The Tick-Hunters vs. The Feathered Elvis

                                    

                                          
Well, if I wasn't allowed to sell my food, I'd just have to give it away. So I changed my sign to read "Free Food!*"
                          
And then added a second sign, "*(with purchase of poem)." 
                          
I guess you could say my poetry was the Acme anvil hanging over the free bird seed.
                          
Taking a cue from Wile E. Coyote, I went down the road a-ways and put up another sign: "Poetry Ahead!" Then a little ways further: "Get Your Free Food and 'Free Verse' Down the Road!" And where the Old Mill Road met up with Route 7: "← Turn Left for the Poetry!" (But even if you turned right, you wouldn't get far before you came to a sign that read, "Turn Back for the Poetry!")
                          
The whole day I never saw a single car, but I did cross paths with an interesting bunch of folks who seemed dressed for a safari. They wore big floppy hats, pouches, packs, canteens, binoculars, and cameras. They'd tucked their pants into their socks. Their clothes had a lot more pockets than were ordinarily worn in polite society. I'd met their kind before, though I'd never seen them travel in flocks: bird-watchers. Or, rather, to use the polite term, "birders." (The starling photographer had tried to explain the whole bird-watcher/birder distinction to me. I gathered it was nearly as contentious as the great Trekkie/Trekker divide.)
                          
Now, I don't know the pecking order of the bird-watching community, but the oldest man in the group apparently considered himself, if not in charge, then certainly much cooler than the rest of the bunch. He proudly introduced himself as a "lifelong birder" and then grumbled about being stuck with this gaggle of "mere chasers and tick-hunters." Among the others there was a bit of eye-rolling and arm-crossing. I think they were all joking but it was hard to be sure.
                          
The leader showed me a flyer with a little yellow and gray songbird on it and said, "Have you seen this bird?" Everyone stared at me, eager and unblinking. I felt like I was being asked to lead a posse to a wanted fugitive.
                          
"No," I said cautiously. "What did it do?" 
                          
"We're looking for it."
                          
"Is it lost?"
                          
The birders all looked at one another, exchanging sad smiles and head-shakes. "That, my friend, is the million dollar question," the leader said. "This is Bachman's warbler!"
                          
"Who's Bachman?"
                          
"Reverend Bachman," he said, not really clearing that up for me. "Look again, please, would you? Look carefully."
                          
I looked. "I'm sorry, I don't think I've seen it."
                          
"Maybe you've heard it, then? Its song is a bit unusual."
                          
I asked how the song went, expecting him to whistle a tune.
                          
Several of the birders pulled out cell phones and started thumb-wrestling the screens. Soon each phone played a recording that sounded kind of like a cicada or a tree frog. Apparently everyone had the same recording, because it played as a round. It was the "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" of bird songs.
                          
"That sound. Have you heard that sound?" the leader said, a bit desperately.
                          
I told him that, in fact, I thought I had.
                          
At once, the birders became as hyper as caked-up kids at a birthday party, all of them asking me, Really? You have? When, when?
                          
"Just a few minutes ago," I said. "Over that way."
                          
And everyone deflated.
                          
"Oh. That was us."
                          
They explained that they'd been calling to the bird, trying to lure it out of hiding, if indeed it was there at all. They said this with quiet, abashed voices, like it was not quite a proper thing to do. Bachman's warbler, they explained, had not been seen since the Kennedy administration and was thought to be extinct. There had been a rumored sighting during the Carter years and another rumored sighting during the Reagan years, and nothing since. I wondered about the birders' fixation with presidents.
                          
"And then, two days ago, this hits the forums." One of the birders showed me, on her phone, a blurry photo of a tiny yellowish smudge in a dark forest. "See there?" she said. "That was taken by a fly-fisherman in Elsedale."
                          
I looked closer. It resembled one of those vague pictures you see of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
                          
"Hmm," I said.
                          
"I know, right?" she said. "Guy swears up and down it's Bachman's. 'Might be a bad photo but I saw it with my own two eyes,' the guy says. Well, he's no bird expert."
                          
"Fishermen," the birders chorused with varying amounts of skepticism and disdain.
                          
"Fishermen," I agreed (though on what, I wasn't sure).
                          
"Of course what we don't want is the ivory-billed woodpecker fiasco all over again," the chief birder said.
                          
"Heaven forbid," they all agreed solemnly.
                          
"But if this is real . . . if this is really real, it could be the last Bachman's warbler in existence."
                          
"Talk about a mega-tick," said one woman, who looked a bit birdlike herself.
                          
"This goes way beyond a mega-tick," said another. "We're talking 'feathered Elvis' level."
                          
I said, "What're you going to do if you find it?" 
                          
The group looked at me like I was an idiot. "Collect it," the leader said.
                          
The rest of the group mmm-hmmed in agreement. 
                          
"Collect it?!" I said. I must have looked horrified, because they all jumped in to explain.
                          
"With pictures. And up here," several of them said, pointing to their temples. 
                          
"And then, I guess . . . cry," the birdlike woman said. 
                          
The others nodded solemnly.
                          
I thought of all these people walking through the woods playing the clip of birdsong, the one fragment of a lyric that was all that remained of the Bachman's warbler civilization. Maybe there really was a single bird left, and it had not heard from another of its kind for years, wondering how it had gotten so lost and alone. What would it think if suddenly the woods were filled with songs of its kind? Would its little bird heart swell with joy and relief? Would he answer, "Hey guys! Where've you been! Oh my God, I've looked everywhere!"—only to hear the same meaningless phrase echoed again and again? And when the bird understood it had been duped, how could it bear the disappointment? Imagine being the last person on Earth with no one to talk to but a See 'n Say.
                          
I wanted to ask the birders if they knew that old Bradbury story about the lonely old dinosaur and the foghorn. I wanted to ask them not to play that birdsong anymore. To please not get the poor bird's hopes up if it's out there. But before I could, a cheerful burst of whistles and trills sang out from the woods, and the birders all raised their binoculars and swiveled toward the sound.
                          
"Summer tanager," they said together like a Greek chorus.
                          
Without another word to me, they all crept off toward the whistling song, snap-snap-snapping pictures like bird paparazzi, and vanished into the forest.
                          
It wasn't until after they were gone that I finally realized what I should have bought at the electronics store with my gift card.