Years ago a friend and I were planning a New Jersey Big Day, and a non-birding acquaintance overheard our deliberations.
“You’re going to the zoo?” she asked incredulously. “That’s cheating!”
Even non-birders know you can’t count zoo birds.
It’s true, I explained, that you can’t count the zoo’s flamingos, but the zoo grounds are great for legitimate, countable, wild birds. The Cape May Zoo was—and perhaps still is—good for Summer Tanager. And a tardy Snow Goose, another wild bird, was lingering there. We needed those birds for our list. The Cape May Zoo would be a stop on our Big Day.
I haven’t birded the Cape May Zoo in a long time, but I get to the Denver Zoo, close to home, from time to time. It’s one of the best places in the region in the warmer months for cormorants, egrets, and night-herons; they nest conspicuously and prolifically in the big trees at the south end of the zoo. But fall and winter are the “high season” for birding. The Denver Zoo is a magnet for cold-season rarities, including such notables over the years as Cape May and Yellow-throated warblers.
To be sure, I go to the zoo to find rarities. But that’s not the only reason. I also go to the zoo for “deep birding,” if you will. I go to the zoo to confront an avifauna that doesn’t play by the rules. Some of the zoo’s birds are in cages, but you can’t put the zoo’s birds in the proverbial box. (Many of the zoo’s birds aren’t in cages—we’ll get to that.) The zoo is a place where our birderly expectations go out the window. When we go birding at the zoo, we have to be willing to think outside the box. When we go birding at the zoo, we’re at the top of our game.
A month ago, my son Andrew and I spent the afternoon at the Denver Zoo. It was Super Bowl Sunday, and we had the whole place to ourselves. The first thing we saw was a cliché, an African lion striking an MGM pose.
1:42 pm–African lion (Panthera leo).
A minute later we got our first bird, a House Sparrow. The bird was a male, in transition from winter plumage to breeding plumage. House Sparrows, starkly different in fall and spring, acquire their breeding plumage (technically, their breeding plumage aspect) through feather wear. It’s a paradox, but their dull plumage in fall and early winter wears down to their brilliant “black-throated brown” plumage in spring and summer. This male is half-way there.
The House Sparrow is a fascinating species. We say it’s a “commensal.” Commensal relationships are one-way: Species A needs Species B, but not vice versa. So it’s not a mutualism, a co-dependency, as with hummingbirds and the flowers they pollinate. House Sparrows need us humans, but we don’t need them. House Sparrows are completely dependent on us. Hence, their ubiquity at the Denver Zoo. I suspect that many of the zoo’s hundreds of House Sparrows (our eBird tally for the afternoon, n=200) spend their whole lives at the facility.
1:43 p.m.–House Sparrow (male transitioning to breeding plumage aspect).
Our next bird: a Black-capped Chickadee, a pair. “What are they doing?” I wonder out loud. “Why do they keep going down to that bare patch in the snow?”
Andrew gets closer, and figures it out. For reasons inexplicable, there’s a pile of mealworms in the snow. This isn’t a natural phenomenon. Somebody, well, dumped a pile of mealworms in the snow—not near any exhibit, just off by a paved path to a maintenance shed. Whatever. The chickadees are going to town on the mealworms.
Black-capped Chickadees aren’t “obligate commensals” like House Sparrows, meaning they have to have their humans. But I think you could get away with calling them “facultative commensals.” Sure, these chickadees could fly off to Rocky Mountain National Park, where they might subsist (or not) on freeze-dried spider eggs and moribund collembolans. But why bother? I’m guessing these birds will still be at the zoo next week, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they nest and raise young there this spring. In their way, they’re zoo fixtures in the same manner as the House Sparrows and African lions.
1:54 pm–Black-capped Chickadee (with mealworm, Tenebrio molitor).
We proceed and encounter a herd of geese. By size and structure, these are “Lesser” Canada Geese, of the Arctic-breeding parvipes subspecies. If Rock Pigeons are “flying rats,” then Canada Geese have become “flying pigs.” You won’t get an argument from Andrew on that. But I’m old enough to remember when Canada Geese were special. Roger Tory Peterson put it this way: “Few men have souls so dead that they will not bother to look up when they hear the barking of wild geese.” And Aldo Leopold wrote of geese in what is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of American nature writing: “One swallow does make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
Isn’t that funny? What we once so prized we now so disparage.
2:00 pm–Canada Geese (subspecies parvipes, “Lesser” Canada Goose).
