Birds

Birding and Genealogy

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

 

At first glance birding and genealogy, both hobbies of mine, might seem to have nothing in common. However, as I enjoy each more fully, I have discovered that there are two types of people who love each hobby. There are the collectors and the explorers.

Collector birders love lists. They travel the world adding to their life list of birds they have glimpsed. For some, it is a competitive sport. Collector genealogists have vast spread sheets of every ancestor that they have identified. Sometimes, unfortunately, in their haste to get an ever bigger data base, they import other genealogy data bases from the internet.

Explorer birders  like to get to know a few birds in depth. They are content to have the same birds visit their yards and feeders, observing their habits at leisure. Explorer genealogists try to learn as much as they can about individuals in their ancestry. They are fascinated with the details of a forebear’s life and their historical context. They rely on primary sources as much as possible and try, often fruitlessly, to correct the mistakes of the collector genealogists.

I am clearly an explorer birder, fascinated with hawks. I am also an explorer genealogist, looking deeply into the lives of several remarkable women in my maternal line whose sketches I am working on posting in the future.

 

Starlings

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

We live amidst a variety of trees, so we are visited in the summer by a myriad of birds: woodpecker, nuthatch, goldfinch, house finch, tufted titmouse, blue jay, mockingbird, mourning dove, robin, and the ubiquitous house sparrow. All co-exist, feeding on the tubes of feed and seed and cakes of suet I set out under our cherry tree, facing the window over the kitchen sink.

This summer, however, I have been plagued by starlings. In poetic language they form a murmuration. In my yard, however, they form a pack of bullies, driving all the other birds away. They don’t even share with one another. Instead, they fight for every toehold, every branch, every suet holder. They spend so much time fighting, they often don’t feed, so consumed are they with pushing each other away from the food.

Last week I put out one suet cake for the downy woodpeckers I had seen around. I hadn’t seen any starlings in a few days, so I thought the coast might be clear. The woodpeckers had the cake to themselves for five minutes. Then, by some starling signal, five starlings arrived and began fighting–not eating–on the suet cake. They drove off the woodpeckers.

I leave any analogy to the reader.