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A Strange Yard Bird
If you are a birder, you probably keep a life list of all the birds you have ever seen. Many other birders keep a yard list of the birds they have found from within the boundaries of their yard. Others have lists for certain places the visit regularly, for each province, state and country they have visited. Still other carry listing to an extreme: birds you have heard at night, seen on TV, identified from a moving car. I’ve even heard of a list of birds identified while sitting on an outdoor latrine!
Moving back into better taste, I keep a yard list. I’m quite proud of some of the birds I have seen in it over the 17 years we have been living in the same place. We live about a block off the main commercial street in Port Alberni. The town isn’t very big and we are on the flats near the river and a municipal park with a creek in it. Still only the fourth record of a Northern Parula in British Columbia was in our yard. We have also had Ruffed Grouse, Red-naped Sapsucker, and Harris’s Sparrow. But I never even hoped to have a Common Murre as a yard bird.
Murres are related to Puffins. They spend all their time on the ocean. They fly like footballs. and they can’t take off from land. Heck, they can scarcely take off from water. They skitter across the surface until they get airborne. So why one would pick our front lawn to land on is quite beyond me. But there it was.
My wife saw it first. she said she thought it was a penguin at first (she’s not a birder). It was standing upright like one. They do this on thier breeding colonies.
Anyway I rescued it by picking it up and putting it into a cardboard box. It seemed healthy enough. No evidence of starvation. So we drove it to the boat ramp at the marina and let it go in the river. Oddly, it seemed reluctant to swim away from us. We had to coax it out into the current of the river. The last we saw of it was when it was floating down the river toward the ocean. I recorded the event on film….uh, pixels!
