Back in 2005, I was in Evansville, Indiana's first folk punk band. For the uninitiated, folk punk is either punk played acoustically or folk played punkily or folk played by "punks" (defining "punks gets us into a whole other mess). Notable entries include Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Against Me's early acoustic offerings, and Bloomington, IN hometown heroes Defiance, Ohio. We sounded much closer to the last of these two, only much more unpolished. We operated under the assumption that if playing music without really learning your instrument was punk, then playing without practicing or remembering the lyrics was even punker. We were made up of Adam on guitar and vocals, Ash on guitar and vocals, Brie on guitar and vocals and myself on ukulele, egg shaker/tambourine, and vocals. They would basically take turns playing guitar (aside from the one ukulele song I wrote) while the rest of us all sang at the same time. We were known for doing things like playing in the middle of a room instead of on stage, or for taking the whole audience outside to listen to us play on the sidewalk in front of the venue. Once I climbed one of Downtown Evansville's sidewalk trees in front of the venue during a set while I was singing and playing egg shaker. We lasted a summer and a fall. We called ourselves "Bikeweather" and our songs were about dumpstering and being vegan and riding bicycles and being anarchists and were titled things such as "And We Can Read Emma Goldman at the Top of Our Lungs to the Tune of Car Alarms." The funny thing is, since we last played a show two of our four members came out as women and one as nonbinary. The fourth member is queer as well (though cis) which makes us an entire band full of closet cases who grew up in the same little corner of southern Indiana and northern Kentucky. An unlikely crew, but one of those things where I think we found each other without knowing why we got along so well quite yet.
About five years ago Brie did the exact same thing I did twelve years ago, which is to come out as a woman and move to Portland, Oregon. I had been visiting Adam at the time, who had gotten the idea to call Ash, who told me they had just heard from Brie and so she got in touch with me and we made plans to hang out. Unfortunately due to some combination of depression and ADHD I wasn't able to make it happen, despite her putting in a solid effort at it, so she emailed me again this year and I made a point of actually making solid plans to go visit her. "What would you like to do?" she asked in an email. "Oh, so actually I've gotten really into birding..." I responded, crossing my fingers.
Upon arriving at Brie's apartment I met her girlfriend and we immediately began catching up. It wasn't long before we'd eaten breakfast and I'd gotten a twenty-year-old folk punk CD-R stuck in her 00s VW Beetle's CD player. We stopped by the hospital so she could visit her other girlfriend who was recovering from Facial Feminization Surgery, a collection of plastic surgeries common to trans women that both Brie and I had already been through. That done, we drove to Portland's Northeast side and parked by the porta-potties. Nothing reminds me of birding more than taking a dump in a bad toilet, but you're all lucky to avoid any more on this topic this time, because I had already gone before we arrived.
This was the second time I'd been to Whittaker Ponds, but I'd seen on E-Bird that they had three birds here recently that would be life birds for me: Black Phoebe, Cedar Waxwing, and Great Egret. Brie has gotten really into photography and brought along two of her cameras, so when the photos here look really good, it's her fault and when they look like shit, it's mine.
If you ever see me out birding, it'll look like this: raincoat, phone in mouth, binoculars in hands. The old smart phone in my mouth is running Merlin, the app that identifies bird song, and it's just the easiest place to put it when I'm using my binoculars because putting it in a pocket muffles it.
It didn't take very long at all to spot our first birds: a handful of assorted ducks floating out on the water. I abruptly stopped where I was in our conversation and squinted into my binoculars, quickly rattling off identifications, pausing, scrolling through my field guide app, back to the binoculars, etc. You know the drill. I looked over at Brie and she looked bewildered. I remembered that she hadn't been birding before. I think that was when I realized that I've really come pretty far in the past half-year. And that maybe I should take a beat and show Brie what I was doing if I wanted to bird with her rather than show off birding in front of her.
L to R: A female Hooded Merganser a male Lesser Scaup and a female Lesser Scaup.
First I handed Brie the binoculars and pointed at a bird. "You see that black and white duck with the big goofy head with spot on the side and the skinny bill? And next to it there's a duck with the same head-and-bill but reddish brown? Those are Hooded Mergansers: male and female." Brie looked and said, "Oh! Yeah, they've got little mohawks." It made me remember that Brie had had a mohawk when we first met, just a year before I had one myself. "Yep, those are them!"
After some duck time I started pointing out Passerines around the trees next to us: Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Chestnut-backed Chickadees, and...wait! What are those? Is it? Cedar Waxwings! A life bird! Hell yes.
We go back to the ducks. I imitate the call of a nearby Kingfisher for her, and then point to where it is in the trees. Brie points across the lake and says, "What's that white thing?" It looks like someone's stuck a swan in the treetop across the lake. Life bird #2: The Great Egret. I proceed to take two of the worst photos I've ever taken of a bird (excluding those where it turned out there was no longer any bird in the frame). Here's my life bird Great Egret (it's the white smudge):
We also saw a beautiful Nutria (they're big invasive rats). It was NOT afraid of people and we took photos of/with it.
Brie's Nutria glamour shot
Brie and the Nutria together
-Here is the Ducks section of this blog post-
I had a "see anything interesting?" conversation with a birder we passed and he mentioned seeing a Common Merganser. At first I thought I'd misidentified the Hooded Mergansers at the entrance to the park, but I checked the field guide and no, I had misidentified the Merganser I'd come across a little bit later and taken a bunch of photos of. Pretty cool duck, huh?
I also saw a bunch of American Wigeons. I love Wigeons.
Wigeon!
-That was the Ducks section of this blog post-
The whole time after we saw the Egret I was scanning for a Black Phoebe, the other life bird I had heard was around. I'd seen a Say's Phoebe in Arizona, and I wanted to see another. Black Phoebes are medium-sized birds who are very fluffy and soft-looking. They zip around watery areas eating bugs like a swallow or something. It's cute. So when Brie was doing her photo session with the Nutria, I started walking around looking for it. Then Merlin heard it! I followed the sound and eventually found my Phoebe:
With Scaups for reference
Life bird number three! And with that I found every one of the birds I was looking for here. Really cool to be able to find everything I was looking for and get to enjoy these really beautiful birds!
Reconnecting with someone from your past is a trip in ways that get stuck in your mind. Brie was so exactly the same person in terms of her personality from when she was 19 and I was 21, but now she had a wider range of interests, mannerisms, and aesthetic tendencies, something I think anyone might have after living for twenty more years, but even moreso if you do a gender transition too. It's always interesting to see how transitioning both changes us and doesn't and I always wonder about things like "If I'd been born cis if I would I have gotten so into computers at a young age?" Because I was encouraged in my love of technology, I took programming classes in high school (C++ baybee). That fell away for me as I got older and got more into books and music, but I'm glad I can fix stuff when my Linux distro breaks. I'm not sure where I was going with this. Is this blog post over? Yeah, it's over. Uh, I had a great time!
Love, Sara