In Search of the Snow Bunting by Michael Valliant
Neck in January of 2015 and saw two brilliant blue birds in the trees along the road. They had orangishbrown bellies. I was stunned by the color, and rif led through my Audubon Field Book when I got home. They were Eastern Bluebirds. In 40-plus years living in Talbot County, I had never seen one. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Birding is about paying attention. It’s about noticing what is all around us. Though people f lock to the region in spring and fall as the
Peter Matthiessen was not a slacker. When he decided to go search for a winter animal, he went to the Himalayas. In 1973, he and naturalist George Schaller went to the Dolpo region of Nepal to look for snow leopards. Matthiessen won the 1978 National Book Award for his account of that trip in his book Snow Leopard. I’m not so ambitious. I’m just trying to see a Snow Bunting on the Eastern Shore. I have not been birding for very long. I was running on Baileys
Photo by Bill Hubick
Eastern Bluebird 67