Yesterday, we were driving between cliffs, as we so often do this time of year. It's the solstice; after a month of squinting over windmaps, of tracing the squiggles leaving Asia (and losing them somewhere over the Okhotsk or Bering long before they ever reach St. Paul), a month of willing winds from all the wrong directions to change, we secede a little. Of course, we've still got hope for a late migrant--a flycatcher or a cuckoo--but the listers are phasing out, replaced by the photographers. We spend much of our time at cliffs or traveling between them.
Priblovian weather had driven us off Reef Cliffs early. It was the sort of day where you spend more time reclaiming your optics from sea spray than you do actually looking through them. We were headed to Ridge Wall. Not because I expected conditions would improve--all our cliffs are a rough time in southeast gales--but because traveling to Ridge would allow us the longest recovery before we'd exit the van to cold and misery somewhere else.
We stopped at Salt Lagoon, and I peered between the raindrops on my binoculars. Even through the condensation, Glaucous-winged Gulls remained various cycles of sorry. Guides on St. Paul, like workers anywhere, carry a toolbox. Not just physical--lens cloths and spotting scopes and field guides--but one less tangible. Tools like: a soft touch to ease a decrepit 12-passenger van from a treacherous sand pit; the sense of working with wind, light, and a Jack Snipe so the group gets the best views as it flushes; how to best console a client who got PenAir'd.
This spring, "endurance", "optimism", and "art of convincingly using time" have been tools in regular rotation. The fun tools--"pin a name on that Asian flycatcher" for example--have not. The winds haven't been with us. We've been poised, ready--begging the winds for an opportunity to use our full repertoire. There's so much that we could do. But there's also only so much we can do, because we need luck.
Yesterday, it was luck that bad weather drove us from the cliffs early.
It was luck that Gail wanted a scope view of the Red-legged Kittiwakes on Salt Lagoon.
It's luck that, after setting her up, I happened to look skyward at the right place, the right time.
A bird cut over the harbor towards us. It didn't fly like a regular, I was catching a weird angle--maybe a Tringa? A Wood Sandpiper would be nice. I swung my bins up and here's where I was wrong: what I'd thought were legs was actually a tail...
"SWIFT!!!!" I shrieked. "GET ON IT IT'S ASIAN!"
Suddenly, I needed all those tools I'd been longing to use all migration. Dropped bins, raised camera, fired off shots before the dark manifestation of aerodynamicity vanished to anonymity. Dark. That'd been the first impression we'd all gotten.
"Well, whatever it was, it was an ABA-bird for me," said Sam, speaking for us all.
Swifts are aptly-named; this one was gone, evidenced just by my adrenaline shakes and our photos. Thankfully, these showed both the dorsal and ventral. All dark, all right!
"It was COMMON!"
Despite its name, Common Swift is anything but--in North America. In fact, the amount of times it's been seen here can be counted on one hand. This is all according to "Rare Birds of North America", the only North American field guide where you'll find Common Swift.
There's a lot of "common" birds in Rare Birds of North America: Redshank, Rosefinch, Cuckoo, Sandpiper...
So what are they? Common or rare? That depends on where you are and where you care. If you're Sam, who's been to Attu and has spent a lot of time chasing down birds in the ABA-area, it's a mega. If you're like John and Janet, UK photographers, a Common Swift is well-named.
"We've got them in our garden," they laughed.
Where is St. Paul, really? Any map would show it being really far from anywhere. A map from 2016 would say USA, but a map from the 1830s would say Russia. In town is a Russian Orthodox church whose congregation bear Russian surnames. There, Russian (and Aleut and English) are used. 4th of July, a decidedly American holiday, is celebrated in decidedly American ways: beer, a loud parade and community barbecue, red/white/blue everywhere. Our birds are conglomerate also. Here, crecca Green-winged Teal reach the eastern limit of their range, carolinensis the western. The two often hybridize, producing offspring with both stripes and no stripes.
But to a lister it's pretty clear: St. Paul is definitively (albeit barely) inside the ABA-area, a volcano-made island in a man-made construct. And listers tend to flock to the limits of this man-made construct--places like southeast Arizona and Newfoundland and the Florida keys--places where extralimital birds show up from time to time.
"Extralimital," said a client a few weeks back. "I love the word...it conjures being in the right location in the right place, at the right time, when the alchemy of wind and El Nino and season finally works itself out."
Today the alchemy had come through. We continued on to the cliffs, high on a "common" bird rendered rare by a boundary. The listers were satiated, the photographers keen on Ridge Wall's Beringian specialties, which, ironically, are birds unrecorded in most of the world yet common on St. Paul. In the end, who's really after the rare birds?
 |
| Parakeet Auklets, St. Paul Island |
