by jennifer d. munro
As we stood on the lakeshore in the pouring rain, our birding teacher taught our adult-ed class how to identify various waterfowl species, especially the drab, indistinguishable females. Since the ladies of many duck species look as similar as nuns, while their varied fellas are as brilliantly plumed as the pope and his bishops, our teacher advised, “Use the speculum to differentiate.”
Speculum? My mind struggled to compute a live duck on her back on a doctor’s exam table, the sanitary crepe paper now soggy beneath her, her webbed feet propped up in metal stirrups.
“The mallard’s speculum is blue,” she continued, “while the gadwall’s is white.”
“Speculum?” I asked, perplexed.
“Color patches on their secondary feathers.” She motioned to what would be cafeteria-lady underarm sags on me.
It took a moment, but my teacher laughed when she grasped what I was thinking. “You know, that never occurred to me.”
Pap smears clearly hadn’t occurred to my avid avian classmates either.
“Speculum” might make sense if it referred to duck bills rather than quills. Probably it was named by the same colonizing, Latin-speaking bloke who named a duck with a clear ring on its bill the ring-necked duck, just to make himself seem smarter than casual noon birdwatchers like me.
When I had taken up languorous-sounding bird watching at age fifty, I didn’t foresee that I’d not only remain the class dunce, but that birding was a more dangerous sport than motorcycling or sushi making.
I’ve given myself a split lip when my binoculars boomeranged on their expensive Audubon-logo elastic strap, which I’d slung purse-like over a shoulder rather than crosshatched on my back.
I’ve landed flat on my back in the dirt, dizzy after spending two hours with my neck craned in the heat, trying to locate the source of a mysterious bird call (which turned out to be the common backyard chickadee).
Binocular or Warbler Neck—a very real medical condition resulting from tipping one’s head back for hours on end—might damage my C7 vertebra or make my neck grow to Schwarzenegger-like girth, so that my pearl choker would no longer fit. I might experience stroke-like symptoms from spending too long staring up at treetops (chirruping “Where? Where?”).
And it wasn’t my fault that I almost rear-ended my cousin’s truck. She told me to watch the fence posts for meadowlarks as I followed her down a steep mountain road in Eastern Oregon. She never hinted that she might brake. This prompted the only time in our 33-year-marriage that my husband yelled at me from the passenger seat to stop, rather than his usual request for me to please drive faster.
Then there was that 27° dawn when a frustrated junco unsuccessfully hammered his tiny beak at my birdbath’s skating rink. In bedroom slippers and pjs, I dashed outside with a pitcher of hot water to thaw the ice for the thirsty little guy, sliding the patio door closed behind me so as not to let out the heat. With a definitive thunk, the dowel I placed on the tracks—for security when I’m inside the house—fell neatly back into place. Huh, it really did work to prevent someone from opening the door from the outside.
Or that day birding along a riverfront park when I stopped to use the loo and caught my finger in the stall’s latch? Chalk up mangled knuckles and copious blood loss as this plucky explorer wrestled with a door.
One thinks of birdwatching in pristine forests, but as it turns out, sewage treatment ponds are birding hotspots, a word I’d only used heretofore for my heating pad warming a patch of bed in our drafty house. Poo-ponds (in birding lingo) are evidently fragrant pits of marinating E. coli, where crowds of waterfowl whoop it up like hippies at a hot-springs. These ponds are often off-limits to the public, yet what are laws to the intrepid when a spectacled eider blown off its normal migration route has been spotted in the fecund stew?
But while recently skidding on hail as I searched for a fulvous whistling-duck in the brambles, wishing its whistle resembled Dock of the Bay in order to help me locate the damn thing, I thought, “Oh, well, beats a trip to the gynecologist.”
Jennifer D. Munro’s work has appeared in publications such as Salon; Ninth Letter; North American Review; Gulf Coast; Boulevard; Calyx; Full Grown People; and in anthologies such as The Bigger the Better the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty and Body Image. She is a freelance editor. www.JenniferDMunro.com