Sometimes the birds come to watch the birdwatchers

A sparkling creek led the way under huge cottonwoods, then under sheer cliffs.  The way became difficult.  A boulder field dammed the narrows where another canyon joined.    For a number of years the compilers of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count assigned me to walk this wild stretch of canyon on a private ranch.  I walked the canyon with my mother, alone, with friends and with strangers.  Varying conditions of snow, strong winds or beautiful and perfect 70^o days have enlivened the hikes.

           One year my companions were a recently retired New York couple, just transplanted to Alpine.  The man dominated the first thirty minutes of the walk with interminable bragging about the many exotic places where the couple had birded.  His storytelling was trumped by a covey of Fools Quail and the encounter was the first true birding we experienced of the morning.

           The clown kachina mask of the quail gave the species another oft-used name, Harlequin. Their erratic behavior led to their colloquial name. Our group of three had reached the rock clamber of the boulder field, which lay in a cold shadowy narrows. My companions (in their 60’s, and I in my early 30’s) voted to rest before tackling the strenuous path ahead. Sun hit a grouping of boulders nearby suitable for seating. Warmed by the morning sun, we drank water and nibbled snacks from our small packs.

           We had seen few birds – mostly because the chill of the morning still penetrated the landscape. On a cold morning birds take their time before moving to feed, remaining warmly ensconced in brushpiles and dense thickets. We had also not become “attuned” to the landscape. The ecology of a landscape is “revealed” to “naturalists.” Our perceptions were still dominated by our attention to the rugged beauty and the cold. We had not begun to pay attention to detail.

           Our rest was interrupted by whistles that none of us could identify. The hollow whistles whispery notes came from several directions, or so it seemed. We fingered our binoculars, peering this way and that. “Whatever they are, they are coming to the sun, and maybe the water.” My companions shushed me with a finger wagging before their lips.

           A lone Fool Quail stepped into the sunlight from behind a boulder at the edge of the cold shadows. We admired his goofy mask through our binoculars. With voiceless consensus, we remained motionless. The quail whistled in quick succession, and was answered by an excited chattering of sibilant notes. Ten more quail filed into a patch of bermuda grass. Bermuda grass can be found even in a wild canyon brought by wind, a hiker’s cuff, or washed from an upstream cattle-feeding location.    

           For three or four minutes, the quail fluffed their feathers, grooming and preening, blinking against the light. One quail nuzzled another in affection. Their black and white faces bobbed back and forth, then up and down. Harlequin quail are meek creatures in the wild.

           Nowadays a birder seeking to add the species to his or her lifelist knows to visit a feeding station for them in the Davis Mountains State Park, but 25 years ago the sighting of the species was strictly serendipitous for visiting birders. The family of Pansy Espy, the compiler of the count, owned a ranch in the mountains, but did not have a “home covey” of the Fool Quail as did her co-compiler and fellow rancher Jody Miller from the Sierra Vieja. Pansy’s home, on a grassy hilltop, is in the wrong habitat.

           Early scientists gave the species other names; Montezuma Quail, and Mearn’s Quail. In the United States it is only found in Trans-Pecos Texas and the corners of southeast Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.  Mearn’s Quail need oak trees and tall grass and have special dietary needs. Unlike other quail they do not feed on forb and grass seeds. Instead, they scratch at the ground, digging up bulbs, corms, and fleshy rots of plants such as nutgrass, onion, and oxalis. These plants usually need clay soils that retain moisture, or shady humus in oak and hackberry groves, or in wet soil. Until the 1890’s Harlequin Quail were found in isolated regions of the western Texas Hill Country.

           The covey crossed the bermuda grass patch, walking directly at us. We remained motionless. The birds stopped ten feet from us and began scratching along a bare cattle trail, still whispering a cheerful conversation.  One entered my shadow. It stared up at me. It seemed to realize my shadow was something new intruding into its morning landscape. Still puzzled, it walked closer, peering up in each direction so each eye could examine me. The bird whistled – a longer tone of a different pitch. The other birds froze. The bird at my feet seemed to stretch his neck abnormally far, myopically inspecting me. In unison all eleven birds exploded into the air, scattering in every direction.

           Their departure disturbed other birds. A spotted towhee fussed from the litter under a grove of gnarled hackberries. A flock of bushtits ascended the hackberries to look for the source of the disturbance. A rock wren bounced up on a rock still in shadow, fussing as it twitched. More and more birds revealed themselves. A pair of robins burbled and chuckled from their roosting site in the middle of the hackberries. A flock of white-crowned sparrows popped up from the ground to perch at the top of a small thicket of wispy beebrush.

           The combined chatter of all the species brought a scrub jay. Jays are sentinel birds. Several jay species come to disturbances in different southwestern montane forests. If the disturbance is a predator, a jay will announce the predator’s presence. If the predator is an owl or hawk other birds will come to mob it (fussing until it leaves in discomfort.) If the predator is a mammal, the jay will follow it, giving traffic reports until it leaves the communal territory of the winter resident birds’ multi-species flocks.

           For five minutes more, dozens of birds appeared. The towhee ended it, when it attempted to land on the rock I was on and panicked when it decided I was a threat.

           “The birds came to us – so many species, so many individuals. They presented themselves to us. Totally amazing.” The man shook himself, as if waking up. His wife spread her arms wide, palms upward. “This is incredible -- it is magical!”