The gulls gull us and a duck ducks us

Of course, no more than three days after I published my post about the disappearing American goldfinches and how old niger/nyger/thistle seed might be the deterrent, a flock of around five showed up and feasted on that outdated seed for a couple of days. Maybe they were just too hungry to care in the middle of winter.

This Carolina Wren isn’t as irrelevant to the current post as an earlier photo showing my dog, but it’s still a bit out there. My brother was trying his new camera when he snapped this picture. Nobody’s sure what the wren was so mad about. Photo by Phil Ryan.

The incident reminded me of a story my mother used to tell about David Parmelee, the renowned ornithologist who taught for a time at the college in my hometown. I don’t remember which species he was talking about, but he told his students, one of whom was my mother, that they would never see a particular kind of bird perched on a fence wire.

You know the rest. The next time he took those students on a field trip, there was that bird, sitting happily on a fence wire. The lesson: Never make categorical statements predicting the behavior of birds (or anything else, except maybe gravity). They can hear you.

But on to the Big Year. My wife Fran and I took a drive to Smithville Lake north of Kansas City because there were unconfirmed sightings of Glaucous and California gulls as well as a female Long-tailed Duck. We didn’t see any of them, but we did pick up a Common Goldeneye, Common Merganser and Chipping Sparrow.

It was a rainy, cold and miserable day, although not as bone-chilling as it has been. The weather around here can change faster than Katy Perry can switch ridiculous-looking costumes during the Superbowl halftime show. (Yes, we watched most of that debacle. What was the Seattle offensive coordinator thinking? A one-yard pass? At the goal line? With downs left over? Good grief.)

Anyway, one day it’s zero here in western Missouri and eastern Kansas and the next it’s in the 50s. Makes the relative stability of southern Florida weather pretty attractive, even if it weren’t for the great birding down there.

I bring up Florida because after our trip to that state in early January, Fran has been thinking how nice it would be to live there. I’m not so sure. But that’s okay. We have a few years to mull it over. In the meantime, we’ll ride the midwest weather roller coaster and keep doing our version of the Big Year until we get one right.

Official Big Year species count as of February 6: 75.