I really enjoy everyone's enjoyment of the birds they are seeing. I love this thread.
***
I have a little story. Not about a bird that I saw, but it's amazing.
My husband and I have been doing field research on birds on a Caribbean island for years and years, but a few years ago, the research program (which involved a lot of scientists in addition to us) was shut down. However, the island owners invited a few researchers from the group to stay on and keep working on specialized projects, and we were among the handful. We did that for a couple more years, but were hesitant to set up years-long study goals (which are much preferable to 1-2-year studies). Then I also had some health issues that prevented me from being fit enough to do the work, so we didn't go for a couple of years. Then, in 2017, the island was blasted by back-to-back Category 5 hurricanes, which devastated it and all the neighboring islands.
The anthropogenic devastation was, of course, widely reported on and was horrifying. One person we knew was killed in the storm, many lost their homes. Needless to say, we couldn't go down to do research that year, but the spotty reports we got of the bird populations in the aftermath were gut-wrenching. Every leaf was stripped from every tree in the island chain, vegetation didn't start to reemerge for 3 weeks afterward...most of the birds presumably died outright, but any nectar-, fruit-, and insect-eating birds that survived promptly began starving (carnivorous or omnivorous birds such as thrashers and cuckoos could presumably eat the dying ones). The forests were devastated, with tons of huge, mature tall-canopy trees down, etc. The day we got some aerial photos sent to us from an emergency aid flyover, I had to go to our office bathroom to have a nice, big crying jag.
A few months ago, with the island infrastructure back up and running, we got word that the island owners wanted us to come down and do inventory to see how the various bird populations were doing in the aftermath. I was not able to go for reasons too tiresome to go into, but we managed to rustle up a friend who had previously done work on the island's endangered iguanas, so he and my husband went down a few weeks ago.
The first few days, I would wait tensely every evening for reports on what they were seeing. About half the backcountry trails were totally impassable, debris in the understory blocking visibility all over the island, etc. As expected, fruit-, insect-, and nectar-eating species were nearly wiped out. Omnivorous species' numbers seemed down, too, but not nearly as much. Iguana numbers (thankfully they are also omnivorous) also appeared down but stable, and with a decent number of hatchlings.
So bad, but not as bad as I'd been dreading.
But the very first day of mist-netting to trap birds, my husband caught THIS bird, already banded. A tiny, unassuming, 18-gram resident flycatcher, that my husband had previously banded...on the 15th of October 2005. People, 2005!!!!! This bird was AT LEAST 14 years old (astounding for such a tiny animal), and had survived at least 4 hurricanes hitting his home, including the two 2017 monsters.
My husband said he has rarely felt so humbled as when he was privileged to hold this tough little bird again for a couple of minutes. And I cried, from happiness this time, when he sent me the news. I hadn't realized how bottled up I'd kept my worry about the island fauna until that moment. Ah, it looks as though my shriveled, cynical soul CAN be touched, after all. THIS is the kind of thing that makes me want to keep fighting what usually seems like a pointless effort against humanity's constant assault on the planet's ecology. Little things like this amazing little bird, just going about its life in the face of catastrophic destruction...
As my husband often says, 'Anyone who doesn't believe in magic just isn't bothering to look for it.'
Behold...Methuselah.
