April 20, 2006
Bird Power
The last installment--part four--of David Attenborough's The Living Earth showed up in my mailbox on Saturday. BBC-style Moog soundtrack aside, it was nice to see one of those unabashedly brainy nature shows, with long edits so you can get a good look at the creature Attenborough is describing (the camera doesn't even turn away from close-ups of kimoto dragon jaws chewing up chunks of dead goat, etc.) Part Four's first episode examined island ecosystems, which tend to be very specialized because the plants and animals floating on them can't escape, so they evolve in a vacuum as it were. There was a parrot who lived like a rabbit, eating grass and hiding out in a hole during the day, and in the deep valleys in Hawaii, hundreds of what used to be finches, which now have beaks that've evolved to crack one specific type of nut or dip into a certain type of flower or burrow under a special kind of tree bark for a beetle that lives only in that part of the world.
My powers of observation are not as powerful as Attenborough's but I do try to do some lazy bird and animal watching in my backyard. We get bags of something called "Critter Crunch" from Schnuck's (once, when we were checking ourselves out, the guy lording over the auto-checkout stations saw that name pop up on his monitor. "Critter Crunch?" he said with some consternation, and ran over to see what exactly we had in the bag). We have a mockingbird who's learned to imitate car alarms and the crow population seems to be slowly recovering from that last bout of West Nile; if I were Jean Keene, maybe I'd have something more earth-shaking to report (Oh well. I can't boast of a career as a rodeo trick-pony rider, either).
But I'm still a bit amazed at the ecosystem here (I grew up with magpies and tiny scorpions, but no possums, and no crows) and am trying to learn more about the Mississippi River Valley. So a week from Saturday I'm going to try to get myself to the Migratory Bird Sanctuary, where they are having the Confluence Birding Festival. I don't really know where to look for birds, or how to interpret their behavior once I do see them, so this is perfect for me, because they drive your ass up to the good birding spots in a shuttle bus and then tell you where to to point your binoculars. I, too, am a bit of urban wildlife, just like the car-alarm mockingbird, so I am as excited about the kettle corn booth and the fact that free screenings of March of the Penguins and Fly Away Home are part of the weekend's attractions.