Waiting, Watching, Hoping

You have almost certainly heard by now about the green-tailed towhee. My green-tailed towhee.

They’d all heard the news at the Los Angeles Audubon Society walk at Whittier Narrows one Sunday last fall. “Did you hear about the green-tailed towhee up at Eaton Canyon?” one woman on the hike asked another.

“I saw it,” I interjected.

They were, and I say this modestly, impressed. “I’ve never seen one in Southern California outside of the mountains,” the other woman said.

“I hadn’t either,” I replied.

This was technically true. The fact is, the Eaton Canyon bird was my first green-tailed towhee, but it didn’t seem important to bring that up.

Just then the group leader arrived. “Guess what they saw up at Eaton?” he asked before he’d even shut the door of his pickup truck.

“If you mean the green-tailed towhee,” one of the women said, motioning toward me, “she saw it.”

They plied me for details, which I supplied. It wasn’t exactly how I expected my 15 minutes of fame to come, but it was satisfying.

You’d probably like the details, too.

It was a Friday morning. Just back from vacation, I was taking one last day off work. I dropped my teenage son off at school in Pasadena and then headed up to Eaton Canyon at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Before taking off on a hike with the dog, I wandered along the tamer trails near the nature center, in an irrigated area where birds often congregate in dry weather.

I was looking for an ovenbird, a species that doesn’t usually get much west of Colorado. A birder had seen one at the canyon a few days earlier, but I didn’t spot it.

What I did find was a bird I’d never seen in the area, with a rust-colored crown, bright, white-ringed eyes and a lot of yellow-green in the wings and tail. The truth is, I did not recognize the species, although I didn’t think that was relevant to mention to my Whittier Narrows fans. I watched it for most of a minute before it flew.

Soon after, I ran into someone who was clearly a serious birder. His binocular strap was worn, and he carried a tattered copy of Peterson’s Guide to Western Birds in his pocket. I described my find.

“Strange,” he said, a note of doubt in his voice. “Doesn’t sound like any of the usual suspects.” A couple of minutes later, he ran up the path and hailed me excitedly. “I found your bird! It was a green-tailed towhee. I’ve never seen one down at this altitude.” Then came the stirring coda: “Good bird!”

I am a recent convert to birding. It happened one day last spring in Elysian Park, where I walk regularly. A man I know from the neighborhood had binoculars trained on a red-tailed hawk’s nest on a nearby hillside. He handed them to me so I could see the two young hawks standing in the nest squawking impatiently. He told me about a snag, a quarter-mile away along a hiking trail, with three knotholes resembling a twisted face. In the hole that formed the mouth, he said, was a western bluebird nest, the first he’d seen in the park.

The next day I brought my own binoculars and watched as the male bluebird ventured out again and again to fetch food for his offspring. I was hooked. It wasn’t that I’d never noticed birds before. My grandmother liked birds, and as a child I’d sit at her kitchen table watching large families of California quail come down from the sage-covered hillside above her house in northern San Diego County to feast on the seed she spread for them. Hooded orioles and hummingbirds--Anna’s and Allen’s--came to her feeders.

My casual interest carried over into adulthood. A few years ago, in my park, I saw a shiny black bird with a crest that I hadn’t seen before. In my National Geographic guide at home I identified it as a phainopepla. I watched with interest as the population swelled and diminished over the course of the year. I loved seeing woodpeckers--the small, industrious Nuttall’s and the larger, familial acorn woodpeckers.

Since last spring, though, I’ve been obsessed. I bought a miniature pair of binoculars to take on my morning runs, and in the evenings my husband and I started frequenting the park to watch western tanagers, as many as 12 to a tree. With my old National Geographic field guide and a new copy of Sibley’s, I identified Wilson’s and Townsend’s warblers, bushtits and spotted towhees and black-headed grosbeaks. At least three kinds of hawks patrolled the skies, and two kinds of orioles--Bullock’s and hooded--lived in the eucalyptus trees.

One morning I heard a loud, raucous cry I didn’t recognize. I followed it down a brush-and-tree-covered hillside, where I found a huge and glorious black-and-tan-striped bird that showed a flash of bright orange under its wings when it flew--a northern flicker.

Soon the tanagers vanished. And the warblers. Other birds replaced them--western kingbirds and a variety of other flycatchers that seemed impossible to definitively categorize. Here in California, seasons are subtle, almost indistinguishable. But the birds’ arrivals and departures, I soon realized, are great seasonal markers.

This revelation gave me a purpose. I didn’t want to learn about all the birds in the world, just about those in my park--the ones that mark the passing of the seasons and remind me that nature exists even in cities that disdain it. I wanted to know the birds intimately, at a glance. I wanted to know when they came and went, which ones stayed all year. I wanted to know all this, and it would be reward enough for the 10 or more hours a week I was now peering through binoculars.

And it was enough--until the green-tailed towhee.

Now, in the park, I think about my next rare bird. I scan the trees hopefully each morning. Is that really just a common black-throated gray warbler? Or could it be a black-and-white warbler, a rarity in Southern California? I call the Audubon Society’s recorded rare bird alert line each Thursday, and then hope that the grasshopper sparrows reportedly seen a few miles away at a cemetery will move over the hill to my park.

I think about the casual vagrants I’d love to discover. Perhaps with my green-tailed towhee success I should specialize in birds with colors in their names. I might see a ruby-throated hummingbird or a yellow-bellied flycatcher. Or perhaps the ivory-billed woodpecker isn’t really extinct. Perhaps it’s hanging out in Elysian Park with the local woodpeckers.

If I see it, I just hope that the guy with the tattered Peterson’s is around.