“The crow is still there,” Peter reports.
The crow is a Hooded Crow, a bird that belongs in Eastern and Northern Europe but has, by some chance, ended up in Staten Island.
I feel a bit of relief, and pleasure in knowing it was still alive. Last weekend, Peter and I drove down to see the crow. I had not gone with enthusiasm.
We had spent Saturday morning at the Basha Kill, paddling the marsh and seeing beautiful sights. This paddle is why I took to birding: to venture out in the natural world and know what I am seeing is a joy to me. But what I’ve also learned is that to see birds, you have to go look for them. You don’t just bump into interesting birds (or, you do, but once every five years). So we looked for least bittern and found them. We saw those moorhen that should be in the Bash.
And once we were done with our paddle, we ate breakfast, drove to the Black Dirt region on the New York/New Jersey border and took a walk where we admired the black black dirt, found Savannah sparrows, green heron, but not much else in the mid-day sun. Exhausted, we loitered by the Wallkill River for a while, figuring out what next.
“I’d like to see the crow,” Peter said.
“I thought you were done chasing rarities,” I said.
“I know. But I want to see this bird.”
For some reason—and there will never be an explanation for this—he was taken with the idea of this crow. Crows are appealing birds: big, bold, aggressive in their feeding (and so sometimes called “opportunistic,” which seems oddly judgmental). They are smart, too. This past fall I had attended a John Burroughs Society lecture by Doug Robinson on crow life, learning that they form family groups and raise their young collectively. I found the social workings of crows fascinating. The Hooded Crow is also a social crow—often described as gregarious—and usually found in groups of three or four. This one, though, was alone on Staten Island. Except for a few other Hooded Crows found over the years on the continent—most of which were probably escaped domestics—this bird was now going to live a solitary Hooded Crow life.
For all the appeal of a crow, I still couldn’t see driving to Staten Island to see one. The traffic. The crowds. What bird would be worth it?
“OK,” I said.
This landed us in a hotel in New Jersey for the night. A hotel in New Jersey. The lobby swarmed with teenage girls in super high heels and super tight dresses, dancing their way to two graduation parties and one sweet sixteen party. I flip flopped my way to the room in my elegant birding pants.
In the evening we took a walk, which seemed an absurd thing to do with the roar of route 23 nearby. Yet this rush of humanity didn’t deter the wildlife: on our walk we saw several deer, and a fox flash across an abandoned road.
The next morning we were up at 5:30 and on the road toward Great Kills Park, specifically Crooke’s Point where the crow had been seen for several days. In fact, it had been seen longer than several days but only recently had a birder come along to identify it as a rare bird for the shores of North America.
We parked in a near empty lot, the ocean in front of us, and walked out a dirt road toward a gravel parking lot. The smell of the ocean floated in and the feel of sand ground beneath my feet. Dune grasses swished in the faint breeze. The sky spread wide and blue. Around us were 580 acres that make up the Great Kills Park. John Crooke, a sign told us, was a businessman, naturalist and photographer who had lived on and loved this land from his log cabin. Glossy ibis flew overhead (see photo above). A Yellow warbler sang for us.
“This is beautiful,” I said, laughing at the image I had formed of where we would be.
Peter took my hand. “This is the thing about birding. It takes you places you never thought you would go. And usually it is beautiful.”
A group of birders stood in the parking lot, binoculars and cameras at the ready. The bird had just been seen in the woods, and seemed to circle back every twenty minutes or so. We joined the crowd, making small talk. “Where are you from?” was the first question. And we learned that a group of young birders had driven ten hours to lay their eyes on this crow. The other subject was how did this bird land here? Did it hitch a ride in a container ship as a stowaway? Did it fly from Northern Ireland, where it is referred to as a “Hoodie”? Everyone seemed happy to endlessly speculate, but truth is, we would never know.
And then, suddenly, there was the bird, with is ashy grey body, with a wonderful black bib. It had the solid black bill of a crow, and a crow’s insouciance as it perched in the tree, while the group surged in to get a look.
And then, soon enough, it flew off again, escorted by some mockingbirds. Throughout the morning other birds, including an orchard oriole and a cedar waxwing, mobbed the crow, clearly sensing it did not belong there.
And the group meandered or sat in the sun, made jokes, made conversation. “Is it legit?” lurked. Legit as in, was it a bird that could be counted on an ABA life list. Now this is the sort of conversation that makes my eyes cross so I wandered off, to the beach. Peter did the same. He was a hundred paces in front of me, when I saw the bird soar overhead. “Peter!” I called. And he turned to photograph the bird in flight.
We returned to the parking lot to join the group of birders that swelled and shrunk as people came, looked, left.
“What’s everyone doing here?” a jogger asked on her daily run.
“There’s a special bird,” I said. “It belongs in Eastern Europe.”
The jogger nodded and kept going. What did she make of this, a group of people congregated to see a bird? What did I make of it? What did the bird make of it? I can not answer one of these questions.
The report is that the bird is still there. Soon, though, a report will post letting us know the bird has vanished. And I can add, Where did the bird go?” to the long list of things that I will never know.
All photos taken by Peter Schoenberger