A moment ago, I mentioned Rock Pigeons, those “flying rats.” No surprise, the zoo is teeming with them. Let’s be honest: They’re beautiful. When I wasn’t much older than Andrew, I read John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers.” We walk a couple hundred yards, to the bighorn sheep exhibit, where we see a small flock of Rock Pigeons up on the highest outcroppings—too high even for the sheep. So often, I’m struck by the beauty and wildness of Rock Pigeons. Maybe it’s because of that encounter in my formative years with Updike.
Did you know Rock Pigeons once weren’t “countable”? The Christmas Bird Count didn’t want your Rock Pigeon (“Rock Doves” they were called) data. That strange policy was abandoned in the late 1970s, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen Rock Pigeons soaring—yes, soaring—about the high cliff walls above the Colorado River; I’ve seen them powering across the desert; I’ve seen them at sea. And of course I’ve seen them in grimy alleys and in zoos. Regardless of the venue, they’re beautiful, “idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seems, in a controlled rapture, with a joy hung level in the air above and behind,” as Updike put it.
2:01 pm–Rock Pigeon.
We make our way to the “Forest Aviary” exhibit, and, bummer, the gates to the exhibit are locked. No matter. We hear and then see the birds we’re here for: a flock of Common Grackles. Every winter, Common Grackles congregate here. This is an eBird rarity. The Denver Zoo is the only place in the region, so far as I know, where the species reliably can be found during the colder months. And not just the zoo, but always the exact same exhibit, the Forest Aviary. One day I’ll write it up for our state journal, Colorado Birds: “Extreme philopatry in a New World blackbird, Quiscalus quiscula versicolor.”
Today we add a bit to the peculiar story of the Forest Aviary’s winter grackle flock. One of the birds is outside the big cage, and we get a photo: It appears to be a first-winter bird, so that means there’s “recruitment,” as the demographers say. The flock is replenishing itself. The big question: Where do these birds come from? I suppose they could breed within 100 meters of the Forest Aviary. But they might also come from somewhere 1,000 kilometers or more distant. We have absolutely no idea.
2:19 pm–Common Grackle.
We’re at Bird World now, the pièce du résistance of the Denver Zoo, any birder will tell you. Outside the hallowed halls of Bird World is one of the zoo’s two penguin colonies—Jackass Penguins here, Humboldt Penguins elsewhere. The flightless penguins are perforce philopatric, like the grackles we just saw. True, the grackles are free to leave. But they never do. In winter they’re always there.
In a certain sense, the penguins are wilder than the grackles. Most of the time, the penguins hide in their burrows. It’s a struggle to get a halfway decent pic of one. The grackles, in contrast, are showboats. They’re the life of the party. I wrote earlier of obligate vs. facultative commensals. I think the grackles are emotional commensals; they have a psychological need to be seen and appreciated by humans.
2:38 pm–Jackass Penguin.
We enter the double doors to Bird World, and, immediately, my eyeglasses, binoculars, and camera fog up. What I love most about Bird World are the big glasshouses, where the avian residents and human visitors share the same space. The vegetation is dense, the lighting poor, and humidity 100%. By and large, the birds do their own thing. In Bird World it can be quite a challenge to find the birds, just as in a “real” rainforest.
A dull-brown form flutters by. It’s carrying a stick. It flies up to a nest, up on an outcropping, well out of reach. It’s nesting, and…it’s a Hamerkop? Are they even supposed to be here? I thought they were in another one of the glasshouses. I’m reminded of that line from Jurassic Park: “Nature found a way.” I try to photo-document the nest-building, but my lenses are still fogged.
2:49 pm–Hamerkop at nest (“documentation shot”). Inset: 2:53 pm–another Hamerkop (better viewing conditions).
We proceed to another one of big walk-through exhibits. It’s brighter and drier in here. My optics have cleared up, and I get a much better photo of a Hamerkop. This is the room that, as I understand it, is supposed to house Hamerkops. It’s also supposed to house a pair of two-toed sloths. I see one directly overhead. Andrew spots the other, a positively spritely creature, adroitly lowering itself from a high perch, watching intelligently, endearingly sticking out its long, pink tongue. Sloths are Andrew’s favorite animals, so this is a fist-bump, exploding-knuckles moment. I’ve seen sloths in the “wild,” distant forms, immobile and impassive, in impossibly high trees. I’m not supposed to say what I’m about to say, but the sloths at Bird World are incomparably superior.
