My Lifelist Focaccia!

I stood atop a ten-foot bank, looking down at the clear still water of - I think - Waterbury Reservoir. The sky was gray and a slight breeze made me glad I was wearing my old fleece jacket.

Waterbury Reservoir

The two people with me weren't birders. They were staring out into the middle of the reservoir, talking about boats and fish.

Bored, I turned away from them - and my eye was caught by what looked like a Northern Flicker. 

Northern Flicker - not what I was seeing!

Sort of. The bird, which was standing on a little rock surrounded by water, had the same size, the same shape. It had the same strong, slightly curved bill. It had the same spotted chest and belly. It even had a mustache. But that mustache, like all its other colors, was muted, even muddy. Its back was more gray than brown, and the back of its neck was a dark dried-blood purple instead of the proper Valentine's Day red.

I moved two steps to my right, along the edge of the bank. The bird must have noticed my approach, because it abruptly threw itself off its perch - and dove right into the water. I watched it swim, expertly, quickly, a foot or two under the water, heading for a little inlet. 

I turned to my companions, but they had wandered away.

"That is NOT a flicker!" I said to myself, aloud. "Flickers do not swim!"

I got out my ever-present birding notebook and started taking notes. Location, time, size and shape and general color of bird. Behavior.

Ah, yes. That's where it got interesting! Behavior! 

The bird neared a large rock and swam to the water's surface. Once there, it balanced on the water with one foot, reaching its other foot up - and then reversing, standing on the other foot, reaching with the other. 

"Bird apparently knows how to climb stairs," I wrote.

After a few seconds of finding no stairs, the flicker-that-wasn't-a-flicker threw itself out of the water and onto the large rock, where it walked to the center and started preening.

"Bird walks, not hops," I scrawled.

At that moment, I sensed someone behind me. I turned and was pleased to see a birder I knew.

"Take a look at the bird on that rock over there!" 

"It's all wet," he observed.

"Yes! It was just swimming. Underwater. Just like a dipper."

"Not possible," he opined. "There are no dippers in the east. And anyway dippers don't look like that."

"I know. I've seen dippers."

a Dipper I've seen

"But this bird, that looks like a dull-colored flicker, just dove under the water and swam fast and efficiently for several yards."

"Hmmm," he ruminated. "Peculiar. We might have ourselves a rarity."

I dug out my tattered Sibley and he got out his iPhone. 

"You check Sibley for rarities," he instructed. "I'll try Whatbird.com."

Several minutes passed. The bird preened and air-dried. The two of us studied, hunted, researched.

"Nothing even remotely similar."

"Well," he said, "I may have something. How's this?"

And he held his phone out to me.

And there was the bird! Our bird! It was exactly what we were both looking at through our binoculars. And it was far, far, far away from home! That flicker-like, dipper-like bird was nonmigratory, a diving bird that frequented deep still lakes in the wilds of Outer Mongolia.  

"What's it called?" I whispered, hushed now that I understood the enormity of the sighting. 

"Mongolian Focaccia," he whispered back.

"Hmmmm," I mused. "That name sounds familiar."

                                                                         

And then I woke up, grinning.

                                                       

(Here's some real  focaccia - not good underwater, and not from Outer Mongolia.)

     

Some e-mailed comments:

That was laugh out loud funny—thank you!  - VT

That was such a great story. Thanks for sharing it in detail!  - PA

That is extremely funny!  Thank you! - VT

Loved it - and laughed!! - OH