Not Quite Kite

Greensboro, North Carolina, is an otherwise unremarkable city on the western end of the Carolina Piedmont. There’s nothing particular special about it from a bird point of view, but it’s close enough that if a good bird shows up there, that it’s good bet that I can get there and back with minimal miles on the car and hours out of the day.

My friend/boss Becky, the collections manager at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, had a good line on a pair of Mississippi Kites that were nesting in a neighborhood in Greensboro. She had even seen one of them, sitting upon the dead limbs of a tree in a park behind a synagogue. A sure thing right? I hoped so, I had missed Mississippi Kites earlier this year. And while I hadn’t really yet been to the places where they’re most likely during the time of year where they’re most evident, I’m not one to miss the opportunity to check out a kite when a kite is there to be checked out.

So I headed to Greensboro Monday morning, in the hopes of staking out the Kite to add it to my year list, and also because Kites are super cool and I hadn’t seen one a few years. A side note, I’ve found that one of the things I enjoy the most about this Big Year is the opportunity to re-find birds I may have seen in the past, but wouldn’t typically seek out in a normal year. The Mississippi Kite is definitely one of those birds. I hadn’t seen it since my last trip to Kansas several years back, the chance to reconnect with it was kind of exciting.

As I drove though the town I noted that this part of it was characterized by older neighborhoods, with mature trees and many creek beds over which I regularly crossed. It was when I was nearing the Kite location that a big bird lifted out of a sycamore and flew over the road into a park. I didn’t see it long, but the gray body and black and white face are unmistakable on a Yellow-crowned Night Heron, and just like that I had an unexpected new bird for the year. A good sign for my primary quarry? I sure hoped so.

I found the synagogue tucked back in a old residential part of town, and in the back, the park and the tree with the dead limbs just as had been described to me. I backed into a parking spot with a view of the trees and, and this gets important later, a playground behind the temple. I settled in to stake out the area in the hopes that the Kites, if they truly had an active nest in the area, would not be long in coming.

The time began to add up, stretching into an hour, an hour and a half with no kite. A small family then arrived and headed over to the playground where they to play on the swings. I don’t know if the mother of the group had noticed me in the back of the lot when they arrived, but it wasn’t long before they began casting odd looks in my direction.

I don’t know if you other young male birders run into this situation, but I can kind of understand why they may look awry at a young unshaven male with binoculars hanging out at a playground. I get that. In this day and age, maybe you can’t be too careful. But it was Monday morning and my attentions were focused on the trees rather than the children. I was listening to NPR podcasts, for pete’s sake. But the dulcet tones of Terry Gross wouldn’t assuage this lady. And when the looks became more pointed and the cell phone came out a few times, I let her worst fears get the best of me. I left, minus the kites.

The Heron was nice, though, in light of the situation surrounding my hasty departure from the Kite stakeout. I’ll just have to try for Kites at a later date, and perhaps not at a playground.