Brooklyn Bird Watch: October 15
Eastern Phoebe. Scientific Name: Sayornis phoebe
Today Brooklyn Bird Watch features a Heather Wolf photo of the Eastern Phoebe. The Eastern Phoebe is considered a “flycatcher” and although bird watchers do not admire its “drab” plumage, there are many things about this small bird that makes it very popular among bird aficionados.
For example, it has a special place in bird history because in 1803 the famous ornithologist and painter John James Audubon used the Eastern Phoebe to conduct the first “bird-banding” experiment in America. Audubon “attached a silver thread to the legs of Eastern Phoebe nestlings before they migrated. The next spring, he recaptured two of the marked phoebes, which had returned to his property. From that time until today, ornithologists have employed bird banding to track birds’ migratory movements and to ensure accurate counts of their populations.”
Probably less important to bird history than to Audubon himself; he was known to be particularly fond of this bird because many of them nested near his home in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, where Audubon courted his neighbor and future wife Lucy Bakewell.
We have also mentioned birds and poetry before, and the Phoebe makes an appearance in a sad Robert Frost poem published in 1923. In the poem “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”, Frost describes how phoebes were still nested inside a barn on a farm abandoned after the farmhouse burned to the ground.