Stakeout!

When I was a kid, I'd watch (in black and white) the daily 4:30 (pm) movie on over-the-air TV, the only kind we had back then. The movies would be cut up to fit into 90 minutes including commercials. One type of movie I enjoyed was the gangster film, usually with Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart in his pre-"Casablanca" days.

"Black-headed Grosbeak male" by K Schneider is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Usually, there would be one scene where the cops (or the feds) would be in a car or van outside where the gangsters were holing up, waiting for someone to arrive or depart. This would be the "stakeout" scene.

Recently, I was part of a stakeout. It didn't involve criminals but one particular bird.

The black-headed grosbeak is a bird of the west. Like its relatives the evening grosbeak and the rose-breasted grosbeak, this bird has a large, thick bill for crunching seeds. A male, like the bird seen above (not the bird of this stakeout), had been reported at the feeder of a house not that far from mine, as the crow flies.

Whenever an "accidental" bird shows up, it makes me wonder how that happened. Was it caught up in the recent strong winds and blown too far east? That is most likely. But who really knows? What is known is that once the bird was reported, birders came running to the house. The owner, who was kind enough to publicize the bird's sudden appearance at his feeder, allowed people to walk up his driveway and wait for the bird to appear. From what I gather from the number of the eBird reports I read, quite a number of people did in the first weekend.

I waited until mid-week, once I determined how to get to this particular house in the hills of Morris Township, NJ.

I arrived with one man as several people left. The bird was coming at 45-min. intervals and had left 10 minutes before, we were told. We walked up the driveway to find a couple sitting on folding chairs. They had seen the bird but were staying because they had driven all the way up from Forked River, about 35 miles away, and wanted to see more.

Roseate spoonbill, 2018 (Margo D. Beller)

This is the first thing I learned about a stakeout: bring a chair. Luckily, the woman wanted to stand and I wound up in her chair for the next hour and 10 minutes. Others showed up as we sat and tallied the other birds in the yard: purple finches, house finches, robins, titmice, among others. Two men had cameras on tripods supporting very large and long telephoto lenses. I can understand them wanting a record of a rare bird sighting. One man said he had come up from Metuchen, not as far as Forked River but not close by either.

I have mixed feelings about seeing these accidentals. While it is nice to see these birds close to home, I wonder what happens to them next. Usually it is only one bird that arrives and many times it is a juvenile. It is on its own in a strange place and won't be mating. One hopes that if it survives it will use the maps in its head to get back to its usual territory.

However, now I don't have to go west to see a black-headed grosbeak, just as I don't have to go south to see a roseate spoonbill or white pelican or to Europe to see a northern lapwing.

When the grosbeak arrived, it was high in an oak tree, eating seeds. When I saw it from below I thought it was a robin at first, until I saw the white on the wing, which a robin lacks. I pointed it out and everyone hurriedly trained their cameras or binoculars on it. Unfortunately for my neck and the photo people, the bird stayed high and did not come to the feeder where it would've provided a striking picture. I watched it for 10 minutes until I could take no more of the pain in my neck. I thanked the man for his chair and he thanked me for being first to see the bird.

I took my leave even as others were arriving. The bird was seen for the rest of that week and into the next weekend. Now, according to what I see on the bird lists today, it left as suddenly as it appeared. My hope is it flew to a more hospitable environment and will give other people a chance to see something wondrous.