2:58 pm–two-toed sloth sp. (Chloloepus didactylus or C. hoffmanni).
We’re about to leave Bird World, but first we pause to study the colony of Inca Terns. I’ve known this bird forever. There was a colony (perhaps there still is) at the Pittsburgh Aviary (now the National Aviary) in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Later, on visits to Peru, I saw the species in the “wild.” Sort of. The Inca Terns in Peru—the ones I’ve seen, anyhow—hang out around restaurants and ship’s chandlers and such. The more adventurous ones fly out to roost on buoys and jetties. I’m not going to say that the zoo’s Inca Terns are superior to the ones in Lima (cf. sloths). Rather, they’re pretty much the same—at the aviary in Pittsburgh, at the marina in Lima, here at Bird World.
2:59 pm–Inca Tern.
We exit Bird World and head for the Elephant Passage, an outdoor exhibit. If there are elephants, we don’t see them. That’s because we’re distracted by one good bird after another. First up: a surprising Mottled Duck x Mallard hybrid, an adult male. There have been exceedingly few detections in Colorado birding history of Mottled Duck genes. This is a red-letter rarity. It’s a “wild” bird that just happens to have found one of the ponds at Elephant Passage; it’s consorting with two hen Mallards and an American Coot. A curious gibbon leaps toward us, grimaces, and goes on his way.
3:11 pm–Mottled Duck x Mallard.
I hear a wavering flight call, have a thought about the ID, and confirm it: a White-throated Sparrow, an uncommon winter visitor to Colorado. A Brown Creeper calls. I’d like to see it; birders in Colorado are starting to pay attention to the “Eastern” and “Rocky Mountain” populations, possibly distinct species. But the sparrow is vying for my attention, and then—a Merlin! It’s a flyby, pale, so probably richardsoni, the “Prairie” Merlin.
3:19 pm–White-throated Sparrow.
The afternoon is wearing on, and Andrew reminds me that he seeks various desiderata in the great aquariums on the far east end of the zoo: fire shrimp, polka dot stringray, and pacu. Tick, tick, and tick; and now I seek my ultimate desideratum in the Denver Zoo, the Indian Peafowl.
Here’s the deal. The resident peafowl are the Huckleberry Finns of the Denver Zoo. Huckleberry Finn, recall, “came and went, at his own free will.” So it is with the peafowl. They have free rein of the place. They build their nests and raise their young where they will. As night falls, they cry so loud, you can hear them from the high rises on the other side of City Park. Then they fly up into the zoo’s tall cottonwoods, where they roost in the company of Merlins and magpies. (Speaking of which, a Black-billed Magpie is tending a zebra right now.)
Maybe I took just a bit of license in equating the zoo’s captive Inca Terns with their free-flying counterparts in Peru, but I believe the following is legit: The zoo’s peafowl are every bit as wild, every bit as “worthy,” as the Indian Peafowl I’ve seen in India. It’s just that we in the West can’t wrap our minds around that. We need our boxes, our categories, our either/or way of seeing things. We need to be able to say that House Sparrows and Rock Pigeons “count,” but that Jackass Penguins and Hamerkops do not. As to a Mottled Duck x Mallard hybrid, let’s avert our glance—that doesn’t fit neatly in a box. And as to a long-present, self-sustaining population of Indian Peafowl, let’s not think too much about that—it might upset our Western applecart.
3:47 pm–Indian Peafowl.
The zoo will be closing soon, and we make our way to the exit. Along the way we hear and then see a Siberian tiger. Here’s a trivia question: What country hosts the largest population of tigers? Answer: the United States. There are far more tigers in the U.S. than in the “wild” worldwide. Any credible natural history of tigers has to admit the U.S. population. To say that American tigers somehow “don’t count” is wishful thinking. It’s also unscientific and deleterious to conservation efforts. If American tigers—and their all-important genetic diversity—don’t count, then American teenagers don’t drink and date. It’s wishful thinking, as I said.
4:07 pm–Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica).
We’re the last ones out of the zoo, I’m pretty sure, and we’re headed now to City Park, which adjoins the zoo’s southern periphery. No matter how often I go there, I still can’t make sense of the road closures and roundabouts. After a while, I give up and just park the car in the street. We’re okay. Kickoff was a minute ago, and it’s a safe bet that everybody in Denver—including the parking authority—is otherwise occupied. We’re in the “wild” now, I suppose, and our first bird is a Graylag Goose.
