PhilPaine.com

I love Good­will stores. Where else are you going to find a vinyl press­ing of Bruce Willis’ rock band, or a biog­ra­phy of Tel­ly Savalas? And you occa­sion­ally find some­thing that’s actu­ally valu­able or use­ful. Yes­ter­day, I paid fifty cents for a two-disk record­ing of the calls of about three hun­dred birds of my region, keyed to the page num­bers of Peterson’s Field Guide, the bible of bird­ing on this con­ti­nent. I was sur­prised at the num­ber of calls that I rec­og­nized. But I was dis­ap­pointed to find the Whiskey­jack (Wiis­age­jaak, in Cree) miss­ing. How could they ignore the impu­dent trick­ster? It’s dis­tinc­tive song is usu­ally described as “whee-ah, chuck chuck”. It also whis­tles and screech­es on occa­sion, or sings a charm­ing “whis­per song” when mating.

[Pho­to of a Whiskey­jack tak­en by Aarre Erto­lahti in Lappe, fif­teen miles west of Thun­der Bay. Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Cana­dian Sanomat, a Finnish-lan­guage news­pa­per in North­ern Ontario.]