Bucket List

Who needs one? A wish list is plenty good enough for me.

(Listen to the radio version here.)

After seeing the drawing on top in my Golden Guide “Wish Book,” how could I not yearn to see this display?

Every now and then, people tell me about their “bucket list”—the list of things they yearn to do before they "kick the bucket." I’ve never been into that concept. Obviously, to experience anything, we have to do it before we die, but why put that kind of existential pressure on a simple wish list?

The moment I cracked open my first field guide, I felt like a little kid opening the old Sears Christmas catalog—what we called the "Wish Book"—enticing me with all kinds of possibilities. Other bird books and online sites expanded my wishes exponentially.

Ever since the early oughts when I first discovered its existence, I longed to see a Cuban Tody more than any other bird on the planet. Yet in February 2015, as Russ was driving me to the hospital while I was having my first heart attack and for all I knew, I really might have been about to kick the bucket, my brain first ran through each member of my family, trying to be sure they’d be fine; then it went to my bank account and calculated that there was enough for Russ to pay back the advance on the book I was working on, my American Birding Association Field Guide to the Birds of Minnesota. Then for the rest of the way to the hospital, my brain was filled with happy thoughts about all the chickadees and other cool birds I have seen, without a single regretful thought about all the cool birds I hadn’t yet seen.

I did see my Cuban Todies—Russ made sure I went on a birding trip to Cuba in 2016, and I got to return this year.

I wanted to see the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock for years, but out of pure luck I got to go to Guyana this year and saw that.

I still long to see a penguin—any penguin—in the wild, and an ostrich, and Africa’s Secretary Bird and Shoebill, and an Australian Magpie, and several others, but the one thing I’ve longed to see even more than any of those potential lifers was not a new bird—it was simply an adult Magnificent Frigatebird with his gular sac ballooned out in his amazing and improbable breeding display. This was not on any bucket list—I never once thought about frigatebirds in the context of me dying. I simply wanted to see it—badly enough to pay for a pretty expensive birding tour when and where I knew it was a good possibility, but not with any thought about kicking some proverbial bucket.

Several birds inflate air sacs somewhere on their bodies in breeding displays. Male prairie chickens and Sharp-tailed Grouse inflate pouches on the sides of their neck and smaller ones above their eyes.

A displaying male sage grouse struts around as if he were at a Mae West Impersonators’ Contest, his pointed tail feathers erect, sporting what looks like a feather boa, and inflating two air sacs exactly where Mae West would want two inflatable air sacs.

Frigatebirds have them all beat. Their gular pouch is like a ginormous balloon.

During most of the year, that balloon is collapsed and mostly hidden by the throat feathers.

But when males are competing and courting at the start of the breeding season, they inflate it to be so huge that it can hold their enormous bill at an awkward angle.

I can’t find measurements of a fully inflated pouch—no male would show that off in the hands of an ornithologist poking him with a ruler—but we do know that the male’s culmen (his upper bill) is roughly 108 mm (4.2 inches) long. My photos of a male’s bill resting on his fully inflated pouch suggest that the pouch measures, from where it originates in the throat down to where it curves back toward the bird’s underside, at least 3 and more likely 4 or even 4 ½ times that bill length, or a good 18 inches, which is pretty darned impressive when you realize that from the tip of his bill to the tip of his tail, a male frigatebird is only about 3 feet long. Fully inflated, that air sac is bulkier than his entire torso.

When appealing to a potential mate, he tries to appeal to her ears as well as eyes, making a cool percussive sound by rapidly vibrating or snapping his bill.

I was in the Dry Tortugas in late April, after most of the frigatebird pairs were incubating eggs or raising chicks, so I missed that courtship stage when the trees can look like they’ve been decorated for Christmas with oversized red ornaments. There were still several male frigatebirds with a fully inflated pouch, but I didn’t get to see them competing or hear that cool sound. It was plenty enough for me to see and photograph that amazing air sac.

I don't know if inflated frigatebird pouches will be one of the visions flitting through my brain as I die, but the thought of them is sure resting easy on my brain at this very moment. Whether I die happy I cannot foretell, but birds sure make it easier to live happy.