A Newest Questing Bird - Finding the Garganey, a Stray from Asia

In my art it's been the longest-sought birds, special to a kind of habitat, that I've wanted to paint--because I went all that distance on all those forays to try and find the bird, and on finding it had to linger indefinitely to see its most obvious, its subtle and tucked-away markings, all that I could see in the time I had. Sometimes too I've painted birds I had never expected to see even while visiting ideally suited habitat where they had been well-documented. Drawing and detailing that bird lent me the thrill of discovery all over again, the bird's form pulled out on paper, in wet and dry media in a blended effect that seemed my best for bringing back the whole experience in a setting as true as I could conjure. But what I'd make of the garganey, seen on April 27th at the first corner off the main route leading north from the Crex Meadows Visitor Center outside Grantsburg, Wisconsin is less likely to be a painting, though I wouldn't say absolutely it won't be.

The garganey is a Eurasian teal, a cousin to our blue-winged, green-winged and cinnamon teal in North America. The teal are small ducks of creeks, puddles and shallow lakes. The garganey in North America is a repeated vagrant that courts and shares feeding ground, as this one did in Wisconsin, with native teal like the blue-winged.

While driving southward from Minnesota last wet and blustery Sunday to find this duck, a species entirely new to me, I knew I'd encounter a lot of other birders. As I drove, the little car entered ever more rain and slued about in the winds of mid-continent equinox and of neighboring truck traffic. I was impatient with excitement. At Crex Meadows conditions were of the harshest kind found in spring, excepting late snowstorms, for viewing birds; we all stayed in our cars unless a certain bird ID could only be made clear of watery window glass. I rolled to and fro over the same stretch of hardpan road gone to muck, wondering at a clunk-clunk-clunk sounding from the right rear tire. The wipers churned, raindrops rolled on the glass, and as I kept turning around in pull-outs or U turns I grew increasingly dizzy. I blamed a coffee and a huge frosted cinnamon roll for what had come to seem a little like motion sickness.

A man I had met once before was staked out in his compact car just a few steps above what's labeled the Erickson Flowage, one of the diked canals that the state of Wisconsin maintains for aquatic wildlife; there, he said, was where the garganey had been earlier this morning, foraging with a couple of blue-winged teal. In an hour or so the garganey flew in with two or more blue-winged teal and afforded intimate looks, while it drifted seemingly unbothered by the nearness of rolling and stopped cars, drivers spying from the obscurity of their windows. I got out and stole back to the trunk of my car to bring out my spotting scope which I beamed on the garganey. Because my vertigo by then was staging a take-over I may have looked a little drunken to anyone observing, even as the shivers were setting in. I wished I had worn something with a hood and was glad of a pair of knit gloves that stay year-round in the car.

Moments later I vomited out the door of the car onto the road; I hadn't been that sick in twenty or so years. Pretty ironic, throwing up in the view of a life bird species, still calmly about its business in the waterway below. Having seen the exquisite body markings of the garganey through the scope I craved a look at its open wings but dared not spoil the scene for others or send off the flock of ducks by any approach on foot. When the ducks eventually rose to fly on their own they were pointed facing the cars, so I got a glimpse of pale grey wing surface high up on the outer side. By now I was so dizzy I could hardly sit up in the driver's seat. Grantsburg, I thought, had an urgent care but I wasn't precise on how to find it. For lack of any better idea, not in my sharpest state of mind, I called 911 for assistance rather than trouble any of the other parked birders. On two calls to 911 I asked for an escort if possible rather than an actual ambulance, though when offered I accepted my first-ever ambulance ride, since an ambulance as escort seemed unheard-of to the first responder. I was nervous of abandoning my car among the marshes with my spotting scope and a half-completed painting and watercolor kit shut inside to the mercies of conceivable vandals.

Along with all the stuff I'd insisted on carrying from the car, I was checked out that night as a healthy adult female with norovirus. I got sick again, much more dramatically, inside the van of the emergency-care nurse who drove me the couple of blocks to the Wood River Motel for the night. But that night's sleep, Zofran gels and a delicious can of 7-up quelled the symptoms for the time being and I gratefully caught a ride from the motel proprietor back out to the T of two roads where the car had remained all night.  Much the same poor visibility reigned in that ongoing tempest of stubborn late winter; it lambasted the few cars of Monday morning birders still hoping for a sighting to start the week. Few to no ducks dabbled within our eye view, and I thought better than to step forth into that wet cold again.

Determination, surmise and restraint rewarded by luck had characterized this quest much more than any poetry of drawn-out observation. So I don't feel a painting being born of the two-day escapade, but look at it with a half-and-half mixture of satisfaction and regret that I couldn't sit up and await an opportunity to see my quarry lift off in the opposite direction and show me his beautiful silver and green wings. Not all experiences get to the point of feeling whole. But as other birders worthy of the utmost respect have said, that's birding, which at its best includes a kind of courteous trade-off of time and closeness between observer and observed. Maybe the garganey will do a spring sojourn at Crex and I will get by there again, even en route to seeing something else.