A tiny population of Graylag Geese have been present here for at least a decade. I suspect they’ve benefited from handouts over the years, but they’ve also survived many a sub-zero night and countless coyote visitations. Like the nominally “wild” geese in the park, the Graylags cycle nutrients, graze grass, disperse seeds, and perform other ecosystem services.
4:32 pm–Graylag Goose.
A small flock of Cackling Geese amble past. They’re small, even in comparison with the parvipes (“Lesser”) Canada Geese, and they’re dwarfed by the bigger Canada geese, probably subspecies moffitti (sometimes lumped, or “synonymized,” with maxima, but we won’t go there). Nevertheless, these are the largest of the various Cackling Goose subspecies: nominate hutchinsii, the “Richardson’s” Cackling Goose.
I mused earlier about our changing attitudes toward geese. We don’t regard them today the way Roger Tory Peterson and Aldo Leopold once did. I said they’re “flying pigs,” but there’s something else. In the past dozen years, they’ve gone from a piece-of-cake ID to one of the most fiendish of conundrums for the advanced birder. Until the dawn of the 21st century, they were all Canada Geese, as simple as can be. Now they’re a major ID challenge, especially here in eastern Colorado, where the smallest Canada Geese and the largest Cackling Geese routinely overlap. The birds in this flock sort out fairly well, but, believe you me, many do not. Our eBird checklist for the park has a greater value for “Cackling/Canada Goose” (n=300) than all the birds we can identify as one or the other.
4:36 pm–Cackling Goose (nominate subspecies hutchinsii, “Richardson’s” Cackling Goose).
We wander over to Ferril Lake, the major body of water in City Park. The ducks are gorgeous in the late-afternoon light: dapper Gadwalls, semaphoric Buffleheads, over-the-top Hooded Mergansers, and more. But the birds that really grab my attention are the sociable Northern Shovelers, at least 400 of them. I grin broadly at the goofy drakes: those oversized bills, eyes like buttons, and pea-green heads glistening in the setting sun. (I know! It’s the green flash!) Tight clusters of 50 or more birds mill about. They’re chorusing! It’s a muffled call, disyllabic, repeated endlessly: shook-shook…shook-shook…shook-shook.
It’s cold. The whole landscape glows as the sun hits the mountaintops to the west. There’s no one in the park but me. (Andrew has repaired to the car.) I could prance a caper, I could even splash about in Ferril Lake, and no one would care. No one would even know. My mind is filled with impressions of the impish and idyllic John Muir, running about, arms flailing, in a sun-kissed Sierran meadow. Muir, like Leopold and Peterson, believed in wilderness.
In a sense, the Bible gets its right in its account of the fall of man. If there was ever a wilderness, if there was ever a Garden of Eden, it was altered forever by the actions of the first human. Not merely altered, it was supplanted, never again to be reclaimed by mortals. Yet we still want that “old time religion,” even those among us who would never consciously consider ourselves religious, or even spiritual. It’s entrenched in our Western cultural heritage. We want Eden, we want to believe there’s still wilderness.
The sun has set, and I retreat to the car. I cast one last glance at the shovelers, still milling about in Ferril Lake. The lake was put there by humans; it’s rimmed with concrete. The ducks that flourish here have been the beneficiaries, at one point or another in their lives, of every manner of human agency: supplemental feeding, habitat management, legal protections, and so forth. Across the way, a peafowl cries out, wild and melancholy. He must be up in one of the tall cottonwoods in the zoo. I’m not there, but I have a very good idea about what is happening right now: A Hamerkop is snuggling into her nest, and grackles are settling in for the night; Inca Terns are fluttering to their roosts, and a chickadee grabs one last mealworm; and a gibbon, wise and worldly, wonders about an unfamiliar duck and a strange sparrow.
We have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. We live in the Anthropocene era. There is no wilderness, no Eden. And I find solace in that view. For one thing, it’s the truth. But there’s something deeper: In this view, old barriers are broken down; boxes and categories become unnecessary; distinctions between “us” vs. “them” dissolve away. In this view, we’re all in this thing together. We’ve got this one world, all of us. It’s a new way of thinking, so antithetical to the Western worldview. Yet in this way, we are set free from old prejudices, from old habits of thought; and in this way, we have achieved a new freedom, and a new wilderness, in our lives.
5:04 pm–Northern Shovelers.
