Blue Mountain Audubon - Memories - Mike Denny
I, Tom Scribner, am a member of our local bird club. We are heavy on older women, most of whom are small in stature. Many of whom do in fact wear tennis shoes (which is why, I guess, the quaint stereotype about little old ladies in ... has such purchase in our collective mind).
But there are still a fair number of guys who are not too embarrassed to be seen in public with a pair of binoculars saying things like, “Is that a yellow-bellied sapsucker?” In fact, our best birder (which is what we call ourselves-- “birders”-- not bird watchers) is a man. For the purpose of this story we will call him Mike.
Mike is to bird identification what Barry Bonds is to hitting home runs. The undisputed king. And the parallel is apt because while Mr. Bonds is currently the subject of intense scrutiny and debate concerning his use or non-use of performance enhancing steroids, Mike is also not without controversy. I know, because I was there when the whole Mike - is - king thing started to unravel.
But first a little background. Our club has periodic field trips to look for birds. A bunch of us birders meet at a pre-determined location, jump in our cars, turn on our walkie-talkies (the better to communicate about who is seeing what) and head off to find, well, birds. And nobody, as in absolutely nobody, can find and identify birds like Mike. He doesn’t even have to see them. A call, a single warbled note, a faint twitter is all he needs. By sight or sound, Mike can identify anything that flies and has feathers.
There are stories told about Mike’s preternatural ability to locate and identify birds. Probably the best known and most frequently told involved a sage sparrow. I, in fact, was there and saw it myself or I would probably not believe it.
We were in a van, heading south toward a wildlife refuge. It was spring and this was a bird-a-thon. Twenty four non-stop hours of birding to raise money, pledges of so much per species, for our club. There were four of us in the van. Mike was riding shotgun. We were speeding along at about 60 mph through open shrub-dotted cattle country when Mike yelled, “There’s a sage sparrow!”
Since we didn’t have a sage sparrow on our list, and since they are not all that common, and since the rest of us had seen nothing but blurred clumps of brush, and since she was half-asleep and Mike’s loud alarm suddenly moved her to action, the driver hit the brakes hard and we slalomed to a stop.
After everything from the back of the van that wasn’t tied down and had gone rocketing to the front of the van had found a new place to rest, I remember my back seat mate saying something like, “ Yeah, right, you saw a sage sparrow. Where?” At this point, Mike was his usual excited self over another interesting find. “I did,” he said. “Back up, I’ll show you. It’s out to the right about 50 yards.”
So we backed up, all the while giving Mike grief about spotting a non-descript brown bird in a huge field of shrubs while going past at a mile per minute speed. “No, really,” he said, sounding somewhat hurt that we didn’t believe him. “It’s on a branch about three feet off the ground near a small clearing. There!,” he said, pointing excitedly. “See?” And we did.
After we got our binoculars off of the floor where they had landed and, with Mike’s help, pointed them in the right direction. One male sage sparrow, perched on a bush about 150 feet from where we sat. A small confession here. I saw the damn thing but I couldn’t tell a sage sparrow from lots of other similar looking sparrows. Still can’t. So, I snuck a peek in my bird book and, sure enough, Mike had spotted a sage sparrow, on a bush, about 150 feet from the road, while shooting past at 60 mph.
Like I said, this guy is the undisputed king. And this little caper was all it took to cement his reputation. Until, that is, the screech owl. It was mid-November and, appropriate to the season, we were looking for wild turkeys. They are not indigenous to our area but the Fish & Wildlife folks have successfully introduced them here. More fodder for the hook and bullet crowd.
There were 13 of us strung out in five vehicles, each rig equipped with a walkie-talkie. I was driving the lead car. Mike was again riding shot-gun. We were inching along near a small stream with lots of riparian habitat, including some large cottonwoods. I was going maybe 20 mph when Mike called out, “Stop!” So I did, with the other four cars piling up behind me.
Fortunately, we were not doing 60 mph or we would all have ended wearing cervical collars and sitting in the office of some ambulance chasing lawyer. Mike immediately got on the radio. “There’s a screech owl,” he said, “in the cottonwood right beside the road. He’s up about 15 feet.”
