By Mel Carriere
Yes I love birds, so it is a shame that I am an awful photographer. A lot of my inability to take good bird pictures comes from that you can't trust me with a good camera. I tend to be very thoughtless with gadgets and delicate devices don't last long in my crude, careless hands.
Since I am a danger to quality optics, I try to make do with my cell phone camera, but it is next to useless when taking pictures of birds. Even birds that are a few feet away come out blurry on my cell phone, as was the case with some Yellow-Rumped Warblers I was attempting to take photographs of from my car the other day. I will let you judge for yourself. On the left is the stock Wikipedia photo of an Audubon's Yellow-Rumped Warbler, taken by somebody Pterzian, who is apparently so excellent at his craft that he is not even required to use a last name like the rest of us. It seems like all the great artists are allowed to get by with a single name; "Morrisey" of the Smiths comes immediately to mind. We hear a Smiths tune and we say, "Oh that's Morrisey singing," not Steven Patrick Morrisey, which is his full god given name. The same must hold true for this Pterzian fellow. People in the know look at his bird pics and say in an awestruck tone of voice, "Oh, that's Pterzian." But nobody would ever look at my fuzzy picture on the right and say "That's Carriere," unless the sentence was punctuated by a derisive snort.
Believe it or not, the bird on the left and the bird on the right are one and the same species, although it's even hard to tell there's a bird on the right. All that can be discerned is a patch in the green lawn that doesn't quite fit in. It could just be a picture of dead grass or maybe even a dried dog turd.
It could be that my lack of photographic skills is the very reason Setophaga coronata feels so safe on my lawn. There is an ancient taboo against images that dates back through thousands of years of history and might extend to the secret superstitious world of birds too. Images are said to steal the soul of the one being depicted. If that is the case bird souls are perfectly safe around me because I am a complete failure at taking their pictures and thus stealing their souls.
This is one reason the Yellow-Rumped Warbler feels safe on my lawn. The other reason could be because I don't have fake grass. Fake plastic grass is a growing trend here in Southern California. It saves on the water bill and takes away the annoying necessity of mowing the lawn, leaving the homeowner plenty of time to indulge in other pursuits such as bird photography except - whoops, there are no birds on the fake grass to photograph!
I look forward to the arrival of the Yellow-Rumped Warblers every year because I love to see them poking around for invertebrates on my very real, though somewhat untidy lawn. On a cool winter's day they are always out there probing the damp greenery, the little flashes of yellow on their wings, sides, throat, crown and rump sometimes being the only signal to their presence, along with the sharp chirp that is their distinctively diagnostic fingerprint.
I am a lazy man to be certain, I do not like mowing the lawn at all, I can't convince my two sons to do it no matter how much money I offer to throw at them, so I could certainly benefit from fake grass. But how could I deprive these fuzzy Yellow-Rumped Warblers of a place to eat? They migrate from hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away and imagine if they underwent this grueling journey only to jab their beaks painfully against a hard piece of tasteless vinyl?
Thank you Yellow-Rumped Warblers for taking the time to make this annual pilgrimage to my lawn and providing me with morning entertainment. Your souls are safe, and your little patch of greenery seething with tasty invertebrate life is safe too.
"Audubon's Warbler Setophaga auduboni" by Pterzian at en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Audubon%27s_Warbler_Setophaga_auduboni.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Audubon%27s_Warbler_Setophaga_auduboni.jpg
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