For every devoted birder, there is a bird that continues to elude sighting.
“I made four 10-hour trips to twitch it, to no avail,” Mr. Kaester wrote in an email. “Once, I missed it by 20 minutes!”
Through such trials birders develop what they call “nemesis birds,” birderspeak for the species that bedevil them again and again, despite their best efforts. As birding surges in popularity, the hobby’s unique parlance requires explanation. To “twitch” is to drop everything to chase a rare bird found outside its proper range. A “spark bird” is what birders call the bird that piques someone’s interest in birding. A “nemesis bird” keeps you going back and remains tantalizingly out-of-reach.
“It’s a species that eludes you after multiple attempts, especially if the bird was or should have been there,” Mr. Kaestner said. “There is a connotation that something supernatural is getting between you and seeing the bird.”
“If it’s a bird that drives you crazy, you can call it a nemesis bird,” Mr. Koeppel said. “It could be a bird your mom has seen, but you haven’t.”
“The concept of nemesis birds is one of the things my nonbirder friends are most confused, then amused, by,” Danielle Khalife, a public health researcher from Brooklyn, said. “Somebody asked if it was birds that you hate. Not exactly.”
“They’re an elusive bird, so that makes me feel a little bit better,” Ms. Khalife said.
Mr. Fischer traveled to the thrush’s normal range, coming up empty in Washington, Montana and British Columbia. He also chased reports of rare sightings that were more local: one in New Hampshire, one in New Jersey, another in Central Park.
“And I’m not a twitcher,” Mr. Fischer said. “I waited years and years and years to see that bird.”
Sometime, it’s grief. Koeppel’s father, Richard, was among the most accomplished birders of the 20th century, tallying 7,000-plus species worldwide before his death in 2012. But one always eluded him: the mountain quail, a rotund game bird of the Pacific Slope mountains.
“Think about the word ‘quail’ — it means to flinch away, to hide,” Mr. Koeppel said. “The very name of the bird is telling you it doesn’t want to be around you.”
After his father made it his dying wish to see one, Mr. Koeppel spent almost five years searching for a mountain quail. He couldn’t disperse his father’s ashes until he succeeded.
“It became this kind of quest,” Mr. Koeppel said. “It became my nemesis, for real. Even though I’m not much of a birder, I was obsessed with it. It had to do with grief and the fact my father’s ashes were in the back seat of my car forever.”
When Mr. Koeppel finally stumbled upon a pair of mountain quail in a Southern California state park, he could hardly believe it. He dashed back to his car to retrieve the urn, and together he and his young son threw their patriarch’s ashes toward the birds.
“It was a total ‘Big Lebowski’ kind of thing, where we both got covered in this white powder,” Mr. Koeppel said. “It was kind of amazing. It became a very emotional moment.”
Sometimes it’s something else about nemesis birds — how they can, with persistence, be overcome. Mr. Kaestner spent time this summer on the Indonesian island of Sumatra searching for several of its endemic species. One of his targets, the rare and reclusive Schneider’s pitta, eluded him on a previous attempt in 1993. This time, the search required a long hike up Mt. Kerinci, the country’s largest volcano, and a nine-hour stakeout before the bird finally appeared.
“Got the pitta today,” Mr. Kaestner reported from the field via text. “Maybe I’ll have a new nemesis tomorrow!”
Category: Science
Source: NYTimes Science
