[APPLAUSE]
"Phainopepla."
"Is that the black one?
Oh, I love those.
Many casual southwestern birdwatchers
confuse the name phainopepla with that of the pyrrhuloxia.
They don't confuse the birds, however.
And once it's confirmed that, yes, it's the black one,
they know which one you're talking about,
and that's the one they love.
Perhaps because they've spotted one perching upright
at the top of a solitary mesquite tree,
glossy black plumage gleaming in the Arizona sun.
Maybe they've seen him leave his perch
in short, circular, acrobatic flights,
catching insects in mid-air, white wing patches flashing.
It's no wonder the phainopepla is more popular
than the pyrrhuloxia--"
Sorry, Sam.
I'm glad Sam's not here.
"--the one with the similar name who just sits around
in the undergrowth, a chunky, dusty,
deserty version of the northern cardinal.
I learned my birds in the Midwest,
beginning in January in an Ornithology
course with 6:00 AM field labs.
Standing in the snow at double digits below zero,
I watched the hearty winter ducks
that clustered in the steamy little pools
below the power plant.
When spring finally arrived, I was
dazzled by trees full of sparkling, yellow warblers
in migration.
Later in the semester, I huddled in a dark, makeshift blind
in the middle of an empty cornfield,
listening to the booming calls of prairie chickens,
waiting until dawn to see them perform
their ritualized breeding dance.
My love for the avian world propelled me to Oregon
for a summer course in pelagic birds.
Living at a field station on the foggy coast,
I raised a great blue heron from an abandoned chick.
Several years later, I moved to Arizona
as part of a career shift from science to art,
and never bothered to learn the local birds.
I once saw a phainopepla and a pyrrhuloxia
at the Desert Museum, but since the names on the aviary sign
were so similar and completely unfamiliar to me,
I promptly forgot which was which and the names of both.
Since I hadn't noticed either bird in the wild
during the three decades I lived in Arizona,
I turned to my well-worn taxonomically-arranged field
guide when I began this essay.
There, I discovered that though phainopepla looks and sometimes
feeds like the familiar northern flycatcher,
it's only distantly related.
Instead, it's 50 pages away, pictured
beside the lovely and exotic cedar waxwing.
Phainopepla belongs to a Central American
family, the only member that ventures north
of the Mexican border.
It's relative, so they live in Spanish-speaking countries
all have accessible common names in English.
So why has the phainopepla been saddled with such
a difficult common name?
The technical answer is that in 1957, the American
Ornithological Union's Checklist Committee
rejected several names being used regionally and decreed
that our bird would be commonly known
by the first part of its binomial scientific name,
phainopepla nitens.
Most of the alternatives were strange and unsuitable,
like the glossy flysnapper.
Like the bird never caught one, it just snapped at them.
But I came across an obscure reference
to the common name windowing.
I wonder how my relationship of the last 30
years with this bird would have been different had I been
introduced to it as windowing.
Would the name's reference to the white wing patches
and taxonomic intimacy with the cedar waxwing
have helped me notice and remember a phainopepla
as it flitted by me?
As this essay progressed, I began to see phainopeplas
regularly in the wild--
on telephone wires and scrubby brush and at the tops of trees,
sporting their long tails, expressive wispy crests,
bright red eyes, and glistening plumage.
I hear the rising werp of their call and, if I'm lucky,
I catch a glimpse of the windowy white wing patch.
Once I've seen a male, I often spot little groups
of gray females nearby.
They were always there.
I just didn't notice them until I'd
learned their difficult name.
And now that I have, I think it's
an aptly uncommon name for this anything but common bird.
[APPLAUSE]