One Photograph: Writ Small

Poor-will, on Slope Harrison, Nebraska, June 1997. ©William Burt.

To some of us, the best birds going are those famous for their speed and predatory punch (the falcons, goshawks, eagles, and the like), while others are most taken by those with the brightest colors (warblers, finches), or the most beguiling songs (the thrushes and some wrens, some sparrows). And to others still—the “listers,” generally—the only birds worth seeing are the rarities.

My own weakness has been always for the most elusive and mysterious—which is to say the birds of marshes, chiefly, and a smattering of others. But in the course of chasing birds with cameras for so many years, I’ve come to recognize another and entirely unrelated group of favorites which share one defining quality: their size.

It dawned on me some time ago that if I were to choose the “best” bird of a given family—a favorite duck, gull, tern, or heron, say—in nearly every case, I’d choose the smallest.
It’s just a question of personal taste, of course, but I stand by this visual conceit of mine; and are not many eyes and hearts won over by the smaller creatures? I admit to some exceptions, and especially with respect to hummingbirds so minuscule that they could pass for insects (and so sheeny that you might imagine them as trinkets, toys, or window bric-a-brac). And as much as I like small dogs, some of the super-tiniest (like chihuahuas) can seem less like living creatures than stuffed cuddle toys.

All this might come across as heresy to some, so before I step in any deeper I’ll move on, and confine my comments to some of those favorite birds.
The pert little Ruddy Duck, for instance: it packs in both comedy and pluck. The Bufflehead is roughly the same size, but a dull duck he is, with nothing of the Ruddy’s arch, upright composure, not to say its goofy courtship antics. Few birds are both as handsome and amusing as a blue-billed Ruddy drake afloat upon a North Dakota pool with his head up, tail up, and the chin-up cocky look of one who thinks he owns the place, as well he might. And when his head bobs up and down, his blue bill smacks the water, and you hear his bubbly courtship quacks—you’ll want to laugh aloud.

This duck has spunk, and personality. No other paddler of his kind can so light up a smile.
Which brings to mind another spunky little job, of quite another family: the Ruby-crowned Kinglet. It’s a truly tiny thing (only the hummingbirds are tinier), but when the male becomes alarmed, or should I say inflamed, you’ll know it: that’s when the bright ruby crown pops up.

He’s much the livelier of the two kinglets, and his ardor is at once apparent in his song, which is so loud and rollicking that when you first encounter it you can’t imagine that the source could be so small. And you’d think that one performance would exhaust him, yet upon completing his long labyrinthine song he often launches off into another, and with little pause between the two.

The tinier the bird, it seems, the greater is his energy.

And so it is with the two tiniest of wrens: they too are impish, energetic, and irascible; and they have big voices. The Sedge Wren pounds out a few flinty chip notes, then unlooses a long ripping trill; and the Winter Wren unlooses a long series of high tinkling notes, which in the end become so high and thin as to elude all but the keenest ears. And like all wrens, these two are always moving: always nudging, probing, and investigating, always building more nests than they need, and singing their big songs. Have you ever known a wren to pause, take time to sit up on a perch, and ruminate?

Nor have I. But if I had to choose between the two, I’d be hard pressed. The Winter Wren’s is certainly the finer song—few avian songs compare—but the hard-punching Sedge Wren’s is no less exciting, and in any case I’m drawn by the mystique of its wet meadow homelands, which are all too surely disappearing...so, my vote goes to the Sedge Wren.
Among the uniformly fashioned thrushes, warblers, finches, sparrows, and most other songbird families, there are no truly tiniest. So I’ll keep to the more morphologically diverse: the gulls and terns, for instance. Which of these are the most winsome to the eye?

That’s easy, on both counts: the Little Gull, and the Least Tern.

They are the smallest of their kind in North America, and they’re smart-looking ones at that. The Little Gull is a rare visitor from Europe, which has turned up in Connecticut at both New Haven harbor and the Connecticut River estuary; and the Least Tern, of course, is a beach-nesting staple in Old Lyme, at Griswold Point. It’s not only the baby of the group in our part of the planet, but one of the feistiest. I learned that well as a 14-year-old on my first visit to the Point, when they descended on me with sharp cries and murder in their eyes. Yet when you’re not intruding on their sands at nesting time, they are a cheerful lot, with calls no longer sharp but giddy: like the cries of children at the swimming pool.

