My busy life means bird info here is usually only updated monthly, but we have a quick special edition today to mark my first successful twitch. Introducing the Bullock’s Oriole (Icterus bullockii) a beautifully coloured insect-eater that also has a taste for orange halves and grape jelly, like its distant cousin, the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula).
For those not familiar with birding slang, to “twitch” is to respond to a report of a rare bird sighting by jumping from the couch and heading out as soon as possible to catch sight of the creature and get it on one’s life list. In their zealous drive for ever more birds, twitchers are often treated with disdain by “serious birders” and accused of all sorts of anti-social behaviour, such as trespassing and even endangering their targets. I don’t mind the twitchers I’ve encountered in my favourite birding park, though I can understand the temptation to get snobby about them. I can always tell there’s some kind of special bird about just by the number of long lenses being unpacked in the parking lot. For me birding is a long walk enhanced by birds. Twitching just seems like too much work.
The classic upside-down slurp of an oriole at a jelly feeder.
I generally don’t twitch myself, out of a combination of laziness and lack of time. I do follow various bird alert email lists and Facebook groups, so I am aware of when and where rarities appear near me. But I’ve learned from experience that near me has to me really very near to me or the impulse to see a new bird can easily give way to a cup of tea and a good book.
But a couple evenings ago, I saw a report of a Bullock’s Oriole in Toronto’s High Park. I live not far at all from High Park. In fact, my parents were married in a church just a block from that wonderful green space; I used to live right beside it back in my student days; and, I still own my High Park T-Ball Coaching Staff shirt from when my now adult kids played there every Wednesday evening from spring to late summer. A twitch to High Park could be accomplished on the way to work. Easy peasy.
Range map of the Bullock’s Oriole (thanks to Cornell’s All About Birds site) showing this bird doesn’t get much into Canada at all, and certainly not to Ontario in the east.
And so, here she is. The female Bullock’s Oriole, a western native who should not have wandered much farther east than the Wyoming/South Dakota border, but who somehow found her way to a stand of loaded oriole feeders near Lake Ontario’s north shore. It is said the Bullock’s and the Baltimore Oriole often interbreed and hybridize at the edges of their territories, and they were once considered a single species. But this bird does not play baseball, and probably has no appetite for soft-shell crab from the Chesapeake Bay.
Delicious grape jelly is a quick hit of energy for the insect hunt.
As I joined the small huddle on the edge of the park, and worked my way quietly into position for some photos, I chatted with an older fellow who had driven all the way into the city from Cambridge, Ontario, about an hour and half to the west. To be where he was when he was looking at the Bullock’s, he must have left his house well before dawn. Now that’s a twitcher.
Safe travels, little friend.