It’s a classic birding bummer — sometimes a rare bird comes to light too late for birders to see it, to the chagrin of those who missed out. Usually, it’s a non-birder with a camera going through old photos, then putting a photo on social media. Case in point, the other day someone sent me a secondhand photo of a real doozy, a Yellow-nosed Albatross, that someone took up in Truro over 3 years ago, but never shared with anyone. With less than 10 previous state records, many a birder longs to add this rare ocean wanderer to their life list. But I’m not here to talk about this albatross — today’s bird-that-got-away makes that albatross look like a pigeon in rarity terms. And how it came to light makes the story even harder to believe.
One day, Provincetown Independent reporter, sharp young birder, and Zyg associate Will von Herff was at the house when he and his girlfriend Cassie noticed a commotion in the bird bath – the Black-chinned Hummingbird, itself one of the rarest birds currently in the northeast, was attacking a brown songbird as it tried to bathe – it appeared to be a super-rare-for-winter Indigo Bunting!
So here on a cold January day, during an old-fashioned frigid winter, were two birds that should have long-since headed to Central America fighting over a heated bird bath. I later saw and photographed the same bunting when I eventually went to see the hummingbird. The bill looked weird to me, but I chalked it up to the obvious missing face feathers as the bird was heavily molting. I picked a few of my photos to go with my eBird report and, like Will, passed it off as an Indigo Bunting. Stay with me here.
Eventually, uber-birder and eBird reviewer Jeremiah Trimble texted me to ask “what’s up with that bunting in P’town,” prompting me to go back and look at my photos. I was aware I had not really done enough to eliminate Lazuli Bunting, unlikely though that would be. After a day of obsessively reviewing photos of brown plumaged buntings, it dawned on me that this bird, with its odd, parrot-like curved bill and plain brown wings, was a Varied Bunting, an obscure Mexican/southwestern cousin to the better-known Indigo and Painted Buntings. This would be a first East Coast record, so I needed some reinforcements. I sent my photos to field guide author David Sibley, who, with uncharacteristically liberal use of exclamation points, agreed with the absurd conclusion that this was a Varied Bunting. I suspect Jeremiah figured this out before I did, though he never said.
What followed among the small number of confidants who knew about these two birds was a level of secrecy that the witness protection program would have considered excessive. But the street had no parking, no shoulder, and no sidewalk. A longer than average pickup truck in the driveway would block half a lane of traffic. There was no way to watch the bird from outside the house that maintained any semblance of privacy. As such, there was no good way to make this bird public. Even posting without the name and address was rejected, as some, who I will call the “stalkers” are in the habit of googling up the address of those hosting rare birds not explicitly made public, and they could have connected the previous hummingbird report to this bunting.
In January, the hummingbird that started all this disappeared. Amazingly, a Black-throated Blue-Warbler visited the hummingbird feeder a few days later, a third improbable rarity at the same small house in the same winter. All the birds are gone now, which I suspect will ruffle more than a few feathers of those who didn’t know about the bunting. I know the feeling. I was lucky this time as this all played out at the house of a friend, but there has been many a secret rare bird, some very close to my house even, that I never heard about.
So I will leave you with the advice I have given ad nauseum — keep those hummingbird feeders up into winter. Because you never know when yours might attract the state’s tenth record of Black-chinned Hummingbird that will then fight with an Indigo Bunting that wasn’t actually an Indigo Bunting but instead the first East Coast record of a Varied Bunting and then eventually also a Black-throated Blue Warbler. Well, maybe not that exact scenario, but you get the idea…
