“Folks,” he said, somehow managing to sound both bored and annoyed, “we’ve got what our friend here calls an American falcon.”
“A peregrine falcon!” I interrupted. “Peregrine!” I repeated more loudly. The captain ignored me.
“Yes, yes,” he said again. “An American falcon. Oh look, there it goes,” he added without a hint of disappointment, replacing the microphone in its holster on the dash. With a few strong, regal wingbeats, the peregrine lifted off and was soon a speck on the horizon. I couldn’t blame it. I would leave, too, if I had been called an American falcon despite having a geographic range that spans the globe.
The skipper pushed back the throttle and I lurched back to my seat. Too embarrassed to make eye contact with even my parents, I stared off into south Florida’s shimmering water that looked decidedly less tranquil than it had when the trip started. I was defeated. If I was the skipper of this boat, I concluded grumpily, I’d brake for birds and call them by their proper names. Whether in a car or on a boat, riding shotgun was painful indeed.
In the midst of my self-righteous stupor, I noticed a line of beautiful white birds soaring some fifty yards off the bow. I lifted off my seat but hastily forced myself back down. No. Not this time.
I wasn’t going to shout it out to my fellow passengers. I’d annoyed enough people for one day. Yes, I was always birding. That didn’t mean I had to force others to do so, too. After all, even I had been annoyed by my son’s interruptive and pedantic insistence on accurate avian nomenclature. If the other passengers saw the beautiful white birds and enjoyed them—great. If they didn’t, they didn’t. But I surely wished that everybody on this blasted boat knew one final thing. Something Ezra would have wished as well. Yes, these were white birds. But actually—and far more satisfyingly—they were white ibis.
Surf scoter
Melanitta perspicillata
6 • CHOMPING AT NATURE’S BIT
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
—Lao Tzu
A surf scoter is a large, black, diving sea duck that I rarely get a chance to see as an inland-dwelling western New Yorker. So when I heard of one resting on a water body about an hour away in Batavia, New York, I brainstormed some errands I could accomplish after a nice quick look at my first scoter. What an easy bird to add to my life list, I thought as I pulled into Batavia’s water treatment facility. Especially compared to the nonbreeding shorebirds I often sought that all seemed to be ever so slight permutations of one another, distinguished literally by shades of gray. But the surf scoter would be a slam dunk. Its boldly patterned head had earned it a colloquial name, the “skunk-headed coot.” The bird should prove easy to find and even easier to ascertain. I’d be home in a jiffy.
I was right on the first count. The bird proved remarkably easy to find. It bobbed like an ebony-colored buoy completely alone in one of the facility’s impoundments. Smiling widely, I lowered my truck window and raised my binoculars. This was fast and easy bird finding at its finest. I focused my binoculars. Magnified ten times, the scoter looked big and black and … headless. The bird, either cold or sleepy or both, had its head tucked so deeply into its coverts I could barely decipher its breast from its rump.
Lots of birds are identifiable without a head. Blue jays, robins, goldfinches—all these birds have irrelevant heads to a busy birder. Not so with scoters. A headless scoter is as useful as a wheel-less wheelbarrow. Akin to trying to distinguish a fish crow from an American crow on a moonless night. My scoter, which my Internet listserv had claimed was a surf scoter, could be a black or a white-winged scoter. I needed to see the head.
I lowered my binoculars and reclined my seat. This was no reason to panic. I’d wait. Sea ducks can’t sleep forever.
But, it slowly dawned on me, they can. Especially headless ones. My alleged surf scoter had no respect for the endless items on my to-do list. It remained as inert as a noble gas. After ten minutes of staring and not getting any errands accomplished, I grew antsy. So antsy, in fact, that I broke a code of conduct I’ve long held. Simply put, I don’t interfere with nature unless absolutely necessary. Yes, I immerse myself in it. I enjoy it in many ways. But unless it’s for teaching purposes, I don’t disrupt it. I like to think of myself as respectfully seated in the balcony when witnessing wildlife dramas, not crinkling candy wrappers in the front row.
But this statuesque scoter had me beaten. I was exasperated. I opened my door and slammed it. Certainly no sleepy scoter could ignore such a gunshot-like sound.
This scoter, however, was an exception to the norm. Its head remained as buried as a Devonian fossil. I opened and slammed the door again. Again. And again. Now I was sounding like a semi-automatic. Still nothing. Either this scoter was stone deaf, had earplugs jammed in its auriculars, or it hailed from downtown Los Angeles.
I looked at my watch. I had to get a vacuum cleaner fixed. If I didn’t buy a garden fence today, our marauding groundhogs might call all their friends for the free buffet. Moreover, I had kids. I was always needed at home. The sand in the hourglass was falling swiftly. For all I knew, this scoter could sleep like this until nightfall. I couldn’t take it anymore. My code of conduct now in shreds, I climbed out of my truck. I slammed my hands on the roof and then, like the scoter, lost my own head. With primeval, hairsplitting yells, I shouted at the scoter and began a series of angry, wild-eyed jumping jacks.
In the midst of my Neanderthal-like madness, I didn’t see the blue sedan until it pulled right up behind me.
Mortified, I tried to transform my witless histrionics into a well-calculated yoga stretch. But nobody in his right mind shouts while doing meditative yoga in a wastewater treatment plant. I had to patch out. I dove into my truck, slammed the door one final time out of spite, and sped away, too embarrassed to glance in my rearview mirror. I drove home skunked by the skunk-headed coot. And try as I have to forget it, my scoter humiliation has resurfaced time and again whenever I’ve found myself chomping at nature’s bit.
I downright drowned in this memory, for example, when I recently uncovered a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Adopt the pace of nature,” Emerson penned nearly two centuries ago. “Her secret is patience.” It’s a palpable irony that makes me grimace. Why? Because patience, I’ve found in my hectic life as a perpetually behind college professor, routinely proves the most elusive of virtues. But I know Emerson had the magic word. Whenever and wherever I’ve been truly patient in nature, I’ve been rewarded.
Of all the nature partakers out there, perhaps hunters understand it best. Especially the ones who sit out in a blind each autumn. If you ever take the time to ask a hunter what they saw during their dawn-to-dusk vigils they often spend in the woods, you’ll recognize a recurrent theme. Long bouts of stillness interrupted with wondrous spectacles. Chickadees that land on gun barrels. Cooper’s hawks that capture flickers in split-second flights. Porcupines that nibble shoelaces. I even had one hunter (not known for hyperbole) tell me how a red fox sat on his hand for a few seconds and, after realizing its error, vanished like a wraith. Nature moves in punctuated equilibrium. Unlike nature documentaries that compress years of footage into a half-hour, real nature observation has long intermissions between dramatic acts. If you’re lucky enough—and patient enough—to witness a dramatic act in real time, it will sear the memory like a hot iron.
At my stage of life, I have to cultivate patience with intentionality. It’s far easier not to, of course. I found
