Global Big Day

I am a big believer in Global Big Day, a birding event created by ebird that normally happens the second Saturday in May. For Big Day, birders around the world take to their favorite patches or hotspots, and try to count as many birds as possible. The last few years, we, as a collective of obsessive hobbyists, have counted more than half of the world’s species of birds in a single day! I think this is an amazing accomplishment, and something that technology has made possible. I’m a real troglodyte with most of the technology, but ebird really does make this window into the population of the birds of the world accessible to everyone with access to the internet.

My big day started at a local hotspot called Mills Pond. Mills Pond is little more than a neighborhood running trail that encircles a creek that is absolutely overgrown with poison ivy. Most of the year, the birds there are extremely basic, but for the last few weeks of April and the beginning of May, it is absolutely popping with migrants. I’m not sure why exactly, certainly the abundance of mulberry trees helps, and perhaps the poison ivy (which does not make birds itch like it does humans) ensures that the birders and joggers maintain their distance, but whatever the reason, Mills is amazing.

I had already been twice earlier in the week, and saw nothing new for my year.

The irony of birding somewhere popular like Mills Pond on Global Big Day is that the data isn’t nearly as useful as birding somewhere unpopular. To truly get a snapshot of the world, it’s best to gather data from an area with no other birders. Often, this means a walk in my neighborhood, but this week, an extremely rare individual showed up at another hotspot, so promising my wife to change the tire on the car as I went out, I headed to Hornsby Bend.

Hornsby Bend is a human sludge treatment plant, and one of the best places to bird in the United States. It’s situated in a bend in the river, and has a forest trail and huge hay fields, though the main draw is the three evaporation ponds at the center of the facility, as well as the massive concrete area where they mix yard trimmings (think shredded leaves and branches) with processed human turds. Over a few months of decomposition, this mix becomes compost. While that happens, birds by the thousands are attracted to this incredibly nutrient-dense buffet. Birds eat the insects and invertebrates that feed on microorganisms that feed on the bacteria that feed on the nutrients that our digestive systems leave behind.

The morning of Big Day, someone had seen a Whimbrel. Whimbrels are not all that rare in the world, but they are amazing. They are a long-distance migrant. They spend their summers in the farthest reaches of the arctic, and their winters on the southern coasts of North America. They are not unusual to see in Galveston or Padre Island in the winter.

But I had never seen one in Travis County.

I arrived at Hornsby bend in the afternoon and immediately began scanning the flabbergasting amount of birds. To say there were thousands is to undersell what I was witnessing. The mudflats of one of the ponds was absolutely choked with birds. Thousands of tiny least sandpipers probed the mud, no doubt hiding other peeps among their multitudes. Between them moved pectoral sandpipers, lesser yellow legs and stilt sandpipers. I quickly honed in on the white-faced ibis, carefully checking the pattern on each of their faces for an errant glossy ibis, another coastal resident. Black terns flew about in the sky, another resident of the coast, that only sometimes comes inland.  But hardly any birders. From a Big Day perspective, this was a better place to gather data than Mills Pond had been.

Even if there was no Whimbrel.

Many of the shorebirds I just listed are difficult to tell apart. They are all painted in shades of white, gray and tan. They all have barring on their backs. The relative length of their bills and wings can be used to tell them apart, but even after nearly ten years of birding, this is not easy.

The Whimbrel should have been different. Instead of a long straight bill, it has a decurved shape, like a crescent moon. It’s larger than most shorebirds as well. Which is to say, I should have been able to find it on my own.

But it was not until another pair of birders arrived that I found it. Here I was, thinking I was doing them a favor. I had spotted a Hudsonian Godwit mixed in with the abundant shorebirds, another rarity, though one I had seen before in Travis County. I pointed it out as it flew over head.

“Is that the Whimbrel?” they asked, difficult as the bird was to see in flight.

“Godwit.” I replied. “I’m looking for the Whimbrel, but no luck yet.”

“Oh, we just saw it from our car!”

They eagerly turned me around, and there, close enough to see the curved shape of its bill without my binoculars, was the bird! It stood in the water pooled around the mountains of decomposing waste; its silhouette distinctive. Not two feet away was the godwit that had flown over.

I raised my binoculars to better take in the Whimbrel’s subtly striped face, and its special bill.

What a day to contribute to science!