Birding at the Zoo
Years ago a friend and I were planning a New Jersey Big Day, and a non-birding acquaintance overheard our deliberations.
“You’re going to the zoo?” she asked incredulously. “That’s cheating!”
Even non-birders know you can’t count zoo birds.
It’s true, I explained, that you can’t count the zoo’s flamingos, but the zoo grounds are great for legitimate, countable, wild birds. The Cape May Zoo was—and perhaps still is—good for Summer Tanager. And a tardy Snow Goose, another wild bird, was lingering there. We needed those birds for our list. The Cape May Zoo would be a stop on our Big Day.
I haven’t birded the Cape May Zoo in a long time, but I get to the Denver Zoo, close to home, from time to time. It’s one of the best places in the region in the warmer months for cormorants, egrets, and night-herons; they nest conspicuously and prolifically in the big trees at the south end of the zoo. But fall and winter are the “high season” for birding. The Denver Zoo is a magnet for cold-season rarities, including such notables over the years as Cape May and Yellow-throated warblers.
To be sure, I go to the zoo to find rarities. But that’s not the only reason. I also go to the zoo for “deep birding,” if you will. I go to the zoo to confront an avifauna that doesn’t play by the rules. Some of the zoo’s birds are in cages, but you can’t put the zoo’s birds in the proverbial box. (Many of the zoo’s birds aren’t in cages—we’ll get to that.) The zoo is a place where our birderly expectations go out the window. When we go birding at the zoo, we have to be willing to think outside the box. When we go birding at the zoo, we’re at the top of our game.
A month ago, my son Andrew and I spent the afternoon at the Denver Zoo. It was Super Bowl Sunday, and we had the whole place to ourselves. The first thing we saw was a cliché, an African lion striking an MGM pose.
1:42 pm–African lion (Panthera leo).
A minute later we got our first bird, a House Sparrow. The bird was a male, in transition from winter plumage to breeding plumage. House Sparrows, starkly different in fall and spring, acquire their breeding plumage (technically, their breeding plumage aspect) through feather wear. It’s a paradox, but their dull plumage in fall and early winter wears down to their brilliant “black-throated brown” plumage in spring and summer. This male is half-way there.
The House Sparrow is a fascinating species. We say it’s a “commensal.” Commensal relationships are one-way: Species A needs Species B, but not vice versa. So it’s not a mutualism, a co-dependency, as with hummingbirds and the flowers they pollinate. House Sparrows need us humans, but we don’t need them. House Sparrows are completely dependent on us. Hence, their ubiquity at the Denver Zoo. I suspect that many of the zoo’s hundreds of House Sparrows (our eBird tally for the afternoon, n=200) spend their whole lives at the facility.
1:43 p.m.–House Sparrow (male transitioning to breeding plumage aspect).
Our next bird: a Black-capped Chickadee, a pair. “What are they doing?” I wonder out loud. “Why do they keep going down to that bare patch in the snow?”
Andrew gets closer, and figures it out. For reasons inexplicable, there’s a pile of mealworms in the snow. This isn’t a natural phenomenon. Somebody, well, dumped a pile of mealworms in the snow—not near any exhibit, just off by a paved path to a maintenance shed. Whatever. The chickadees are going to town on the mealworms.
Black-capped Chickadees aren’t “obligate commensals” like House Sparrows, meaning they have to have their humans. But I think you could get away with calling them “facultative commensals.” Sure, these chickadees could fly off to Rocky Mountain National Park, where they might subsist (or not) on freeze-dried spider eggs and moribund collembolans. But why bother? I’m guessing these birds will still be at the zoo next week, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they nest and raise young there this spring. In their way, they’re zoo fixtures in the same manner as the House Sparrows and African lions.
1:54 pm–Black-capped Chickadee (with mealworm, Tenebrio molitor).
We proceed and encounter a herd of geese. By size and structure, these are “Lesser” Canada Geese, of the Arctic-breeding parvipes subspecies. If Rock Pigeons are “flying rats,” then Canada Geese have become “flying pigs.” You won’t get an argument from Andrew on that. But I’m old enough to remember when Canada Geese were special. Roger Tory Peterson put it this way: “Few men have souls so dead that they will not bother to look up when they hear the barking of wild geese.” And Aldo Leopold wrote of geese in what is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of American nature writing: “One swallow does make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.”
Isn’t that funny? What we once so prized we now so disparage.
2:00 pm–Canada Geese (subspecies parvipes, “Lesser” Canada Goose).
