28 January 07
Smew
If birding were always so easy…Today we went to see the smew that’s been hanging out at an exurban park pond near Sonora, about 2 1/2 hours from Davis. The smew is a vagrant species of duck from Eurasia that only shows up in California every few years. This particular bird was sighted a couple weeks ago and has been seen at the pond almost every day since. The one exception was yesterday, when it never showed, which made today’s trek a little more exciting than otherwise. But when we got up there and joined the crowd of several dozen birders, we saw the smew within 20 seconds!
Previous: Native Plant Links Next: Davis Flyby
Congrats on catching up with the White Nun. Love that sketch – amazing how you captured the essence of this bird with just a few lines.
Isn’t that a nifty bird? Dittoes on the sketch!
I love this bird’s name (and your drawing of it).
I heard the word “smew” for the first time ever four or five days ago, while I was reading Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The book is set in an unspecified place, and I wondered if the list of birds—greylag, beangoose, pintail, wigeon, mallard, teal, smew—might be used to surmise the possible location of the narrative. I presume these birds wouldn’t be out of place in South Africa, but I don’t know for sure.
Teju: those birds are all arctic breeders, summer denizens of the high tundra. They winter further south, but the smew would be an accidental as far south as the Camargue… So the narrative is almost certainly set in Northern Europe.
Thanks, Pica!
The book is unclear about place as well as about time. So, I can say it’s set somewhere North, and sometime between the fall of Rome and 1980.