The illness came on like a vicious badger. Fever and chills, weariness deep in my bones. It wiped out the remainder of Sunday like a squeegee pulled across wet glass. When I arose Monday morning the fever was gone and so off to work I rode. On the way I encountered a rain squall and took cover for some time under a tree. About an hour after I finally reached the office, the chills returned with wicked vengeance. What strange ailment this was, with its unusual suite of symptoms. Shaking uncontrollably at my desk, I tapped out an SOS. As I waited for my rescuer to arrive, I suddenly recalled the tick bites I’d received while out birding a week and a half before. One of the ticks had eluded my attention for what may have been longer than the “safe” period for transmission. That’s right, Lyme disease. Cursory web searching revealed a match for my symptoms. Not typically one for alarmist self-diagnosis, I wanted to believe it was just coincidence, but the facts could not be ignored. At the clinic, I shared what information I had with the health professionals. They, too, could not look past the facts, although the blood work they performed pointed to a viral, not a bacterial infection. That was encouraging. To be safe, the doctor ordered a Lyme titer and antibiotic treatment to address the possibility of a non-coincidence. I went home and lived through two days of feeling sicker than I have in a long time. And then yesterday the scourge left as suddenly as it had arrived, like a dark mantle yanked from my body. I felt reborn. The test results have yet to come back. However, the Lyme titer typically doesn’t show positive until at least four weeks after a tick bite, and my bite occurred much more recently. So I may never know if I had the disease. I may never know the true cost I paid to finally find that bobolink.
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three days in the wilderness
Posted by sean on June 21, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/21/three-days-in-the-wilderness/
revoke my car privileges and drop me in a field somewhere, please
Rarely do I feel compelled to deconstruct my entire day in the space of a blog post, but today was um…special, shall we say? It started out normal enough. Armed with an unexpected day off, I crossed county lines with field glasses in hand to search for field birds. I had good intel on locations for breeding birds, and made haste for them. With windows rolled down, I heard the telltale robotic jingle-jangle of a Bobolink and navigated over to the shoulder. Out of the car in a flash, I first thought I’d been fooled by a nearby mockingbird attempting to hog the spotlight as usual, but then the bobolink himself flew overhead, tinkling and jingling to his heart’s content. He flew across the road and landed in a field, affording me adequate looks to get the day started off on the best foot. Nemesis bird comes home to roost! I moved on. I drove the country roads for about an hour and a half and found the birds to be generally cooperative. I saw and heard all my target birds for this trip. Meadowlarks were plentiful and I got a couple of stellar looks at them. Horned Larks were not as plentiful but I did spot a couple from a distance, and heard them elsewhere. I found a singing male Dickcissel perched on the exact section of power line where I found one last year…could it have been the same bird? In addition to these birds, I was also treated to great looks at several American Kestrels.
As I began to wind down my time, I returned once again to the site of the initial bobolink sighting to see if I could cop another look. As I navigated the car onto the opposite shoulder this time, the right front end suddenly sunk into a hidden ditch. When I got out of the car, I saw that the back left wheel was about 3 feet off the ground! As I assessed the seriousness of the situation, a man in a box truck drove up and offered assistance. We tried moving the car with him sitting in the hatch for balance (he was sorta stocky), but that didn’t work so he offered to seek out a farmer down the road with a chain, or failing that to call the sheriff’s office. While waiting around, I watched a bobolink groom himself while perched on a power line. Unfortunately my concern about the car impeded my joy at witnessing this scene. About 20 minutes later I was about to give up on Box Truck Man and call a tow truck when simultaneously the sheriff showed up and two country dudes in a big pick-up passed by and offered to pull me out. Within minutes they’d hooked a chain to the frame and pulled the car out. Country folks rule! I thanked them all profusely and decided to head back to the city after so much excitement.
I needed to pick Em El up and shuttle her downtown for a meeting but I had some extra time so I stopped to check on the birds at another favorite location. There I found expected Prairie Warbler and Hooded Warbler, although couldn’t get a visual on the latter. Many singing Field Sparrows, a perched Turkey Vulture (usually they’re circling endlessly overhead at this spot), a singing White-eyed Vireo, and other usual suspects rounded out the mix.
