The Delightful Horror of Family Birding. Eli J. Knapp

Like before, his face belied no emotion. Despite looking straight at the bird, he didn’t seem to notice it. We weren’t slowing down. What?! If anything we were speeding up. Still sore about the pigeon, I was not going to lose this peregrine. If we could halt our pleasure cruise for mangroves, alligators, and air plants, we had to stop for the fastest animal in the world, a bird that when clocked by Ken Franklin in 2005, hit 242 miles per hour.

      Two hundred forty-two miles per hour! When Usain Bolt hit his top speed of 27.8 miles per hour in Berlin, we gasped in awe and awarded an Olympic medal. The world reacted similarly to Secretariat’s 49 miles per hour at the Belmont Stakes. Yes, speed is relative. But peregrine speed is relative and superlative. Everything about them is modified for it. Small, bony tubercles line the nostrils like inlet cones on jet engines. As air rushes in the nostrils it is slowed by rods and fins. These reduce the dramatic changes in air pressure and prevent lung damage, allowing the bird to breathe. An additional secretory gland prevents the corneas from drying out while a third eyelid—a nictitating membrane—spreads its tears and clears debris without sacrificing keen vision. The menacing dark markings around the eyes reduce glare. Keen vision and glare reduction is essential. Because peregrines don’t just defy death, they inflict it during their miraculous stoops.

      While the peregrine is falling like a meteorite, it’s applying mathematical principles that would have impressed Pythagoras. Speed in a stoop is largely determined by drag coefficient. The lower the drag coefficient, the faster a falcon can free fall. Peregrines fold back their wings and tail, tuck in their feet, and drop. With a drag coefficient of 0.18, the crow-sized peregrine calculates exactly when to blast through the wing of an oblivious mallard, speeding along on its own trajectory at a cool sixty miles per hour. The peregrine slightly adjusts its tail and tucked-in primary feathers to alter its trajectory as it tracks its prey. The impact angle is critical; a direct hit can be suicidal. To live through an assault, a peregrine needs a glancing blow, which it makes with a clenched foot. A stunned, spiraling mallard is enough.

      But the physiological feat isn’t over yet. The falcon still has to slow its speed without ripping its wings off in the process. It accomplishes this with a U-shaped dive, gradually arcing upward, allowing gravity to slow it down. On the upswing, it uses its talons, now unclenched, to snatch the witless duck from the sky. If I were a mallard, I’d choose death by duck hawk. Alive one second, dead the next. Fast and furious.

      But no. The skipper didn’t see the falcon. My parents didn’t see it. Nobody saw it. We had to see this!

      I leapt up, gesticulated wildly, and shouted, “Peregrine falcon!” at the very top of my lungs. Weary heads snapped up all around me, obviously wondering why a binocular-toting lunatic had been allowed on board. No longer able to pretend he didn’t see me, the skipper cupped his ear, indicating he couldn’t hear me. I shouted again, stumbling into a railing as I did so. Ever so reluctantly, the skipper eased off the accelerator and grabbed the microphone.

      “Folks,” he said, somehow managing to sound both bored and annoyed, “we’ve got what our friend here calls an American falcon.”

      “A peregrine falcon!” I interrupted. “Peregrine!” I repeated more loudly. The captain ignored me.

      “Yes, yes,” he said again. “An American falcon. Oh look, there it goes,” he added without a hint of disappointment, replacing the microphone in its holster on the dash. With a few strong, regal wingbeats, the peregrine lifted off and was soon a speck on the horizon. I couldn’t blame it. I would leave, too, if I had been called an American falcon despite having a geographic range that spans the globe.

      The skipper pushed back the throttle and I lurched back to my seat. Too embarrassed to make eye contact with even my parents, I stared off into south Florida’s shimmering water that looked decidedly less tranquil than it had when the trip started. I was defeated. If I was the skipper of this boat, I concluded grumpily, I’d brake for birds and call them by their proper names. Whether in a car or on a boat, riding shotgun was painful indeed.

      In the midst of my self-righteous stupor, I noticed a line of beautiful white birds soaring some fifty yards off the bow. I lifted off my seat but hastily forced myself back down. No. Not this time.

      I wasn’t going to shout it out to my fellow passengers. I’d annoyed enough people for one day. Yes, I was always birding. That didn’t mean I had to force others to do so, too. After all, even I had been annoyed by my son’s interruptive and pedantic insistence on accurate avian nomenclature. If the other passengers saw the beautiful white birds and enjoyed them—great. If they didn’t, they didn’t. But I surely wished that everybody on this blasted boat knew one final thing. Something Ezra would have wished as well. Yes, these were white birds. But actually—and far more satisfyingly—they were white ibis.

      Surf scoter

      Melanitta perspicillata

      6 • CHOMPING AT NATURE’S BIT

      Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

      —Lao Tzu

      A surf scoter is a large, black, diving sea duck that I rarely get a chance to see as an inland-dwelling western New Yorker. So when I heard of one resting on a water body about an hour away in Batavia, New York, I brainstormed some errands I could accomplish after a nice quick look at my first scoter. What an easy bird to add to my life list, I thought as I pulled into Batavia’s water treatment facility. Especially compared to the nonbreeding shorebirds I often sought that all seemed to be ever so slight permutations of one another, distinguished literally by shades of gray. But the surf scoter would be a slam dunk. Its boldly patterned head had earned it a colloquial name, the “skunk-headed coot.” The bird should prove easy to find and even easier to ascertain. I’d be home in a jiffy.

      I was right on the first count. The bird proved remarkably easy to find. It bobbed like an ebony-colored buoy completely alone in one of the facility’s impoundments. Smiling widely, I lowered my truck window and raised my binoculars. This was fast and easy bird finding at its finest. I focused my binoculars. Magnified ten times, the scoter looked big and black and … headless. The bird, either cold or sleepy or both, had its head tucked so deeply into its coverts I could barely decipher its breast from its rump.

      Lots of birds are identifiable without a head. Blue jays, robins, goldfinches—all these birds have irrelevant heads to a busy birder. Not so with scoters. A headless scoter is as useful as a wheel-less wheelbarrow. Akin to trying to distinguish a fish crow from an American crow on a moonless night. My scoter, which my Internet listserv had claimed was a surf scoter, could be a black or a white-winged scoter. I needed to see the head.

      I lowered my binoculars and reclined my seat. This was no reason to panic. I’d wait. Sea ducks can’t sleep forever.

      But, it slowly dawned on me, they can. Especially headless ones. My alleged surf scoter had no respect for the endless items on my to-do list. It remained as inert as a noble gas. After ten minutes of staring and not getting any errands accomplished, I grew antsy. So antsy, in fact, that I broke a code of conduct I’ve long held. Simply put, I don’t interfere with nature unless absolutely necessary. Yes, I immerse myself in it. I enjoy it in many ways. But unless it’s for teaching purposes, I don’t disrupt it. I like to think of myself as respectfully seated in the balcony when witnessing wildlife dramas, not crinkling candy wrappers in the front row.

      But this statuesque scoter had me beaten. I was exasperated. I opened my door and slammed it. Certainly no sleepy scoter could ignore such a gunshot-like sound.

      This scoter, however, was an exception to the norm. Its head remained as buried as a Devonian fossil. I opened and slammed the door again. Again. And again. Now I was sounding like a semi-automatic. Still nothing. Either this scoter was stone deaf, had earplugs jammed in its auriculars, or it hailed from downtown Los Angeles.

      I looked at my watch. I had to get a vacuum cleaner fixed. If I didn’t buy a garden fence today, our marauding groundhogs might call all their friends