[cobirds] More fake birds and other stuff

Discussion of late about fake swans and egrets being mistaken for real birds reminded me of a few things.

A couple years ago in spring migration primetime I was checking Grandview Cemetery and heard a bird song that instantly registered as both "not normal" and "good".  I listened closer.  Hmmm, grosbeak, maybe tanager?  Then an old Ohio memory cell called in to the front desk.  "Scarlet Tanager, to the right."  Trying to home in on the sound, I cocked my head like a robin.  Think back to your high school yearbook picture.  Orders from my ears overruled those from the brain, redirecting my gaze from up there to down over there.  That is, toward a particular headstone.  Draped over the angular rock was a garish assortment of plastic leaves and flowers.  From squarely in the middle of the arrangement, the bird again gave its gargling song.  The closer I got, as if responding, the more frequently it sang.  There, perched within the 200-year-half-life vegetation, was a bright red bird with dark black wings.  It was a Scarlet Tanager alright, the 4-inch, motion-detector "stickpin", battery-powered, subspecies.  They are known to sing intensely, but for only two weeks, then die.  The avian equivalent of the Century Plant, if you will.  If the Sills do a third volume of their wonderful Little-Known & Seldom-Seen Birds, this is a candidate.  I looked around, glad to be alone, and resumed strolling the patch.  My patch, where I know every tree and every bird.  Ha.

As time passed, the "Scarlet Tanager Incident" became easier to accept, especially when I saw a female Broad-tailed Hummingbird poke her beak in plastic daffodils.  Last summer Painted Lady butterflies visited bright yellow paper mums.  My files have photos of blister beetles sitting on long-stemmed white flowers with bar code tags.  Will this summer's pewee dive on the recently installed solar-powered tiger swallowtail that on sunny days does endless tight circles in front of a certain tombstone?   I've seen pictures of a bull moose humping a bronze moose statue, a Galapagos turtle lustfully mounting a boulder, gulls plucking golf ball "morsels" from fairways.  Our bus stops along Mason Street in Fort Collins have piped-in Carolina Wren and Northern Cardinal sounds because modern mass transit goers, in the event their earphones malfunction, can't be expected to wait 5 minutes "naked" without faux stimulation.  Artificial Happens.  And human "ingenuity" is getting more realistically artificial all the time, certainly enough to frequently fool/satisfy humans, and even wild creatures with far better awareness of their surroundings than humans.  

Dave Leatherman

Fort Collins