###Toast Master Speech #3
Props: Binoculars, The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America, Hedwig mug
Last week, I found myself walking on campus with huge smiles on my face, for no reason. The weird things is, everybody else also looked pretty happy! Then I realize, of course everybody is happy; it’s spring!
I’ve been here fives year now and I’m getting used to the winter. What I’m still struggling about winter is the amount of time you spent inside. I’ve got this book, 60 hikes within 60miles of Madison, so I went on my first hike this year last weekend in Governor Nelson’s State Park on the other side of the lake.
It was a good hike. Still pretty muddy, nothing flowering except pussy willows, then I saw my old friend, red-winged blackbirds.
I’m sure you’ve seen red-winged black bird. It’s this black bird, with distinctive red and yellow marks on their wings. They like wet marshy area like the lakeshore path near campus. They usually perch on top of trees and claim their territory by arching their wings and making this sound [me mimicking the red-winged black bird]. They’re very loud. They try their best to attract your attentions.
I went with my friend Terry and we saw lot of red-winged blackbird. Then we see this one perched on the tree in front of us. Instead of having red and yellow marks on its wings, this one only had yellow marks. Terry said, “Look, there is a female one.”
A lot of you might have known birds are usually dimorphic, meaning, the males and females look pretty different. Terry is pretty outdoor-sy. He was in Boy Scout, he likes camping and he knows lots of plants and birds. Actually, it was him who told me the name of pussy-willows (银柳). However this time, he’s wrong. That’s definitely not a female red-winged blackbird, because I know exactly how a female red-winged blackbird looks like.
I started birding when I was working in a tropical botanical garden on the Chinese boarder of Myanmar and Laos, southwest part of China. Tropical birds, they are amazing. They are big and colorful. It is mind-blowing to see them through binoculars, with all the details of their coloration and behavior. When I just came to Madison, I was pretty excited. New world birds! New species to add to my list! But my enthusiasm died down pretty quickly after seeing the same cohort of birds in every birding trip: chickadees, northern cardinals (they are the first birds I saw and they are actually very beautiful), house sparrows, ring-billed gulls, and mallards. Meanwhile, I don’t mean to be rude, but most of the birds look pretty dull comparing to tropical ones. So my birding activity died down pretty quickly.
I didn’t realize what I was missing until I took this birding class. It was the spring of 2013. I don’t know whether you remember that spring, but it was after one the worst winters. I remember, for the first two months, we will meet on campus 6am in the morning, and go to one of the good birding spots like nine springs or Cherokee marsh, but we would keep meeting the same winter birds as I was seeing during my first fall. My patience started to run out, until we began to go on some longer weekend trips.
My first longer weekend trip outside Madison was in Milwaukee around lake Michigan. The goal was very explicit: snowy owls, Harry Potter’s messenger. In the movie big year, where three serious birders competed to see as many species as possible in the US (excluding Hawaii) within a year, the last one the winner saw, was a snowy owl, for which he gave up his Christmas time with his family. But it did not take much for us to see it. We did not get too close but we took a good look of it through a monocular when it perched. It looked exactly like Hedwig [showing my Hedwig mug bought in universal studio]. I was getting excited to see such a rare bird like that.
Then we went to Sauk City to see the national bird, bald eagles! They are very well protected so we managed to see all kinds, males, females, juveniles etc., and learnt how to distinguish them, not easy. But there was one more thing we would like to see: the juveniles practicing their mating ritual. Bald eagles mate for life. Before they mate, they have this courtship behavior where they approach each other by their talons in the air, and cartwheel while falling down. They won’t unclench until they are very close to the ground and you almost think they are going to crash. It’s a marvelous thing to see. Check out the Youtube video “Bald Eagle Mating Ritual” with Adele’s Skyfall as background music. This is no easy task so the juveniles practice on that. We’ve been watching out for that the whole day but there was no luck. It was 5pm in the afternoon and getting pretty dark. We were freezing after being outside for more than 4 hours and it seemed like it was not going to happen. Finally the teacher gave up and herded us back to the van. While half of us already got into the van, it happened! Two juveniles were practicing! They were a bit clumsy but they managed to do a couple of cartwheeling. It was breath taking.
Then I realize, to see the unseen, you need nice tools [showing again my binoculars], some expert opinions [showing the field guide], and most importantly, a little patience for it to happen.
As for female red-winged blackbird, they look like bigger size house sparrows. They are not black, and they don’t have anything red either on their wings or anywhere else on their bodies. The “yellow-winged black bird” Terry and I saw, might have been a juvenile male.
Thank you.