Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen 

    Yesterday Lorraine was in the dining room looking out the window when she spotted a bird in the pond on the 15th fairway. She observed it for a while then called me to come and identify the thing. Now Lorraine is the bird identifier in this family, so if she’s stumped I don’t really have much of a chance. 
     This bird was at the outer edge of good binocular viewing. What I saw was a black duck-like bird, with grey sides, floating on the pond and occasionally diving. Not tipping, but diving. Of course, the dive happened just as I got the binoculars focused and then it would dive. When it surfaced, it would be in a new spot so the binoculars would need refocusing, and so on. 
    It’s good the bird was that far away, otherwise I’d have given serious thought to wringing it’s little neck. When the thing was on the surface and I was trying to focus, there was a mallard cavorting around between me and my target, which didn’t help. Next to the mallard my bird looked rather small. 
    I went through the book. Some birds I was able to eliminate immediately, such as Great Blue Herons and Bald Eagles, but seriously, most of the ducks got eliminated on my first sweep through the book. Then I went through it again, and once more. 
    Finally, we agreed to put in down as another mystery bird. 
    Mystery birds are those that you can put into some kind of broad classification but not really nail down to a specific bird. One requisite for being a mystery bird is that it looks like nothing in any of several of the most popular bird books. 
    Now a person can’t just glance at a bird and designate it as a mystery bird. There is a certain protocol that theoretically should be followed if a person is a serious mystery-bird birder. You have to spend enough time to note all the particular aspects of the bird in view, or as much as you can before it leaves for the next bush, tree, or county. Very few birds sit still for any length of time, and I guess we birders wouldn’t either if some big aggressive person, who depended on our bodies for food, was always lurking around. 
    Anyway, getting as many specifics like color, shape of the bill, head, body, color of everything, special features like size, what it’s doing, and about four dozen other specific things is important. 
    When you get to a bird book, and if you can’t find a bird with the list of specifics you’ve just spotted, then you possibly have yourself a mystery bird. Congratulations!
    Experience shows that most birders, unless they were lucky enough to find a bird in a cage, will only have time to note two or three of the specifics listed above, which actually makes it easier to fit into the mystery bird category. 
    Like I said earlier, birding, if done only for the bird count, can get rather frustrating and intense. That’s why birders are often seen pulling out a PEZ® dispenser and popping a few Valiums. 
    Lorraine and I have compiled an impressive list of mystery birds. We have traveled all over the U.S., or most of it, including Hawaii, seeking out mystery birds. We’ve been to Canada, Mexico, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Bahamas, Costa Rico, Brazil, Europe, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Japan. A few of these destinations were not specifically birding trips, but even so we usually managed to stumble on some mystery birds. 
   A mystery-bird list looks something like this: the date, location, the specific characteristics, and then these notations. It wasn’t a _____, it wasn’t a _______, it wasn’t a _____. The blanks of course contain the names of specific birds that your mystery bird looks something like, but isn’t. 
    Our life list of mystery birds is impressive. A list such as ours is not acquired without dedication, perseverance, and a somewhat slovenly approach to bird watching in general. Even then it can be a lot of hard work. If you’re not ready to take this attitude toward mystery-bird watching, then maybe mystery-bird watching isn’t for you.