Rag of a man that I am, is this the end of me?
— ODYSSEUS IN HOMER’STHE ODYSSEY
ON NOVEMBER 4, WHEN I got Bohemian Waxwing as bird 295, I figured three hundred was a cakewalk. How could I miss? I even started telling people that I thought I was going to make it — just a matter of time. The gods, of course, were setting me up for the fall. Had I not heard of hubris? Humpty Dumpty syndrome? I should have known better. I’ve been a loser all my life. Why should I start to come through now? Had I done anything other than offer constant, often copious, libations each evening to gain favour with the bird god? I should have seen it coming.
I spend hours in the field day after day, but no new birds. It is a bleak and desperate November. Even the Internet is reporting few novelties and the ones it does post manage to avoid me no matter how soon I chase off after them. My sole comfort is that Margaret and Hugh are not racing ahead scoring right and left and leaving me struggling in their wake. This is another doldrums period. The whole province is quiet.
And I still can’t find Pine Grosbeak. I’ve been missing them everywhere, while everyone else has been having really good luck with them. I get sick of crabapples and buckthorn; I check every one within miles of Cobourg. It is embarrassing. People are discussing and comparing all the Pines they are seeing; others are bored with Pines — too numerous.
Photo by Sam Barone.
Pine Grosbeak (female). Guelph. Less gaudy than the male, to be sure, but this female looked awfully good to me.
Eventually, I am the only person in the province who has failed to see one of these ubiquitous invaders, which as Ron Pittaway predicted, would be all over the place in goodly numbers. I’d all but counted the bird as a given. Imagine my horror when I understand it is going to be the Eurasian Wigeon all over again, but this time with a less felicitous outcome. The gods have lost patience with the Rewards for Hard Work Program and have reverted to their old ways. Screw Pope wherever possible without hurting other birders unduly. There is one other birder, a rookie junior field naturalist in Punkeydoodles Corners who has also failed to see Pine Grosbeak, but he has been ill. It is understandable. People are cutting him some slack.
Then, on November 20, Don Shanahan calls to say there is a flock of Pine Grosbeaks outside the Brighton Beer Store. I do not stop to ponder how Don might have come to find them. These things happen. Margaret (who has already seen one yesterday and knows from experience that loser Pope will never find one without her) and I are off in a flash. As we arrive, I see a flock of birds explode out of a nearby tree, gain height, and fly as if possessed for the horizon. I know they are Pine Grosbeaks, but I do not get my diagnostic look. A lesser man and one not so used to defeat and abject disappointment might have wept. I begin to stare above my head into dark, forbidding spruce trees. As I stand in the sad bleak silence thinking of Cato the Younger in the crepuscular gloom, Margaret says, “Oh, what was that?”
“What was what?” I ask, as I so often do around Margaret. She has heard some little cheep or tweet or something, maybe a distant Brown Creeper clearing its throat.
“There, that call,” says Margaret. “Isn’t that Pine Grosbeak?”
“Right on,” I say, hearing nothing except the now-alluring creak of the Beer Store door. Then the fates play another trick on me. I think I hear a Greater Yellowlegs. It seems unlikely that this species hides in fir trees in the winter, but I know enough to start screening those fir trees madly. Right above us, hidden deep in the branches of a big spruce, we see the saffron rump and then the whole body of a beautiful female Pine Grosbeak (296), the most beautiful one of these unprepossessing birds I have ever seen.
Ticky, ticky.