A moment ago, I mentioned Rock Pigeons, those “flying rats.” No surprise, the zoo is teeming with them. Let’s be honest: They’re beautiful. When I wasn’t much older than Andrew, I read John Updike’s “Pigeon Feathers.” We walk a couple hundred yards, to the bighorn sheep exhibit, where we see a small flock of Rock Pigeons up on the highest outcroppings—too high even for the sheep. So often, I’m struck by the beauty and wildness of Rock Pigeons. Maybe it’s because of that encounter in my formative years with Updike.
Did you know Rock Pigeons once weren’t “countable”? The Christmas Bird Count didn’t want your Rock Pigeon (“Rock Doves” they were called) data. That strange policy was abandoned in the late 1970s, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve seen Rock Pigeons soaring—yes, soaring—about the high cliff walls above the Colorado River; I’ve seen them powering across the desert; I’ve seen them at sea. And of course I’ve seen them in grimy alleys and in zoos. Regardless of the venue, they’re beautiful, “idle designs of color, no two alike, designs executed, it seems, in a controlled rapture, with a joy hung level in the air above and behind,” as Updike put it.
2:01 pm–Rock Pigeon.
We make our way to the “Forest Aviary” exhibit, and, bummer, the gates to the exhibit are locked. No matter. We hear and then see the birds we’re here for: a flock of Common Grackles. Every winter, Common Grackles congregate here. This is an eBird rarity. The Denver Zoo is the only place in the region, so far as I know, where the species reliably can be found during the colder months. And not just the zoo, but always the exact same exhibit, the Forest Aviary. One day I’ll write it up for our state journal, Colorado Birds: “Extreme philopatry in a New World blackbird, Quiscalus quiscula versicolor.”
Today we add a bit to the peculiar story of the Forest Aviary’s winter grackle flock. One of the birds is outside the big cage, and we get a photo: It appears to be a first-winter bird, so that means there’s “recruitment,” as the demographers say. The flock is replenishing itself. The big question: Where do these birds come from? I suppose they could breed within 100 meters of the Forest Aviary. But they might also come from somewhere 1,000 kilometers or more distant. We have absolutely no idea.
2:19 pm–Common Grackle.
We’re at Bird World now, the pièce du résistance of the Denver Zoo, any birder will tell you. Outside the hallowed halls of Bird World is one of the zoo’s two penguin colonies—Jackass Penguins here, Humboldt Penguins elsewhere. The flightless penguins are perforce philopatric, like the grackles we just saw. True, the grackles are free to leave. But they never do. In winter they’re always there.
In a certain sense, the penguins are wilder than the grackles. Most of the time, the penguins hide in their burrows. It’s a struggle to get a halfway decent pic of one. The grackles, in contrast, are showboats. They’re the life of the party. I wrote earlier of obligate vs. facultative commensals. I think the grackles are emotional commensals; they have a psychological need to be seen and appreciated by humans.
2:38 pm–Jackass Penguin.
We enter the double doors to Bird World, and, immediately, my eyeglasses, binoculars, and camera fog up. What I love most about Bird World are the big glasshouses, where the avian residents and human visitors share the same space. The vegetation is dense, the lighting poor, and humidity 100%. By and large, the birds do their own thing. In Bird World it can be quite a challenge to find the birds, just as in a “real” rainforest.
A dull-brown form flutters by. It’s carrying a stick. It flies up to a nest, up on an outcropping, well out of reach. It’s nesting, and…it’s a Hamerkop? Are they even supposed to be here? I thought they were in another one of the glasshouses. I’m reminded of that line from Jurassic Park: “Nature found a way.” I try to photo-document the nest-building, but my lenses are still fogged.
2:49 pm–Hamerkop at nest (“documentation shot”). Inset: 2:53 pm–another Hamerkop (better viewing conditions).
We proceed to another one of big walk-through exhibits. It’s brighter and drier in here. My optics have cleared up, and I get a much better photo of a Hamerkop. This is the room that, as I understand it, is supposed to house Hamerkops. It’s also supposed to house a pair of two-toed sloths. I see one directly overhead. Andrew spots the other, a positively spritely creature, adroitly lowering itself from a high perch, watching intelligently, endearingly sticking out its long, pink tongue. Sloths are Andrew’s favorite animals, so this is a fist-bump, exploding-knuckles moment. I’ve seen sloths in the “wild,” distant forms, immobile and impassive, in impossibly high trees. I’m not supposed to say what I’m about to say, but the sloths at Bird World are incomparably superior.
