The Four-Leaf Clover Of Birds

I had thought birds were completely uninteresting. Might have granted an exception for exotic birds like flamingos and emus, but not for birds you see in everyday life. Truth is, I didn’t even see them in my everyday life. Not that they weren’t there. I'm no bird-denier. But I paid them no heed.

One time in the mid-1990s I went to lunch with Royce, a sales guy at work. The lunch itself was unmemorable, all these years later. But when we returned to the parking lot after lunch, Royce discovered that a bird had pooped on his car. He was outraged—and I mean real rage! He said, I hate birds.

I remember this only because I didn’t think birds worthy of any strong emotion. Definitely not rage. Bird poop on a car wouldn’t have penetrated my notice either, unless it was right in the middle of the my side of the windshield. Then I might have noticed. But the Royce’s new Mercedes was a lot nicer than my car, which I and others affectionately called the yuckmobile.

What he really said was, f**k! f**k! f**k! I hate birds! Now that was real bird passion. Or car passion masquerading as bird passion.

I bet you seven dollars the offending bird was a seagull. My friend Lee says I’m not supposed to call them seagulls unless they’re near the sea. This bird would have come from the bay. Then it’s a bay gull, I said to Lee. She said, no, you just say gull. But bay gull is so much funnier, I replied. Because, bagel.

You all put up with a lot from me, I know. Stop here if you’re bored.

My interest in birds surged when I started cycling, a year and a half ago. The world outdoors was silent with pandemic panic. I’d get on my bike and ride through newly-quiet city streets, then over the freeway on an engineering marvel of a bike bridge, on my way to the San Francisco Bay Bike Trail.

My husband is a lifelong cyclist. He grumbles constantly about how our town is unfriendly to bikes. I tell him to go to city council meetings and change it, or stop grumbling. There are bike lanes in Belmont, for sure, but the Belmont Bike Lane Administration seems to have decided that whenever they suddenly need the space of the bike lane for some other purpose, they just end the bike lane. On the main road through town, the bike lane is a series of stops and starts. Morse code for, this city is not serious about bike lanes.

A decade or so ago our town built a beautiful bike bridge over the freeway to connect the east side of town to the sliver of megalopolis that remains before you get to the bay. Beau and I decided that Belmont’s unstated bike motto was, if you want to bike, get out of town. Here! We built you a bridge.

You get to the slough after you’ve crossed the bridge, passed the smiting fence, and zigzagged through a mile or two more of quiet streets.

I do enjoy walking or riding through unfamiliar neighborhoods, just to see how people live there. Modern dense housing complexes draw me in, with swimming pools that are too short for laps and empty tennis courts impatiently waiting to be converted to pickleball. The streets of 1970s single-family houses hold treasures, too. One house I pass on nearly every ride has a sign above the door, The Boncore’s. I call the Boncores the apostrophe people. I picture them as an older couple whose children moved away after they tried for years to get their parents to ditch the apostrophe.

On the same street is a lemon tree with giant, bumpy lemons all over it. My story about that one is that the original owners of the house bought a Meyer lemon tree. Everyone buys those, because they produce the best lemons. Then they sold their house to people who paid as much attention to lemons as I used to pay to birds. Thus the root stock onto which the treasured Meyer branches had been painstakingly grafted was allowed to compete for resources. Root stock always wins if you’re not paying attention.

On a perpendicular street is a Fuyu persimmon tree, especially tempting this time of year because the persimmons are ready to eat and the scant leaves aren’t concealing the bounty. Topping off this fruit detour during a story that’s allegedly about birds is a pomegranate tree, the reward for a couple of extra turns in a ride through the same neighborhood. A pomegranate tree! Do we live in Eden, or what?

When I was a kid, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, my grandfather planted an orange tree in our backyard. Never got very big. Its primary product was gigantic thorns that épéed your attempts to come near. Every few years it would make golf ball-sized fruits. You couldn’t eat them. Once my grandfather made them into marmalade, but that was a lot of work. At least I assume so, because it never happened again. This was my native experience of exotic fruits growing on trees before I moved to California.

Even with all of these wonderful encounters on neighborhood streets, the best part of the bike ride is the slough, and not only for its water birds. If you look away from the water, you can check out people’s little backyards. Behind one house is a trampoline and a tortoise. Never seen anyone jumping on the trampoline, but the tortoise is often hanging out in the yard. One morning the tortoise escaped and I had to screech to a halt because it was smack in the middle of the bike path. This tortoise is about a meter long; I'm not talking about a little pet box turtle. And I'm not making this up to make a story about birds more interesting.

Even more astonishing than finding a pomegranate tree, right?

I feel as if I could be forgiven for not noticing the birds, initially, with all of the other visual bounty. And then I started noticing them.

