Always Be Birding

Giant Eagle Edition

This is the first in a series of pop-up mini-posts for my paid subscribers wherein I will share serendipitous encounters with birds that happened while not intentionally birding at the time.

“Always be birding.” That’s a mantra many birders share. The phrase implies a sort of hopeless obsession, an inability to turn off the birder brain no matter the circumstances. The reward is finding a cool birds in unlikely places or at unlikely times—like the Yellow Warblers that distracted me from what was no doubt a lovely wedding ceremony in rural New York a few years ago. That kind of hyper-vigilance is also the reason most birders (never me, of course 😇) have had near-death experiences trying to ID a hawk while speeding 75 mph down the freeway. For my part, I always try to have at least my binoculars handy whenever I venture out of the house.

Giant Eagle is a Pittsburgh-based grocery store chain I frequent not because of its birdy name, but because of its proximity to our house. Yesterday I was lucky to have binoculars and camera on hand when I pulled into the Giant Eagle parking lot. The hoarse croak I heard upon exiting the car was a familiar sound, but not at this location, and the fact I’d never managed a decent picture of this bird before had me abandoning all thoughts of shopping and scrambling for the camera in an attempt to capture…