Early in the college phase of my life, I became friends with
a girl who lived in Pewee Valley. At
some point, driving along in a car, we had a conversation about the name Pewee
Valley, and Angela explained to me that it was named after the pewee bird. “Pe-WEE,
pe-WEE, pe-WEE,” she said, “That’s it’s call.”
Not too many years before, I had taken an on-and-off, very
casual interest in bird watching. Well,
maybe not so much bird watching as bird awareness. I wasn’t exploring wilderness areas with a
pair of binoculars and a checklist; but I was watching the bird feeder, and
using a Peterson field guide to identify birds.
This “pewee bird” was a new one on me, though. I didn’t recall ever seeing or hearing one,
so I mentally categorized the bird as something slightly exotic, living in the
wilderness of Louisville’s periphery, possibly mythical.
Fast forward a quarter of a century. The memory of the pewee
bird description stayed with me, but I still didn’t recall every noticing
one. Awareness of the memory probably
just never surfaced often enough, or at the right time, for me to bother with
an internet search to learn more about it.
So, for more than 25 years, the pewee wasn’t much more than a feathered
mental chupacabra.
That brings me to a few weeks ago. I was sitting in our family room with my
daughters and my mother-in-law, as dusk settled ouside; we were all
reading. After a while, I became aware
of an intermittent, high-pitched bird call from outside. Not super loud, but loud and high enough to
penetrate our wall and windows more
distinctly than the rest of the evening bird racket. “Phwee-EEEH. Phwee-EEEH.”
I looked at my mother-in-law and asked, “What is that? That
bird?” She said she didn’t know, but had
heard it the night before, too.
I went outside.
There, the call became less distinct, because it was mixed in with all
the other bird noises that I couldn’t hear from indoors. It was somewhere off in the trees, but I
couldn’t see anything. I was puzzled; I
had no idea what it was, and went back inside.
Over the following days, I heard the bird again. Finally, I went to the Cornell University
bird web site, and started listing to the bird calls of birds I already knew,
thinking that maybe one of them was making calls I was unfamiliar with (I had
recently been surprised to learn, via Cornell’s pages, that odd piping notes
behind our house were blue jays; I was even more surprised a couple of months
ago when I witnessed, from my front yard, a blue jay imitating a red tailed
hawk.)
I listened to a lot
of bird calls and still had no answer, but resolved to continue the search
later.
A short while after that, we were visiting friends at their
house in the Highlands neighborhood of Louisville. As we talked and played basketball in the
back yard, I again heard the bird call off in the trees. Phwee-EEEH.
I thought for a minute.
How do I search on the internet for a bird call? I would need a description that matches the
call. Very high-pitched, whistling,
sounds kind of like “Fweeee” … How else could the call be described? “WeeyaEEEE?”
“PweeEEE?”…
…holy crap. “Pewee?”
I pulled out my smart phone and looked up “pewee call.” I was taken to the Cornell page for the
eastern wood pewee, and sure enough, found the call.
Apparently, it’s not a rare bird at all (although if my
experience is any indication, it’s not exactly common in residential Louisville,
and vanishes altogether to South America in winter anyway.) I got the visual description of this small
member of the flycatcher family, so I knew what to look for.
There, in my friends’ driveway, I played the recording, and
I think it actually provoked the pewee that was in the tree-line a good way off
to fly over to a nearby tree. Regardless
of the reason, it did fly to a tree by the driveway, and I could see it.
I probably had seen it before; except for the loud,
distinctive call, the eastern wood pewee is easy to overlook. They are small and olive-drab, matching the
colors of the tree branches on which they perch, looking very nondescript from
a distance (especially if your distance vision is as bad as mine.) A more detailed view will show them to have
cute crested heads and cute short tails, but from a little way off they just
look like any old small bird.
There are at last two living near my house, and I hear them
and see them almost every morning and night.
In fact, a couple of nights ago, as I mowed our back yard, one flew down
to a post in the middle of the yard, watching for insects that I was stirring
up. I got within fifteen feet of him,
lawnmower still running, before he flew off (and I don’t think he flew away
because of my proximity; I think he was chasing a moth.)
I am very happy to have made this acquaintance, and every
time I hear them now, I smile.
