By Rachel Hudson
As the woman sitting on the airplane seat next to me accidentally elbowed my side and woke me up for the umpteenth time, I briefly entertained the idea of what would happen were I to actually lose my mind and let myself snap halfway into my tenth and final plane ride within the last four weeks. I groggily envisioned my quiet, reserved self suddenly standing up and ranting and raving about how I’d had enough of it all and just wanted to be far, far away from all the insanity. After a light chuckle—No way I would ever do that, nor could I even raise my voice to do so, I thought—I tried my best to curl into a tight ball against the wall of the plane, carefully leaning far enough sideways to avoid being elbowed by the person next to me, far enough forward to not have my spine jabbed by the person kicking the seat behind me, and far enough backward to avoid having the top of my skull cracked open (for the fourth time) by the person in front of me, who periodically leaned backward in his seat so violently that the dinner tray latch kept impaling my head as I tried to sleep. I also had to avoid my beloved window, for the sun was blazing right into it at that time of day, and I was forced to carefully balance my jacket between myself and the closed window shutter to keep it from being burned.
This hadn’t exactly been my favorite flight of them all, but it did give me an odd sort of clarity in my drowsy musings of what all had transpired on my Grandest Adventure. Sure, this flight may have been rough, but did it hold a candle to having an automatically flushing toilet with a broken sensor repeatedly flush itself, spraying me with its water, as I miserably sat in an airport stall with a violently bloody nose that wouldn’t stop? What about having to hike up a steep trail at 5,000 feet above sea level three times over two days because I’d missed my target Life Bird by mere minutes each time… all while suffering from crippling allergies and a severe lack of oxygen in my body? Or perhaps having to bird on the run while sprinting through what should have been a lovely patch of trees and wildflowers on the Gulf Coast… but what was instead overrun with beefy mosquitoes an inch long that could easily keep pace with (and persistently bite) a running human in the stiff ocean breeze?
As I remembered my least favorite experiences of the journey, I caught my heart longing for my home, which I’d only seen for a brief couple of days in between one set of flights in the last month. I realized that I had been taking many things for granted for years, such as refrigerated filtered water, my “Little Pillow” that I’d slept with since 7th Grade, noise-canceling over-ear headphones, power outlets that worked, my own car… even the ability to sit for an extended period of time without being moved sounded like Heaven to me.
But, my tired brain reminded me, weren’t you just crying a few hours ago because you had to leave?
Well… yes, I was. I was sad to leave my family, my fiancé, and all the beautiful new landscapes, birds, flowers, and animals, and return to my “regularly scheduled life” after a month of adventures. And what incredible adventures they had been…!
To start with, I had traveled to Scotland for my very first time to explore the Glasgow area and part of the coastline with my beloved partner (now fiancé, as he proposed to me during that trip after an incredible experience getting to hold and fly several species of owls together at the Scottish Owl Centre). We saw so many amazing birds on our adventures; I got to watch as my first Northern Gannet bent its wings backward and plummeted into the ocean right in front of us! I got to hear the never-ending songs of European Robins, Eurasian Wrens, and Dunnocks for the very first time! I got to watch as a Carrion Crow harassed a Common Buzzard that had flown too close to the crow’s nest, a Eurasian Skylark belted out its song from up in the clouds then plummeted back down to Earth, a Great Crested Grebe shook its luscious locks in the breeze, and a pair of huge Great Spotted Woodpeckers quietly crept through an old forest.
One of the most amazing things I noticed while birding in Scotland was the parallel between the birds of Scotland and the birds of the Pacific Northwest. On my first full day there, I noted something that sounded for all the world like a finch to me… and sure enough, it was a European Greenfinch. A bit later, I heard calls from what I was certain was a pair of Bushtits; therefore, I started looking for their Scottish equivalent, the Long-tailed Tit. As I looked around, I saw that a pair of Long-taileds was indeed right there, dangling from the small tree next to me. They were cuter and fluffier and rounder, shockingly, than our little gray balls of happiness we know and love here. From then on, I trusted my instincts and my thorough knowledge of bird calls from the Pacific Northwest. Scotland is, after all, extremely similar in climate to Western Washington. Rain and mild temperatures are the year-round norm, the rocky coast is never far away, buttery yellow Gorse and Scotch Broom (which are native, important habitats for birds in Scotland) cover the hillsides and road edges, and many birds that live there behave just like ours do.
