May 26, 2016
Western Kingbird
Western Kingbird
It’s 4:00am.  I’m two steps out the door, headed for the greenbelt, hoping I’m not so early that I meet up with the lady walking her two surly Chows off the leash.  I pause, feeling a chill, consider going back for a lightweight pullover, then realize that’s nuts.  Yesterday was our first 100 degree day.  Even now, in this coolest part of the night just before sunrise, it’s at least in the low 60s.  I’ll work up a light sweat in a few blocks.  I move on, not a hint of dawn in the eastern sky above the Supes.

Up the berm to the path along the golf course, feeling yesterday in my quads.  Then I hear it—two sharp notes followed by a complex series of high pitched, high frequency phrases.  I smile, remembering it took me several years to figure out who was out here in late spring calling up the dawn with this distinctive song.

Western Kingbirds have seven recognizable vocal patterns.  This is their dawn song, sung by the males for thirty minutes before sunrise to advertise themselves, their territory, and their willingness to copulate.  It is not heard later in the day or in the evening, and it took me so long to associate the song with the species because I never saw them.  In the dog days of summer I never run the greenbelt in daylight when Western Kingbirds are about their business of breeding and raising a family.

It’s eerie how sounds punctuate the darkness of the night, and how the silence of the night magnifies their significance.  Little wonder, really, that ancient man found the night fraught with fear and danger and how, to this day, darkness still elevates our senses and erodes our confidence.  Every year in late autumn when the resident Great Horned Owls become territorial along the greenbelt, I still get a shiver up my spine the first time I hear a mated pair calling to one another.

North of El Dorado Park I hear another noise, distant at first but louder as I move in its direction, at once vaguely reminiscent, yet strangely disquieting as I search the darkness of the trail for a possible source.  Occasionally we hear train whistles mournful in the night along the tracks which pass miles south of us through Tempe.  This sound now is rhythmic, rising and falling, somewhat ominous, for sure nothing suggesting birdlife.  Perhaps boxcars moving over the rails down in Tempe . . . but probably some mythical beast, breathing hard, in and out, waiting for me in the trees. . . .

Just ahead on the path are seven huge Eucalyptus, rising perhaps a hundred feet over a fishing pond.  I am almost under them when it dawns on me, as first light breaks in the east, that this grove of giants has been used for years as a nighttime roost by Double-crested Cormorants.  Cormorants are common now in the greenbelt ponds, but though I am familiar with their guttural repertoire of coarse grunts and growls, they are generally a silent species, and I have never heard them make a racket like this!  Who knew?  Upwards to a hundred cormorants emitting, in unison from the darkness high above, a low, hoarse, ratcheting chorus of heavy breathing, a “dawn song” of sorts, a communal awakening to begin their fishing day.

Recovering my senses, I have to smile again--kingbirds and cormorants, birds of totally different habits and habitats, their names rarely spoken in the same paragraph, heard only but not seen, on the same day, before daylight.  Bizarre, even in the often surprising world of birding.

Double-crested Cormorant
Double-crested Cormorant