This is just a tribue: #100

I'm officially halfway to my goal of 200 bird species in Argentina. Yesterday I tried to eek out my 100th species but came up one short. It didn't take long today. After finishing up our suck work (bugsuck that is) we headed down to the field site, but quickly stopped when we saw a small, striped bird pecking at a tree. "What is that? Hmmm, ummm, small bird, black and white horizontal stripes on the chest, small, errr... ummm... Get the book!" We vigorously thumbed through the passerines, but found nothing. "He was so little! And the way he was climbing the tree? It had to be a passerine. Hmmm... but wait, the way it was pecking, wasn't it almost woodpecker-esque?" We flipped through to the Picidae family and sure enough there he was, the White-barred Piculet.

 

Not my picture; thank you internet

The piculets belong to a subfamily, Picumninae within the woodpecker family, Picidae. They are almost exclusively found in South America, though there are a few species in Asia and one species in Africa. Piculets are similar to woodpeckers in that they have zygodactyl feet, which means they have two toes pointing forward and two toes pointing backwards (as opposed to anisodactyl feet in perching birds, which have 3 toes pointing forward and one toe pointing backwards). This is great for maneuvering up and down the sides of trees searching for insects.

Great, awesome, #100 was out of the way. The pressure was off. As we progressed through our brood cooling of box 64 (description to come [maybe] in a later post), the sun beat down harder and harder. We measured, banded, and bled the chicks from box 65, and as my clothes became drenched in sweat as I roasted inside my waders, I started becoming worried. I had #100, but what if I couldn't find anymore? Did I put so much pressure on that bird, whatever it was to be, that now I wouldn't get past it? What if I didn't see any new birds?

"Damn it's hot out here. Are we almost done? There aren't any birds around here. Ergh, ugh, LET'S HURRY UP!" As I headed to Florida (check Lay of the Land, probably still to come) my confidence seemed to sweat out of me with everything else.

I slogged my way through Florida, resting my things underneath the oasis around boxes 28, 29, and 37. I walked out to box 34 to find a new egg, which I marked and measured; fortunately that was the only real work to be done in Florida. I mucked back to the oasis, grabbed my things, and began to walk back to rejoin Maya in Power Tower. Then I heard it. Not that I knew what "it" was, but there "it" was, a long descending call note I had not heard before coming from a bird that had just flown in ahead of me. Could this be #101? I crept up slowly, not wanting to scare "it" away. From behind a shrubbery (Nii!) I saw it, a medium-sized passerine, very stripey, with some streaking on the breast. It was a pipit! My first ever, actually. I flipped to the Motacillidae family. Son of a b... they all look the same! Well that one isn't around here, that one's too streaky, it must be one of these two: either the Yellowish Pipit or the Chaco Pipit. To my chagrin I read the description of the Chaco Pipit, and I quote, "Indistinguishable in the field from the Yellowish Pipit."

What a kick to the gonads. I had gotten over the hump, found #101, and now I couldn't tell it apart from a mirror-image cousin. That's it, not only am I going to be stuck on 100 species, but these look-a-likes are going to taunt me all the while. Screw that noise, there must be a way to tell these guys apart. Wait a minute, that's it! Noise! What are their calls? I returned to the Pipit plates (after I had shoved my book back in my pocket in frustration). Sure enough; the Yellowish Pipit's call exactly matched what I had heard as it flew in, a long descending note. The Chaco Pipit?  Cliclicliclicliclilidlidlidlidlid; ERRR! I had my bird, the Yellowish Pipit.

That's the difference between a good birder and a great birder (disclaimer: I am not calling myself a great birder). Anybody can look at a bird and find it's picture in a book, but what about when two species look almost exactly the same? Or when you can't even see the bird in question, but only hear its call? A great birder has his/her/sexually neutral ears tuned in to the songs and can distinguish species by the music that they play. There's more to birding than just identifying a bird. When you come to fully know a bird, it's field marks, calls, behaviors, habitats, then you can honestly call yourself a birder.


[This adventure story has been brought to you by Birdman Dave, inc. All the excitement of Sherlock Holmes with the education of your high school biology class (don't kid yourselves, I know you were sleeping in that class anyways)]