A bird by any other name ...

ELISABETH M. BROWN

“What’s that?” is the most common question Laguna Coast Wilderness

Park tour guides hear on nature walks. But what’s in a name? Not much

information, usually. We remember the flower, bird or butterfly much

better if we understand how it fits into the whole ecosystem.

We recently visited a winery in southeast Australia. Besides her

wines, the vintner was proud of the number of different birds on her

property. She talked especially about one particular bird, apparently

rare, that frequented the place.

The name meant nothing to me -- it was just a name.

I tell people trying to learn the local fauna or flora to forget

the names and try to answer a few basic questions such as, where is

it, what does it look like, and what is it doing? There’s no

substitute for spending a few minutes really looking.

For birds, the size and shape of the beak indicates the diet:

short and fat for seed eaters, small and thin for insect gleaners,

long and scythe-like for birds that rake their bills through fallen

leaves, hooked and sharp for predators, etc. Then: where is it? On

the ground or in foliage? How many of them are there: a flock? a

pair? one? What is it doing? If it perches on a dead branch, flies

out and returns repeatedly, it’s catching flying insects, so it’s a

flycatcher.

In a whole continent filled with unknown birds, I was forced to

follow my own advice. I sat with my binoculars in a quiet corner of

the winery grounds and waited. After a few minutes there was a light

twittering, then louder, then movement in the branches of a nearby,

low, shrubby tree. A flock of small, dull-colored birds began to

drift through the tree, moving in the same way as ... my brain said

bushtits. But there are no bushtits in Australia. Never mind. As I

watched them, I knew what they were doing -- working the foliage for

insects.

Like other tiny birds, they move in flocks as protection against

predators, the same reason small fish swim in schools. The constant

twittering keeps them in touch with each other when they are out of

sight as they move behind leaves and branches.

Through the binoculars they were small, brown, with no conspicuous

markings and with narrow, sharp beaks. They were feeding lower to the

ground than typical bushtits (probably because they weren’t

bushtits). Were they the dread LBB (little brown bird) of birders

everywhere? No, wait; they seemed to hold their tails upright, the

way wrens do, although U.S. wrens don’t feed in flocks.

Later I looked in the bird book and found emu-wrens, fairy-wrens,

grass-wrens and scrub-wrens. Not a simple, unhyphenated wren in the

bunch. Australia has been an isolated land mass for 70-million years,

since before the dinosaurs died out, and has had plenty of time to

evolve interesting wrens. Anyway, I have a tentative identification,

and some day I’ll know for sure what name goes with my mystery birds,

which I first noticed in 1999 and mentioned in a column back then.

Why bother to learn the names at all? To paraphrase Shakespeare, a

rose still smells as sweet even if you don’t know its name. But once

you do know something about the bird (or flower, or whatever), the

name is a handy label for your memory, useful to retrieve that

information. But try to learn the name after, not instead of, all the

really important stuff.

* ELISABETH BROWN is a biologist and the president of Laguna

Greenbelt Inc.