2:58 pm–two-toed sloth sp. (Chloloepus didactylus or C. hoffmanni).
We’re about to leave Bird World, but first we pause to study the colony of Inca Terns. I’ve known this bird forever. There was a colony (perhaps there still is) at the Pittsburgh Aviary (now the National Aviary) in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. Later, on visits to Peru, I saw the species in the “wild.” Sort of. The Inca Terns in Peru—the ones I’ve seen, anyhow—hang out around restaurants and ship’s chandlers and such. The more adventurous ones fly out to roost on buoys and jetties. I’m not going to say that the zoo’s Inca Terns are superior to the ones in Lima (cf. sloths). Rather, they’re pretty much the same—at the aviary in Pittsburgh, at the marina in Lima, here at Bird World.
2:59 pm–Inca Tern.
We exit Bird World and head for the Elephant Passage, an outdoor exhibit. If there are elephants, we don’t see them. That’s because we’re distracted by one good bird after another. First up: a surprising Mottled Duck x Mallard hybrid, an adult male. There have been exceedingly few detections in Colorado birding history of Mottled Duck genes. This is a red-letter rarity. It’s a “wild” bird that just happens to have found one of the ponds at Elephant Passage; it’s consorting with two hen Mallards and an American Coot. A curious gibbon leaps toward us, grimaces, and goes on his way.
3:11 pm–Mottled Duck x Mallard.
I hear a wavering flight call, have a thought about the ID, and confirm it: a White-throated Sparrow, an uncommon winter visitor to Colorado. A Brown Creeper calls. I’d like to see it; birders in Colorado are starting to pay attention to the “Eastern” and “Rocky Mountain” populations, possibly distinct species. But the sparrow is vying for my attention, and then—a Merlin! It’s a flyby, pale, so probably richardsoni, the “Prairie” Merlin.
3:19 pm–White-throated Sparrow.
The afternoon is wearing on, and Andrew reminds me that he seeks various desiderata in the great aquariums on the far east end of the zoo: fire shrimp, polka dot stringray, and pacu. Tick, tick, and tick; and now I seek my ultimate desideratum in the Denver Zoo, the Indian Peafowl.
Here’s the deal. The resident peafowl are the Huckleberry Finns of the Denver Zoo. Huckleberry Finn, recall, “came and went, at his own free will.” So it is with the peafowl. They have free rein of the place. They build their nests and raise their young where they will. As night falls, they cry so loud, you can hear them from the high rises on the other side of City Park. Then they fly up into the zoo’s tall cottonwoods, where they roost in the company of Merlins and magpies. (Speaking of which, a Black-billed Magpie is tending a zebra right now.)
Maybe I took just a bit of license in equating the zoo’s captive Inca Terns with their free-flying counterparts in Peru, but I believe the following is legit: The zoo’s peafowl are every bit as wild, every bit as “worthy,” as the Indian Peafowl I’ve seen in India. It’s just that we in the West can’t wrap our minds around that. We need our boxes, our categories, our either/or way of seeing things. We need to be able to say that House Sparrows and Rock Pigeons “count,” but that Jackass Penguins and Hamerkops do not. As to a Mottled Duck x Mallard hybrid, let’s avert our glance—that doesn’t fit neatly in a box. And as to a long-present, self-sustaining population of Indian Peafowl, let’s not think too much about that—it might upset our Western applecart.
3:47 pm–Indian Peafowl.
The zoo will be closing soon, and we make our way to the exit. Along the way we hear and then see a Siberian tiger. Here’s a trivia question: What country hosts the largest population of tigers? Answer: the United States. There are far more tigers in the U.S. than in the “wild” worldwide. Any credible natural history of tigers has to admit the U.S. population. To say that American tigers somehow “don’t count” is wishful thinking. It’s also unscientific and deleterious to conservation efforts. If American tigers—and their all-important genetic diversity—don’t count, then American teenagers don’t drink and date. It’s wishful thinking, as I said.
4:07 pm–Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica).
We’re the last ones out of the zoo, I’m pretty sure, and we’re headed now to City Park, which adjoins the zoo’s southern periphery. No matter how often I go there, I still can’t make sense of the road closures and roundabouts. After a while, I give up and just park the car in the street. We’re okay. Kickoff was a minute ago, and it’s a safe bet that everybody in Denver—including the parking authority—is otherwise occupied. We’re in the “wild” now, I suppose, and our first bird is a Graylag Goose.