In choosing a best shorebird, I stand fast with its companion of the upper beach: the Piping Plover.

The brown-streaked Least and Semipalmated Sandpipers are actually a wee bit smaller, but they are plain-looking Joes compared to this quick-legged sprite. The larger godwits, curlews, phalaropes, and other fancy shorebirds are more thrilling, surely, but for none do I hold such affection as I do for this pale innocent, which also nests at Griswold Point.

It’s the subtler, understated qualities that lend it such appeal: the ghost-white camouflage, and the relentless hide-and-seek it plays upon the sands; the motor-powered legs, the head-down runs and the surprising speed of such a gentle creature—and the sudden stops. And above all the mellow, almost melancholy call, which the old-time bird man Winsor Tyler once described as “a soft musical moan, we can not tell from where.”*
Another darling miniature is, believe or not, a dove—the Ground Dove—and it truly is a tiny thing, no bigger than some sparrows.

It’s unsettling to think that this fun little favorite is related to the unwashed likes of the park pigeon, or the witless Mourning Dove; but while the others may be dull as a wet afternoon, this dove is no such thing. It’s a quick and lively creature, and a personality.

The Ground Dove is found only in the deep south (chiefly Florida), so I don’t know it well; but the late southern naturalist Donald Nicholson once noted that the male will sit fast at the nest when approached, hold up its wings and rasp at the intruder; and when lifted off the nest will take mock strikes at the man’s hand. Can you imagine the dim Mourning Dove responding with such spunk?
Our smallest owl—you’ve likely seen a photo of it peering out from a small hole in a Saguaro cactus—is the Elf Owl. It’s about “the size of a chunky sparrow,” as Peterson has put it in his western Field Guide. But here in the US it occurs only in the southwestern desert, and I’ve never actually seen it; so I can hardly claim it as a favorite.

Besides, we in the eastern states do have the Saw-whet Owl, which is about the size of a man’s open hand, and it too is a sweetheart. In Connecticut you sometimes hear its tooting calls in early spring, and should you be so lucky as to see the round-faced little owl itself, you’ll find it very tame. In the snowy January woods here in Old Lyme some years ago my late friend Walter Kennedy essayed to clamber over a stone wall and slipped, went over in a tumble and before he knew it found himself upon his back beneath a cedar tree, and looking up into the yellow eyes of a big-headed little Saw-whet Owl.

“Hello little owl,” he said, and the owl stared back without a word.
My last two half-pint favorites here are also creatures of the night, and little-known; and both are irresistible to eye and ear alike. And the first of these, to me, is the most haunting of all creatures on the planet: the Black Rail.

I’ve written much about it in the past so I’ll say little here, though I should point out that this skulker of the marshes is no bigger than a minor sparrow (or if you prefer, a mouse—the naturalist Alexander Sprunt, Jr. once characterized it as “a feathered mouse”). So deftly does it creep within the finery of its salt meadow home that it could slip between your boots, and you would never know. It calls only at night, and mostly on dark (cloudy) nights; and only during a few weeks in May and June. And while few eyes have ever chanced to see one, it’s a creature of rare beauty: slaty-black, strewn with a galaxy of fine white speckles on the wings and back, and blazoned with red eyes.

One other thing about this Lilliputian rail. Like many another tiny creature, it can be ferocious as a shrew. When I played back a tape-recorded call to several male birds down in Maryland—this was near forty years ago, when both the practice and the rails were common—they came at their Panasonic challenger like snarling rockets, keen to have it out. And I would not have wished to be that adversary, even if I were three times their size.
The other night bird I’ve become especially fond of is the gentle Poor-will: a foreshortened western version of our eastern Whip-poor-will, you might say; and yet a different creature altogether. It’s a moth-winged phantom of dry hills and canyon slopes whose two-note calls are mellow, musical, and a surprise delight to those accustomed to the loud, stuck-record shouts of Whip-poor-wills and Chuck-will’s-widows. And it’s a squat, fun-looking fellow with a big-eyed and big-headed look, and an abbreviated body from the neck on down.

So yet again, the bird writ smallest is the best.

William Burt is a naturalist, photographer, and writer with a passion for wild places—especially marshes—and the elusive birds few people see. He is the author of four books, and his traveling exhibitions have been shown at some thirty-five museums across the US and Canada.