World Bird Wednesday LXXXIV

In Pursuit of the Yellow Headed Black Bird

    Two years ago I was chatting with a lady who owned a sport fishing business along the marshy shoreline of Saginaw Bay. Day after day she experienced the comings and goings of this great bird flyway in a passive sense, not studying it exactly, but being surrounded by such rich avian life she was privy to tons of anecdotal information. She told me about the strange Yellow-headed black birds she would occasionally see. I was intrigued. As much as I bum around the back roads and marshes of the Saginaw Valley you'd think I'd have heard of such an interesting photographic prospect. I immediately put her marshy address on my list of birding hot spots and returned often in hopes of catching a glimpse of this bird. I never got lucky.
    The years passed, and the cycles of migration came and went without me getting a look at a creature my research showed should be at hand. It remained an itch that would not be scratched until last week when I came by some information purporting to give the location of the largest colony of Yellow-headed black birds in the Saginaw Bay watershed. In my minds eye I began to conjure a magnificent WBW entry replete with gorgeously detailed portraits of it's brightly contrasted plumage.
    I readied a thermos of coffee and a half dozen cinnamon apple cookies and thusly prepared, drove off in pursuit of the Yellow-headed black bird.
    As so often happens, fate had finer plans.

     I was seeing a scattering of high clouds and hoped I would be blessed with those thinly overcast skies that would give me a choice variety of lighting conditions. No luck there, the cloud cover dissipated into nothingness along the bay. There would be the stark shadows of a bright June sun to deal with.

    Very little bird life showed itself until, walking a dirt path along a dyke system about a mile and a half deep into the marsh, I saw a dead bush with a brood of Tree swallows perched on it's dry limbs. My presence did not stir them. Unfortunately the high ground of the dyke was not at a good angle to the sun so I began to swing wide out into the marsh and come up from the South-East to approach the swallows in harmony with the light. A little blood was being shed as pickers scraped my arms and legs. That was easy to ignore when adult swallows began flying in to feed the youngsters.

   My shutter speed was at a smoking 1/1600, ISO 400, @ f7.1 and as I was shaking and fumbling with focus issues I needed all that. I kept shooting and I kept moving in. The action was fast, the view exquisite. I had the elation of witnessing an extraordinary sight and at the same time a sick feeling in my stomach, brought there by the doubt that any of it was convincingly locked in my camera. 

   Sunburned and bleeding I walked back to my car thoroughly broiled by my experience, Yellow-headed black birds having been eclipsed by the common Tree swallow. I rewarded myself with coffee and cookies. Then what do you know...darting through the sky over the cattails at a mad pace I saw it's yellow head and black torso. I had time to swing the camera out for a couple of good clicks.

    I waited and prayed through the hot mid-day for a closer encounter but I would come no further this day and sailed my little car home content.

  

    "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

                                                                                                    Henry David Thoreau

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