{"id":241,"date":"2007-06-10T10:07:35","date_gmt":"2007-06-10T17:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=241"},"modified":"2008-11-27T20:25:51","modified_gmt":"2008-11-28T03:25:51","slug":"birding-in-the-desert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=241","title":{"rendered":"Birding in the Desert (Part I)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw a bird that shouldn’t be here. \u00a0This was\u00a0about a month ago, while Donna and I were hiking in a Tucson park.\u00a0 Back behind the soccer fields, where it was\u00a0mostly dirt and cactus, there was this beach bird, something like a plover.\u00a0 “That bird is sure lost,” I thought.<\/p>\n

\"Killdeer\"
Killdeer<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As Donna and I got closer to the bird, it started flopping around in the dust.\u00a0 “Wounded bird!” I said, “It’s an act!”\u00a0 Looking around, I saw its mate\u00a0sitting in the dirt about 20 yards away.\u00a0 I’d heard of such things, and probably even seen it on educational TV, but it was really cool to see it happening right in front of us.\u00a0 Our wounded bird flopped around, but as we got closer to it miraculously recovered, ran another few yards farther away from its mate, then started flopping around again.\u00a0 It was trying to draw us away from the nest and its mate.<\/p>\n

\"Broken
Broken wing act<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We broke off the pursuit and left the birds in peace, hoping\u00a0coyotes or kids from the park wouldn’t get them.\u00a0 In the weeks that followed, I tried to find our Southern Arizona bird-spotters guide, but couldn’t.\u00a0 I asked my friends if they knew about these birds, but no one had ever seen one.\u00a0 Finally I broke down and bought a new bird book.<\/p>\n

Turns out our bird is\u00a0a Killdeer.\u00a0 It’s a type of plover, all right, and although they’re shorebirds they also live in the desert, making their nests in dirt or gravel.\u00a0 I felt fulfilled – no, triumphant – when I read that the Killdeer is famous for pretending it has a broken wing, a defensive ruse it uses to lure predators away from its nest.<\/p>\n

In Nabokov’s Pale Fire<\/a> (I’m probably getting this wrong, but I know I’m close)\u00a0the narrator sees a bird he hasn’t seen before, then runs upstairs in “nomenclatorial agitation” to find his field guide.<\/p>\n

Nomenclatorial agitation, indeed.\u00a0 I think I understand.\u00a0 I think I could become a birder!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw a bird that shouldn’t be here. \u00a0This was\u00a0about a month ago, while Donna and I were hiking in a Tucson park.\u00a0 Back behind the soccer fields, where it was\u00a0mostly dirt and cactus, there was this beach bird, something like a plover.\u00a0 “That bird is sure lost,” I thought. As Donna and I got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":984,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}