February 17th, 2011

This is a piggy-back on Sean’s great blog below…

Sean, you may or may not know that this was the bird that started by birdwatching career back in Feb of 1999… I was in the car with Ted Cheskey (and 2 other people that I cannot recall right now) and we were making a right turn towards Wrigley’s Corners – then we made a “U-ey” and were parked on the shoulder on the opposite side of the road. Three people exited the car quickly and I was still in the back wondering what the big deal was. I heard lots of ooo’s and ahhh’s as I sat there. Ted then came around to the side of the car, stuck his head in the drivers side and asked “Al, would you like to see a Shrike”? I said I did, not knowing what it was. Ted handed me his binoculars and I proceeded to wildly scan the trees. I then asked him “what is it that I am looking for?”. He replied “A robin-sized bird perched at the top of that tree over there.” Well, it was a forest of trees and I was trying to find a robin-sized bird at the top of one of them when Ted said “Oh…. it just flew”. He gave me a couple of details of the bird, most notably that it is nicknamed the butcher bird. I found this interesting so I looked it up in a book and thought that it was pretty cool. I then figured that there must be other cool birds out there that I did not know existed. I dove head-first into the books and recordings and never looked back.

Sometimes students ask how I became interested in birds and they always think it is odd that a bird that I did not even see was the one that started it all…