“Have you seen the yellow-breasted chat?” the kid asked.
“Is it missing?” I replied.
The kid gave me a blank look and pressed on. “I got an eBird alert that says it’s here. I’ve been looking all day.”
It was late afternoon on a trail in the woods where I walk most days, modest Nikon in hand.
The kid, probably in his twenties, was decked out in camo, carrying a camera with a lens as big as a bazooka.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’ve never seen a yellow-breasted chat, never heard of a yellow-breasted chat, wouldn’t know a yellow-breasted chat if it was in bed with me.”
“It’s rare,” he said. “It would be number 187 on my life list.”
“One-eighty-seven is murder in California.”
I resumed my walk. The kid tagged along, talking non-stop.
“Did you see the short-eared owls at Downsview?” he asked.
“I saw the pope at Downsview.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not a what, it’s a he – Pope John Paul the Second. He was here – there, at Downsview – before you were born.”
We walked on. Joggers and dog-walkers passed by. I stopped on a bridge over a fast-running creek.
The kid was fiddling with his phone. Showed me a photo of a yellow bird. “That’s the Bullock’s oriole in High Park,” he said with pride. “It’s very rare.”
I’d had enough. Time to stop shining him on. “It’s not very rare if you’re in Mexico, or in the southwestern U.S. It’s just not supposed to be here. It’s lost.”
I don’t get the attraction of birds that took a wrong turn, were blown off course by a storm, or captives released in the wild.
The Canadian birding community was all atwitter last fall when a roseate spoonbill was spotted near London, Ontario. I’d seen many of these large gaudy creatures in the Everglades. Where they belong. Felt sorry for this one.
The same way I feel sorry for a lost dog or cat. Or Flaco the eagle-owl on the lam in Manhattan. Or the young couple that got on a plane in England for a vacation in Sydney, Australia, and wound up in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
I was feeling sorry for the kid too, being teased and lectured by a geezer with a mean streak.
“Birding is great,” I said. “So is wildlife photography. But you might have more fun if you got a cool car and a girlfriend”
“I have a wife – and drive a Mercedes G-550,” the kid said.
I laughed. Shook my head. And walked off.
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