The background of the slough bird tapestry is formed by bay gulls and Canada geese. They’re so common that it’s okay to screen them from your consciousness while you look at the other birds. Except! Some time around May, the Canada geese have babies, little fuzzy goslings. You don’t get to see them much, because their parents hide them and protect them fiercely. But I’ve seen them taking their swimming lessons!

Also, mallard ducks galore. Mallards are really funny when they stick their butts in the air while, presumably, eating breakfast from the bottom of the slough. There are places where the slough is just a few inches deep, and that’s where you’re most likely to see pairs of mallard butts.

I’ve seen baby mallards in the Spring, too. One day I saw baby mallards and baby Canada geese. What a day.

Why is it that you never see baby gulls? Are they born into adult bodies so they can torment you from their first day of life? One time in Everglades National Park a gull stole a hot dog, in a bun, right out of my hand. A hot dog! It scared me and I started to cry, which makes me sound three years old, but it happened last year. Also, I was really, really hungry at the time. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been eating a hot dog, you know.

Egrets, those white, elegant beauties. You'll always see egrets on the slough. They come in two sizes, snowy and great white. Snowy size is small, like grande at Starbucks. Snowies also have variegated beaks and feet, while great whites adhere to a yellow-orange theme. Great whites are surprisingly enormous, as tall as the tortoise is long.

I know about the different colors of egret beaks (bills?) and feet because I started paying attention to birds. A habit of mostly solitary cycling is responsible.

Snowy egrets, the smaller ones, sometimes line up along the bank of the slough, three point five feet apart. If you check the city ordinance carefully, you’ll find it’s the recommended social distancing value for egrets, whenever five or more gather. I don’t know why egrets are the only birds subject to social distancing rules.

Once in a while I’ll see a blue heron in the slough, the cousin of the great white egret. Blue heron was my father’s favorite bird. I think of my dad when I see a blue heron or a marina. He liked sailboats, too.

Cormorants are a common site. What I like about them is that they stand any platforms they can find and extend their wings to dry. They’re sizable black birds, unconcerned about their vulnerability in that spread-out posture. They’re larger than coots, the cute black swimmers with shockingly white beaks. Coots are talkative! What’s also funny about them is that when you see them on land, they look like chickens. It’s something about the shape of their bodies. I doubt they’d be good to eat, though. When I think about infusing (land) chicken with the flavor of the slough, well, I’d have to be really, really hungry to eat a (slough) chicken.

And then one day last winter, I saw white pelicans.

A half-dozen of them were paddling slowly and companionably together along the slough, dipping their bills into the water from time to time and swallowing their breakfasts right before my eyes. Pedestrians and other cyclists stopped to watch. They come here every winter, said one of the women near me.

Now, gray pelicans are a common site along the bay and the ocean around here. They have an every-bird-for-himself mentality when it comes to feeding. I have nothing against that. I can be that way myself. But white pelicans are social eaters. Not only have I observed this countless times, but I looked it up when I got home. You'll see a solitary white pelican now and then, but they're either on time out or they needed a few minutes alone to shop for their Secret Santa present.

After the first sighting, I returned home and convinced my husband to grab his fancy camera and drive back to the site of the sighting. They were nowhere to be seen.

Two days later Lee and I were on a ride, and we saw them again. She was ecstatic, enthralled. As I’ve mentioned before, Lee notices and appreciates beauty and joy.

When we ride together, we look for them and celebrate when we see them. When I ride alone I look for them and count them, and then tell Beau and Lee how many I saw that day. The days I don’t see them, I’m a little disappointed.

Some days they remind me of synchronized swimmers practicing. They haven’t perfected their routine yet, because their timing is a few tenths of a second off. To my utter delight. I’ve always enjoyed rehearsals more than the performances themselves. I like to see the work behind the perfection.

White pelicans bring good luck, Lee told me one day. I don't always buy the ideas she tries to sell me, but this one seems plausible. I do seem to have a lot of happiness in my life, and I see white pelicans fairly regularly. On the day of the smiting incident, we’d seen white pelicans. I mentioned this to Lee yesterday, and then explained, if we hadn’t seen white pelicans, we’d both have been smashed to bits. And here I was, not even three weeks post-smiting, back on my bike. White pelicans.

Last week my husband said, do white pelicans really bring good luck, or is that just something the two of you made up?

Until that moment, I’d had no idea that four-leaf clovers and break a leg had been rigorously tested in large, double-blind studies under controlled conditions. Always learning.

[I promise to replace this beautiful found image of white pelicans with a homegrown photo, once I convince Beau to get me a nice one. White pells are a bit camera-shy, or I’d just use my iPhone.]