Bobbling birds

Grasshopper Sparrow

One of my bird books insists that the distinctive call of the bobolink can be transcribed as “bobolink,” which is ridiculous. You can perch on a treetop calling out “bobolink” from now until next Tuesday and no one will ever accuse you of sounding bobolinkish. (Bobolinkesque?)

My other bird book takes a more descriptive turn: “Song a bubbling, jangling, rising warble with short notes on wide pitch range.” This sounds accurate now that I’ve actually heard the bobolink’s song, but it wouldn’t help me identify the bird in the wild.

For that I need my birding-and-botanizing buddy, whose new hybrid car proves a real boon for birding in the hinterlands. We crept along a country road on the edge of The Wilds, her silent car allowing us to sneak up without startling shy birds. In addition to seeing my first bobolink (and then my second, third, and fourth), we stalked grasshopper sparrows, Henslow’s sparrows, and a solitary Savannah sparrow plus meadowlarks, horned larks, common yellowthroats, kingbirds, killdeer, and whatever kind of flycatcher says something like “leap year!” I spotted an orchard oriole and a pair of ospreys, and later at a rest stop we saw an owl.

Orchard Oriole

What kind of owl, you ask? A chintzy plastic owl of the type you might hang in a picnic shelter to discourage birds from nesting in in the eaves, such as the pair of barn swallows we saw nesting just inches above the plastic owl.

Barn swallows know when an owl is not an owl, but now that I look at my photos, I can't always distinguish between the grasshopper sparrows and Henslow's sparrows, and the bobolinks look like mud spots on the lens. You'd know them if you heard them. They sound like nothing so much as bobolinks, and once you've heard them, they can't possibly be anything else.