Lumen 21-3, 2.0
Evening Grosbeak
Posted – August 5, 2021
Irrelevant tid bit – … between the longing for love and the struggle for legal tender.
“The Pretender” Jackson Browne
In the winter of
2020-21 a single female Evening Grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus)
showed up at a backyard bird feeder in Mena, Arkansas (irrelevant aside – after
I retired from full time work, I spent several years helping FEMA process
damage claims associated with natural disasters {floods, hurricanes} including a
month driving the washed out gravel roads around Mena). The Evening 
Male EVGR
Grosbeak generally lives in
southern Canada and in the U.S. in the northern Rocky Mountains and coastal
mountains of the northwest, but sometimes in the winter it irrupts south into a
more southern and wider area of the U.S.
These irruptions are irregular, infrequent, and cover different areas
each time: a sort of bird migration roulette.
Many of the irruptions do not get as far south as Arkansas: since 1986
they have been recorded in only 11 different years, so this is a rare bird in
Arkansas.
Evening Grosbeak is a great name evoking the relaxation at the end of a day well spent. Henry Schoolcraft; a U.S. Indian agent in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan; collected (as in shot and skinned) the first specimen in about 1825 and gave it the name “evening” because he believed that the species sang only in the evenings – wrong. Schoolcraft apparently liked naming things such as many counties in Michigan where he made up faux Indian names combining words and syllables from Native American languages with words and syllables from Latin and Arabic. Lake Itasca, the source lake of the Mississippi River, is an example of his faux Indian names.
Evening Grosbeaks
always remind me of my second year birding while I was a high school student at
St. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Pennsylvania.
Herman was and is a town of about 100 folks one hour 
Female EVGR
north of Pittsburgh
(fellow students from western Pennsylvania, and most of the students were from
western Pennsylvania, always told me about how Pittsburgh is one of the few
“burg” towns with an “h” at the end. I
did not understand the significance of that then, and I still don’t). This rural area was a good spot to start
birding. One of the priests, Fr. Roch,
had a bird banding permit, and it was customary to join the Cardinal Bird Club
when you reached second class (for some reason the seminary never spoke of
freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, but 1st, 2nd, 3rd,
and 4th class. We had two
years of college in the same complex and students there were cleverly enough called
5th and 6th class).
The main activity of the bird club was to catch and band birds, but when
I reached 3rd class Fr. Roch had his banding permit suspended
because he was not sending in his banding records on time.
This meant that the teenage energy that had been directed at banding needed a new outlet. Several large trees just outside the 3rd class study hall became the home for platform bird feeders filled with sunflower seeds and various small seeds. The study hall was on the third floor so we could look down on the feeders, a perfect arrangement to get good looks at the birds. And this was an irruptive year for Evening Grosbeaks.
I remember seeing dozens of Evening Grosbeaks on the feeders but I have learned that memory is frequently wrong, causing me to consult my birding journal. The first entry on November 19, 1961 included a sighting of six Evening Grosbeaks, not on the feeders, but along Little Buffalo Creek, which I do not remember at all. (If you are going to put place names in your journal, make sure you sufficiently identify them so you can fully recover the memory.) Three Evening Grosbeaks first appeared on the feeders on January 4, 1962, eventually building up to 40 birds (13 males and 27 females). After March 16, 1962 the grosbeaks disappeared from the feeders.
Overall, it was a very good year to start feeding birds, which I am sure helped me to become a permanent, life-long birder. We had 27 species on the feeders including Pine Grosbeaks, Hairy Woodpecker, Rusty Blackbirds, and Red-breasted and White-breasted Nuthatches. Most notably we had a Cape May Warbler feeding on peanuts, peanut butter, suet, and small seeds from December 1, 1961 to January 17, 1962. This guy should have been in the Caribbean islands by October or November. It snowed a lot that winter, so he either made a late migration or helped to fertilize the Pennsylvania landscape.
This volume of my bird journal ended on May 4, 1965, which I summarized as “After nearly 3 1/2 years of organized bird watching” I had seen 194 species. I’m not sure what I meant by “organized bird watching”, possibly just keeping records. Today those records would be on E-bird or a computerized birding program: does anyone besides me still keep a handwritten bird journal? I never did have a birding mentor, which helps to explain why after 3.5 years I had only seen 194 species. Of course, all my birding was in either Pennsylvania or Missouri and I did not own a car.
One of the
interesting things about my birding journal is the quality of my handwriting:
it is quite good, and in some places looks remarkably like my mother’s. My writing today is illegible, even to
I spent the rest of that winter looking for Evening Grosbeaks on our feeders, no luck.
Photos by Michael Linz
Photos by Michael Linz.
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