literally posted only bird pics. Took years to build that following. Now she has to start all over. I’m sure people following her would make her day. You oughta do that if you’re on IG. Good person, birder, and photographer.]

Finally In closing, I will leave you with this…

Ya know, there might be some birds down around your town lake. Maybe take a walk down there someday. Maybe bring a pair of binoculars along… just to, ya know, check it out. If ya do, I’ll see ya in some marsh somewhere someday. <evil laugh>