A tiny population of Graylag Geese have been present here for at least a decade. I suspect they’ve benefited from handouts over the years, but they’ve also survived many a sub-zero night and countless coyote visitations. Like the nominally “wild” geese in the park, the Graylags cycle nutrients, graze grass, disperse seeds, and perform other ecosystem services.
4:32 pm–Graylag Goose.
A small flock of Cackling Geese amble past. They’re small, even in comparison with the parvipes (“Lesser”) Canada Geese, and they’re dwarfed by the bigger Canada geese, probably subspecies moffitti (sometimes lumped, or “synonymized,” with maxima, but we won’t go there). Nevertheless, these are the largest of the various Cackling Goose subspecies: nominate hutchinsii, the “Richardson’s” Cackling Goose.
I mused earlier about our changing attitudes toward geese. We don’t regard them today the way Roger Tory Peterson and Aldo Leopold once did. I said they’re “flying pigs,” but there’s something else. In the past dozen years, they’ve gone from a piece-of-cake ID to one of the most fiendish of conundrums for the advanced birder. Until the dawn of the 21st century, they were all Canada Geese, as simple as can be. Now they’re a major ID challenge, especially here in eastern Colorado, where the smallest Canada Geese and the largest Cackling Geese routinely overlap. The birds in this flock sort out fairly well, but, believe you me, many do not. Our eBird checklist for the park has a greater value for “Cackling/Canada Goose” (n=300) than all the birds we can identify as one or the other.
4:36 pm–Cackling Goose (nominate subspecies hutchinsii, “Richardson’s” Cackling Goose).
We wander over to Ferril Lake, the major body of water in City Park. The ducks are gorgeous in the late-afternoon light: dapper Gadwalls, semaphoric Buffleheads, over-the-top Hooded Mergansers, and more. But the birds that really grab my attention are the sociable Northern Shovelers, at least 400 of them. I grin broadly at the goofy drakes: those oversized bills, eyes like buttons, and pea-green heads glistening in the setting sun. (I know! It’s the green flash!) Tight clusters of 50 or more birds mill about. They’re chorusing! It’s a muffled call, disyllabic, repeated endlessly: shook-shook…shook-shook…shook-shook.
It’s cold. The whole landscape glows as the sun hits the mountaintops to the west. There’s no one in the park but me. (Andrew has repaired to the car.) I could prance a caper, I could even splash about in Ferril Lake, and no one would care. No one would even know. My mind is filled with impressions of the impish and idyllic John Muir, running about, arms flailing, in a sun-kissed Sierran meadow. Muir, like Leopold and Peterson, believed in wilderness.
In a sense, the Bible gets its right in its account of the fall of man. If there was ever a wilderness, if there was ever a Garden of Eden, it was altered forever by the actions of the first human. Not merely altered, it was supplanted, never again to be reclaimed by mortals. Yet we still want that “old time religion,” even those among us who would never consciously consider ourselves religious, or even spiritual. It’s entrenched in our Western cultural heritage. We want Eden, we want to believe there’s still wilderness.
The sun has set, and I retreat to the car. I cast one last glance at the shovelers, still milling about in Ferril Lake. The lake was put there by humans; it’s rimmed with concrete. The ducks that flourish here have been the beneficiaries, at one point or another in their lives, of every manner of human agency: supplemental feeding, habitat management, legal protections, and so forth. Across the way, a peafowl cries out, wild and melancholy. He must be up in one of the tall cottonwoods in the zoo. I’m not there, but I have a very good idea about what is happening right now: A Hamerkop is snuggling into her nest, and grackles are settling in for the night; Inca Terns are fluttering to their roosts, and a chickadee grabs one last mealworm; and a gibbon, wise and worldly, wonders about an unfamiliar duck and a strange sparrow.
We have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. We live in the Anthropocene era. There is no wilderness, no Eden. And I find solace in that view. For one thing, it’s the truth. But there’s something deeper: In this view, old barriers are broken down; boxes and categories become unnecessary; distinctions between “us” vs. “them” dissolve away. In this view, we’re all in this thing together. We’ve got this one world, all of us. It’s a new way of thinking, so antithetical to the Western worldview. Yet in this way, we are set free from old prejudices, from old habits of thought; and in this way, we have achieved a new freedom, and a new wilderness, in our lives.
5:04 pm–Northern Shovelers.