In praise of boring birds

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One out of every three Minnesotans is an active birder, which means we are likely to bump into one another on the trails or parklands. And our first question when we encounter someone with binoculars or a spotting scope is always going to be: See anything unusual?

We can’t help it. We’re hardwired to seek the exotic. Kenn Kaufman, in his birding classic “Flights Against the Sunset,” observed that “The search for rare birds is the big thing (even the only thing) for many, and common birds become part of the background, an annoyance to be ignored while one searches for the next rarity.” He call the attitude “contempt for the familiar.”

In fact, most birders faintly resent the omnipresent species. House sparrows are practically the definition of common, crows are ubiquitous, pigeons are barely even wild and associated with urban desolation and, of course, with chalky lines of their droppings on every downtown ledge.

If you happen to have entered a checklist on eBird — and if you’re a serious birder, the chances are good that you have: the site logged its billionth such list several years ago — then you have read the instructions that advise you to enter all of the species you have observed “and not just the highlights.”

The caveat is well-placed. The goal of the eBird project is to create a global database of bird populations and behaviors. But its curators recognize that birders are just as drawn to the shiny object as anyone else, like infants delighting in a multicolored rattle. Who wouldn’t want to be dazzled by rose-breasted grosbeaks, scarlet tanagers or the china-plate brush strokes of a Blackburnian warbler? In John James Audubon’s day, such splashes of color were commonplace, simply because all birds were commonplace. In his day, there were four species of parrots in North America; in our day, there are still a few scattered green parrots in Texas and the other three species are extinct.

Yet even without spectacular colors, we can make room for redemptive aspects of the most familiar birds.

Starlings: pests, invasive and dirty. Then again, there’s the oil-slick sheen of their feathers, and the astonishing visual poetry of a huge flock in synchronous motion. Robins are no longer a harbinger of spring — but their song remains warm and melodious. Red-winged blackbirds clog the edges of every lake and wetland, but when a redwing shrugs, the flare of those epaulets thrills even the most jaded. Mallards, too, seem to colonize every lake and pond — except their green heads and the bottle-blue wing patches make it hard to be indifferent. It doesn’t take long for birders to concede those “then agains.”

That’s a good moral habit, I think, and not just in our birding life. In a world gone mad with “shiny object syndrome,” there’s something to be said for the pluggers. No winning team relies on trick plays. We would be happier in our relationships if we stopped comparing our partners and spouses to the gods of Hollywood. And, yes, we would be better governed if we listened to competent administrators instead of pie-in-the-sky politicians.

It’s almost spring. The songbirds, the shorebirds, the migrating waterfowl will all be returning soon in large numbers. A few will be exotic; most will be birds we’ve seen before, sometimes thousands of times. The gracious thing to do is to welcome them all.

James Silas Rogers lives in St. Paul. His previous commentary “A return to birding” was published in April 2024.