Once downtown I killed more time (die, time, die!) by finishing Darkness Visible and continuing with Paris Spleen, drinking espresso, and getting yelled at by a probably schizophrenic man. Somehow I think Baudelaire would’ve appreciated the scene. Unbeknownst to me, while all of this fun was taking place Em El’s car was being towed because I failed to read the red highlighted part of the parking meter that said No Parking Between 4-6 PM Mon-Fri. Yes, this is common knowledge to those who frequently drive and park in the city. However, I’m like a deer in the headlights when I get downtown behind the wheel of a car (really bad simile in this context, I know). I don’t know the rules, man! I’m a cyclist, for god’s sake. I haven’t owned a car since 1997 or something (if you’re curious, it was a Plymouth Valiant that sat in my driveway for a few years after I used it to move to Virginia [it looked like this, except crappier because it only cost $400]). Anyway, I guess the cycling gods were raining down holy fire and brimstone on me today for driving too much lately. Maybe I deserved it, but damn, those cycling gods are harsh. Of course, no thanks to The City of Baltimore, either, always taking and never giving!
As we waited in line to pay the obscene $272 required to get the car back, I attempted to lighten the mood by telling Em El that at least we can chalk this up as another quintessential Baltimore experience (along with other special things, such as becoming the victim of a crime and receiving wildly inaccurate water bills). After all, you haven’t really lived in Baltimore until you’ve waited 45 minutes in the tiny concrete bunker under the interstate overpass with all the other suckers preyed upon that day by the blood-sucking savages commonly known as tow-truck drivers.
As if all this wasn’t enough, immediately after Farley ate his dinner tonight he barfed it all up in various places around the house along with all the water he’d drank in the previous 30 minutes. By that time, I was about ready to hurl myself off the deck in search of sweet unconsciouness.
To sum up, my joy tonight is all tangled with misery and weariness.
Posted by sean on June 7, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/07/revoke-my-car-privileges-and-drop-me-in-a-field-somewhere-please/
spotlight on bobolinks!
Male Bobolink in breeding plumage, Lake Woodruff National Wildlife Refuge, Volusia County, Florida.
Image Courtesy of Andrea Westmoreland, licensed under Creative Commons
Somewhere in a field just north and west of here a bobolink sings. If I quiet my mind enough I can almost hear it, even though I’ve so far only heard recordings. Sometimes called rice bird, butter bird, skunk blackbird, or meadow-wink, the male bobolink sings a jubilant song that has frequently been likened to the robotic voice of R2D2 in the Star Wars films. Unique in many ways, the bobolink is one of only a few species that goes through a complete molt of its feathers twice each year. The male bobolink in its breeding plumage is a most striking bird! Yet through molting for the winter it comes to resemble the much drabber female.
Twice each year, bobolinks undertake one of the longest migrations of any songbird. They winter in central South America and spend their breeding season in the northern United States and parts of southern Canada. Originally a prairie-dwelling species of the Midwestern U.S., bobolinks adapted to breeding on agricultural land and were thus able to expand their summer range. Once killed by the thousands by rice farmers in the southeast U.S., these birds are now considered to be beneficial to American farmers due to their primarily insect-based diet during the breeding season. However, loss of farmland and changes in agricultural practices over the years have led to a steep decline in bobolink nesting habitat. Meanwhile, on their wintering grounds, a shift toward rice production has made the bobolink an enemy of South American farmers. Regrettably they are not protected there by law as they have been in the United States since the Migratory Bird Act of 1918. In the past bobolinks were also served as food in restaurants, and continue to be a delicacy in Jamaica, where they earned their “butter bird” nickname, a reference to the heavy fat content of the birds when they arrive there on stopovers during their long migration.
The bobolink has long been a nemesis bird of mine, along with a few other field-dwelling species. As one who rarely travels far to watch birds, I am restricted to what habitat is nearby. Unfortunately, appropriate field habitat is not plentiful in my usual birding grounds. Searching for field birds also typically involves a lot of driving around and pulling off on narrow road shoulders in an effort to catch glimpses of species that seem to thrive on playing hide-and-seek in the shelter of their grassy living quarters. This is not my preferred method of birding. That said, there have been recent reports of bobolinks northwest of here, and I may set out this weekend once again to find this elusive and intriguing bird.
Posted by sean on May 31, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/05/31/spotlight-on-bobolinks/
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