As some of you might recall, one of my best friends and birding partner was Bill Gentry. Bill was not your average birder. Actually, he was probably one of the worst birders I ever met.
He was the best door-slammer I ever saw, however, and was always hungry. He carried Snickers bars with him and wouldn’t share with me, but he would give you the shirt off his back if you asked for it.
Bill was part Cherokee and was proud of it. He even remembered a lot of old names for birds that wern’t in the field guide.
Birding in South Texas, we saw a yellow-billed cuckoo, but Bill insisted it was a rain crow.
Arguing with Bill, who wore hearing aids that had been condemned by the Federal Communcations Commission, had proved useless in the past, so I wrote down “rain crow” on the trip list.
Down in the Rio Grande Valley, we saw a cormorant. I started to write it down and then looked at Bill. “What is that?” I asked.
“Water turkey,” Bill said with his mouthful of Snickers bar.
So I added water turkey to the list and we moved on. At the lake at Edinburg,, we saw a green heron. I was sure my identfication was correct, but Bill said, “Shide pole.”
“The book says green heron,” I said, pointing to the picuture in the field guide.
“Book wrong,” Bill said.
With “shide pole” safely engraved on our weird trip list, we headed for Bentson State Park. The park was filled with retirees in their campers. Bill looked at them as the first Indians must have looked at the early settlers.
“Snow birds,” he said.
Actually juncos are somtimes called snow birds, but I was in no mood to argue with an irritated Indian.
I’m not the sound man Richard Kinney is, but naming the loud-mouthed birds in the brush at Bentson was easy. They were plain chachalacas.
“Mexican pheasant,” Bill said.
“How do you spell that?” I asked.
“Charkerlarki,” he said, and I thought I saw a little smile on his lips.
At Brownsville, the grackles were abundant and I was taking no chances. Before I wrote the bird down, I looked at Bill, my pencil poised over our trip list that had half the names stricken out.
“Daws,” said my native indentifier of strange birds. I looked bewildered. “That’s what they were called many years ago,” he said, “Or sometimes chocks or crow blackbird.”
We spent the night at a motel in McAllen where a “bird of paradise,” alias a scissor-tailed flycatcher, sat on a telephone line.
“Big tepee,” Bill said as we checked into the motel, where he fell asleep at once, snored like a B-29 bomber and kept talking in his sleep about somebody named Custer.
E.M. “Bosie” Boswell is a member of the American Birding Association and the Audubon Society. Contact him at 6413 Stonewall, Greenville, TX 75402, or e-mail bosieb@geusnet.com.