Now screech owls are larger than sage sparrows, and this guy was right beside the road, not out 150 feet, but still, you gotta admit this was pretty good spotting. And it gets better. After we all got out of our vehicles and had gathered on the side of the road, within spitting distance of the tree in question, we started looking for the owl.
Nobody could find it. “Where is it?,” about half a dozen folks asked. “I don’t see it. Do you see it?” “Are you sure you saw an owl?” “Maybe it flew off. Do you think it flew off?”
For those of you who are not familiar with cottonwood trees, or screech owls for that matter, the former has bark which is light gray in color, with darker almost black veins. Screech owls come in various color phases, but here in the west we get more grays with dark breast markings. And this particular owl, when I finally located him with my binoculars, was tucked up real tight to the main trunk of the tree, sporting identical coloration. As in, one well camouflaged owl.
In fact, I am not convinced, even with Mike pointing and telling us where to look, that some of our group ever really saw the bugger. Oh sure, they said they did, after all, who wants to admit that he or she, standing no more than 20 feet or more from a stationary bird, can’t spot the damn thing? That is how difficult it was to see the owl. Yet Mike saw it while driving by at 20 mph.
We were all very impressed. “How in the world did you see that thing?” one guy asked, echoing what all of us were thinking. Which, of course, led to one of our group telling the story of Mike and the sage sparrow. Except this time it was night, and it was raining, and Mike was going 80 mph and the bird was half of a mile from the road - - and it was flying.
Still, amid the laughter, we all had to admit that when it comes to spotting birds, Mike is the man. Which made the events of the next day that much more disappointing. When I got home I told my wife about our field trip, finishing with the story of Mike’s uncanny talent for finding birds. “I’d like to see it,” she said. “Well, I don’t know how long it will hang around, but we can drive up there tomorrow and take a look, “ I told her.
Next morning we motored out on our own private owl prowl. When I got to the tree I drove past and pulled into the first available side road. We then walked back to find Mike’s owl. Which I did - - in the exact same location! My wife, not the skilled birder that I am (ha!), couldn’t find it. Across the road from the tree there was a bank that rose rather steeply. It had some large pine trees on it. I suggested that we climb up the bank, find a comfortable perch and look at eye level across the road at the owl. Which we did.
Sitting on the pine needles and grass, with our backs against a big Ponderosa, my wife, with my skillful help, eventually located the owl. Eyes closed, tight against the trunk of the cottonwood, unmoving in the morning sun. “It sure is stationary,” my wife said. “Does it ever open its eyes or turn its head?”
Just as I was getting ready to respond to her questions and show her how much I knew about owls, a small blue car drove up. It had a rack on the roof and on the rack was an aluminum ladder. (You were beginning to wonder when I was going to get to the ladder, weren’t you?)
Mike drives a small blue car. I was getting curious. I told my wife to be quiet and we hunkered down as tight to our pine tree as possible. The car stopped near the cottonwood and, sure enough, Mike climbed out. He looked up and down the road to see if anything was coming. Nothing was, so he untied the ladder, carried it around his car and leaned it against the tree.
Checking again to see if the coast was clear, he climbed up toward the owl. Which owl, let me state, still sat with its left side tight against the tree and its eye shut. This was really getting interesting.
When he got up to the owl Mike reached out with his right hand and, this is true, I was there and I saw it, picked the bird off the branch. The owl never moved. It was stuffed! I know this because I watched Mike climb back down the ladder with the never moving bird in his hand and toss it on the back seat of his car.
He then took down the ladder, put it back on the rack on his car, tied it in place, got back in his car, and drove off. He never saw me or my wife. Prior to today I’ve never told anyone what we saw. What would be the point?
Mike is still the undisputed champ of our little birding community. He has been the first to spot and identify lots of birds that other folks eventually saw and were able to identify. Birds that were alive and moving. So I know he can do it.
It’s just that from now on, when he pulls off one of his you-ain’t-gonna-believe-this stunts, I am not going to believe it. Well, maybe that’s not true. Let’s just say I will be suspicious. And one other thing. I wonder, I really wonder, if he’s got a stuffed sage sparrow tucked away with his stuffed screech owl.
Tom Scribner April 8, 2005