FOOL

I want you to know there is a bird who can trick my phone. It’s not a parrot, either, in case you’re thinking of the ones who order strawberries from Alexa and forty pounds arrive the next day, scaring everyone in the house. I support that as well and would vote for it for president.

What I mean is that as old as this body is, with a neck that has receded into its tenure as heartwood, whatever lives inside it can still be astounded. Gobsmacked. Titillated into near-oblivion in the April fools’ ditch-grass on another goddamn gray-sky, idiotic-wind kind of walk.

I thought it was a Fox Sparrow, not gonna lie. There’s this thing where no matter how nerd-begone you are, it’s not actually the perimenopause cooking up the havoc in your identifier cells when the avian migrants return; it really is just that you haven’t heard the damn thing in a year or two or ten. I frankly don’t expect anyone to remember a sound that dusty on the brain-shelf the second it shows up in the middle of a pine tree where you can’t even see it.

In other words, I forgive me. For the starter misidentification. Even though it irks me. And I accept it as a good donkey accepts her rattling panniers. Birders have got to allow occasional or even frequent mistakenness, or else they become assholes rather than the dearest geeks you can call when something from the sky hits your window and you need encouragement not to put it in a shoebox and try to feed it worms. No, Stephanie, the stunned American Goldfinch doesn’t want your tweezered nightcrawlers; you’re just scaring the bejeezus out of it while it’s already deathly addled.

Anyway the thing in the conifer was not at all a Fox Sparrow. That was an idiot moment. One I have accepted, as detailed.

Next I will disclose another embarrassing thing (this is why you pay me the big bucks) (that’s a joke) which is that I whipped out my phone. The Merlin app is utter witchcraft, and I have betrayed my puritan roots by embracing such devilry. In case you don’t know it, it listens to birds and tells you what they are. Sound in, name out. it’s complete balderdash that an electronic device can do this, but I’m a goner, totally crushed out, that it exists.

Here’s an interlude where I will boast, similarly disrobed in an ungodly way: reader, I am better than the Merlin app¹. I am faster, and can hear farther.

Nonetheless, I rely on it when bamboozled. So, reader, I did whip. Opened that app with a thumb on fire.

Within seconds (if I had been in my right mind—which really I guess is generally a fiction, but whatever— I’d have identified it faster) the app booped up a dry little knowing: the thing was a damned Purple Finch.

Don’t get me wrong, also a nice find, satisfying morsel, but for one thing, it was, like, a tenor Purple Finch or something, like, out busking with a sax bigger than its torso, and for another, well… I forgot, but there was a list in there. A righteous one.

I stood for a good long time, while gravel bits climbed up the heels of my shoes and nestled down in around my socks, laughing at me meanly. They do that, and to spite them, I regularly prove my mettle by balancing on one foot, sock swinging in the winter awfulness, while I dump those fuckers out.

Anway I stood and listened while the wind did the most stupid things. I stood with my mouth open (why do I do this? Somehow it makes me hear better? Something about nose breathing liabilities and intra-head audio interference? Whatever, I was looking dumb, is the point) and I tried to track what this little dude was saying.

He did the thing he was supposed to do, albeit weirdly low-pitched— that happy burbling, gossipy syrup-chatter, and then… I heard a few notes from an American Robin, one that had to be smushed inside the evergreen right next to this little booger. Like, in his lap. I know birds don’t have laps but that’s how close, OK?

It’s true that humans and other large mammalian predators are absolutely miserable at echolocation, what with our stupid symmetrical ears and a pitiful hearing range, but I’m still pretty stinking sure these two sounds— the busking Purple Finch and the chup-chupping American Robin— were issuing from the same tiny slash in spacetime. Wherefore?

Before I could remove my glove and incur the obligatory Reynaud’s while scratching my noggin, another birdsong slipped from this black hole of nonsense: a short fragment of an Eastern Bluebird song. OK, so, now we either had the weirdest invisible interspecies birthday party ever happening in a pine tree not ten yards from me, or something else equally astonishing was happening. I waited and the phenomenon proved itself repeatable. Repeating. I was really starting to get frothy about this, almost snarling with confusion.

Then the little turd gifted me with the one thing, the only thing, that could solve the great mystery: it flew out of the dense pine into a deciduous skeleton immediately above my head. I watched, in relevant danger of getting finch-poop dropped directly into my yawp, while the insouciant magician issued more and more finchy gossip. I tracked its quiver and thrust: yep, that’s him, for sure, the one singing.

And then I watched. While. He. Robined.

I watched As. He. Bluebirded.

Friend, I saw the Purple Finch body squeeze itself to make these other species’ sounds, and I witnessed as the Merlin app was duped. Utterly had. It pronounced confidently, without even the little half-moon icon that indicates some measure of doubt, that it was hearing first an American Robin and then an Eastern Bluebird. Oh the scallywag finch! I am such a fan I would send mail!

There is only one thing I like better than being right and that is being wrong. My god it’s fun. NO ONE TOLD ME IN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF BIRDING THAT PURPLE FINCHES CAN MIMIC. Yet there it was, plain as day in a sleazebag AI round-up summary: “Yes, Purple Finches can mimic the sounds of other birds.”

I would have skipped the rest of the way home if it weren’t for needing the gravel not to win in the long fight over my sad heels. So I walked measuredly. But I let my face do some absurd foray into the upturned stretch, that thing we do in summer maybe? I’ve forgotten. It’s something like the glowing orb in the sky whose name I can’t remember.

The point, I guess, is that they will all come back, the facial calisthenics and the light-blasting sky-thing, and I have living proof that any and all of what returns to us might say things we had thought impossible.

1. with the roughly 150 species I hear locally on a regular basis. I am absolute shit at shorebirds, waterfowl, anything pelagic, and anything that lives anywhere other than the northeast. Also shit at a few of the warblers. OK a bunch of them. But still.