Coincidence

I had a good bird day today.

I saw an American Goldfinch perched on a tall stem of grass on my drive to work. (I’ve been seeing them more and more lately, most often on my drives to and from work, but occasionally one will pause on the sand near the edge of the lake where I lifeguard.) While I was sitting on the stand, across the lake a Bald Eagle—the first one I’ve seen this summer—swooped down to grab a fish out of the water, then flew to the northwest edge of the lake. I only briefly glimpsed its white head, but its white tail caught the sun’s light as it flew away. Another bird I’ve never seen before (which makes it harder for me to identify—was it a warbler? a female tanager?) landed on the sand in front of the lake before flying into a tree on the lake’s edge. (It’s even harder to identify the birds that make appearances at the lake because I’m supposed to be watching the people in the water, not the birds nearby.)

But the best was the Eastern Bluebird that I saw as soon as I arrived at the lake. I was sitting in my car, listening to my music while waiting for another guard to arrive with a key to the building. As one song was ending on my iPod shuffle, a Bluebird flew toward me and landed a few parking spaces away in the otherwise empty parking lot. The sun caught the blue in its wings; it was striking to me how blue this bird was. I’ve seen Bluebirds before, and several at the park where I work, but I had never seen one so brilliantly blue. I was contemplating this, and watching the bird as it tried to eat whatever lay in front of it, when the next song began on my shuffle. “One morning when I was riding in my old pick-up truck, a beautiful bluebird came flying down…” Of some 6,000 songs on my iPod, what are the chances that this song—one I actually did not know existed before this morning—came on, just as I was watching the very same bird? Neil Young goes on to sing about the “beautiful bluebird” and how he has “never seen that blue before.” I watched the bluebird in the parking lot for the duration of the song, marveling at the coincidence and the beauty of both the bird and the song, until it flew away, just as the song ended, as one of my coworkers arrived.


Photo from allaboutbirds.org
As I was watching the Bluebird, I remembered an ornithologist I knew while in Australia telling me that North American birds were “boring”—I assumed he meant that they were not as large and colorful as Australia’s rainforest birds. With our many drab-colored birds, I didn’t think very much about his comment. But after watching the royal-blue bird today, the bright yellow goldfinch, the olive/yellow unidentified bird, and the magnificent eagle, I wondered how he could have said such a thing. In behavior and appearance, these birds were anything but boring. They were beautiful—it was a good bird day.