In the Pacific Northwest, when we enter a forest, we will often hear the bubbling song of the Pacific Wren; in Scotland, the trees can erupt with the similar bubbling song of the Eurasian Wren, which looks just like our tiny Pacific Wren. Well-kept lawns here in Washington are home to many American Robins, which are known for their habit of creeping about for a few steps, standing upright and watching/listening, and then repeating the process, sometimes freezing and staring intently at the ground before stabbing downwards and pulling up a large earthworm. In Scotland, our American Robin’s equivalent is the Eurasian Blackbird, another Turdus thrush which is, in essence, a robin painted jet-black, with the same mannerisms as the robins we know here. Backyard habitats and birdfeeders in Washington are magnets for American Goldfinches and various types of Chickadees; neighborhoods and feeders in Scotland attract European Goldfinches and several members of the Scottish “Chickadee-equivalents”, the tits: Great Tits, Eurasian Blue Tits, and sometimes Coal Tits. Mere minutes after I’d correctly identified the calls of Long-tailed Tits without ever having seen or heard one before, my ears picked up the seemingly unmistakable high-pitched calls of a Golden-crowned Kinglet. In Scotland, the Golden-crowned Kinglet’s equivalent would be the Goldcrest, a tiny bird that looks almost identical to our version. With that knowledge, I searched the tall evergreen treetops for my quarry and was once again proven correct, as I saw a Goldcrest flit around at the canopy, just like our kinglets do.
As my time in Scotland progressed, I continued to marvel at every single thing I experienced there, regardless of how familiar it all seemed to be. Eurasian Jackdaws, smallish crow-like birds with white eyes and gray napes, frequently walked around where American Crows would have back home, and I delighted in stalking them and taking their pictures. I was thrilled to bits when I found a pair of Eurasian Nuthatches walking upside-down on a dead log in a forest… sound familiar? The Eurasian Coots were so obvious and barely distinguishable from our American version that I was eagerly spotting them from public transport windows, and when a Gray Heron snuck up behind my fiancé and I, I lost all composure as a birder and started taking scores of pictures of the Great Blue lookalike as it calmly walked past. Even Scotland’s pigeons were exciting to me… outside the cities, the most commonly encountered pigeon was the Common Wood-Pigeon (aptly named), a large and spectacularly handsome bird that reminded me of our Band-taileds.
I started to realize that, to the casual observer, I was going nuts over things that were so ordinary, so “plain and boring”… but to me, these things were spectacular, new, exciting, and beautiful. As I spoke of my birds back home, I often found myself saying, “It’s just exactly like your this, only this one little detail is different.” If that was the case, with so many of Scotland’s birds being so very similar to all the species I knew from Washington, why was everything so thrilling? I’d taken thousands upon thousands of photographs of only 70 species, many of which were “lookalike birds” to ones from the Pacific Northwest… Aside from the “New Life Bird!” factor, what was so enchanting about it all?
I wouldn’t begin to appreciate what was happening until a few days later, on my first-ever trip to Arizona, for a solid week of nonstop birding….
To be continued next month…
Photo credit: All photos taken by Rachel Hudson. First collage, clockwise from top left: Northern Gannet, Great Tit, European Goldfinch, Common Wood-Pigeon, Great Crested Grebe, Long-tailed Tit. Second collage, clockwise from top left: Eurasian Coot, Eurasian Wren, Eurasian Blackbird, Eurasian Nuthatch, Common Buzzard being chased by a Carrion Crow, Gray Heron.
