Adele erguson-My Walking Bird

I didn’t see anything in the newspapers I take about The Great Backyard Bird Count but it probably takes awhile to compile the results.

The GBBC has been done in the middle of February for 16 years where volunteers go out nationwide and count and list the various wild birds they see over a weekend. It’s sponsored by Cornell University and the Audubon Society.

It once in awhile makes news when somebody reports seeing a rare bird believed to be extinct and the bird watching community goes nuts over it. Especially if the reporter had managed to take a picture of it.

Birders travel far and wide to go to the area where the rare bird has been reported to try to catch a glimpse of one. My relatives in Denmark have been lifelong bird watchers and planned their vacations around trips to places to see various birds. They were thrilled when they came here a couple of times and got to see the eagles and the vast numbers of wild ducks that used to congregate out front on Admiralty Inlet.

The ducks are fairly rare now, and I have no idea where they went. They’re just gone. I don’t know the part eagles played in their disappearance although I read and have seen the way eagles catch ducks for their meals. They swoop down on a floating duck which goes under and they keep doing it until the duck drowns, in which case the eagle snatches the body in its claws and sits on a tree branch just off my deck and eats it.

Anyway, I have never taken part in the Bird Count but I may report to them about my Walking Bird which all winter has met me each morning when I go down to the road to pick up my newspapers. It has become my habit to sit on a log and eat an apple before taking the papers up to the house. Back in December I was joined one morning by what turned out to be a male rufous towhee, a member of the American finch family. Or so the dictionary describes it. Black head and neck, black back with rusty red side feathers and white markings. Cream breast. Almost the size of a robin.

I had been leaving my apple cores for my flying squirrels which live in a big cedar tree adjacent to my log and the driveway. One day the towhee showed up. Now, it could see the white core through the now leafless blackberry vines but couldn’t fly through them to get to where the core was. No problem. The towhee would walk or run behind me down the length of the log, go around the end and walk back up to where I threw the apple cores. I began leaving smaller pieces with the core which the towhee gobbled up.

It ‘s usually waiting for me each day although if I am late, it may be in an apple tree across the driveway but when it sees me walking down it flies across, walks through the brush, runs down the length of the log to arrive at the feeding spot just as I do.

Snow which I get very seldom, living in the Sequim belt, and rain doesn’t discourage my Walking Bird, although it was a little spooked at the large red umbrella I carry at those times. One day it was spooked by a vole which was after the apple core but I shooed it off and haven’t seen it since. The core disappears each day.

One of my neighbors who’s a road walker identified the vole for me. I hadn’t seen my Walking Bird yet that morning, I told him, but he’s probably afraid of you and hiding out until you leave.

“He’s right behind you,” said the neighbor, and sure enough there he was, marking time until it was just him and me and as soon as the neighbor walked off, he scampered around the log and dived into his daily feast.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)

This column was previously published. Adele has taken a break.