Welcome to birding, James Hetfield
Plus, a look at other celebrity birders and pink gulls.
Everyone becomes a birder eventually.
The news arrived in late June that Metallica frontman James Hetfield is a birder.
“I love the beasts of this planet, they’re so cool. On my time off, I’m obsessed with having a cigar on the porch and I’ve got probably about six bird feeders. I know all the birds that come out there and I’ve got my little app that has bird noises and I can see which one they are and I’ll pull it up and talk to ’em and all that stuff.”
Fifteen-year-old me is in shock. Kids in Metallica jean jackets were stuffing kids like me into lockers back in the day. Now they’re downloading the eBird app, donning safari clothes, and toting a gigantic camera everywhere they go. It’s not something one could have seen coming.
Hetfield, who lives in Colorado, goes on:
“I do live in a place where there’s animals all the time and I get to see ’em. I admire the wolf, I admire the eagle, I admire the buffalo, I admire the elk,” he says. “I like to think that humans have been so distracted by the worldly clamour that we’ve forgotten about survival and all these animals wake up thinking – well, I don’t know what they’re thinking, but – what I visualise is they have to eat, so that’s what they do.”
Now that Hetfield’s seen the light, let’s take a look at other celebrities who enjoy a walk in the woods and penciling updates to their life lists:
Geddy Lee
The Rush frontman and legendary bassist enjoys bird photography in his spare time. Notably he took a photo of a Sulphur-crested Cockatoo in Australia some years back.
Steven Spielberg
A flamingo surprised everyone by showing up in the Hamptons in June. Among those on the twitch were the decorated film director, according to this piece from the New York Times.
Mary Tyler Moore
When a pair of Red-tailed Hawks nested on her luxury apartment on Fifth Avenue, the late star took steps to protect the birds’ nest. The story was chronicled in a book called “Red-tails in Love.”
Jonathan Franzen
The celebrated author is on the Board of the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and has written extensively about being a birder. The plot of his 2010 book, “Freedom,” features an effort to protect Cerulean Warblers from coal mining in West Virginia.
Tig Notaro
The comedian and frequent talk-show guest has been birding for more than three decades. Notaro cites Blue Jays and Northern Cardinals as two species that she enjoys at her bird feeder.
Lili Taylor
The “Mystic Pizza” star has been one of the more notable celebrity birders for some time and regularly totes around Zeiss binoculars. Northern Flickers and Gray Catbirds are two species she’s seen in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
Amy Tan
The author of “The Joy Luck Club” has just written a book about backyard birding and serves on the ABC Board. According to this article, “her doors of perception flew wide open when she began to study drawing at 64, something that had delighted her as a child.”
Pretty in pink?
In a piece for Chicago Bird Alliance, Woody Goss examined why so many of our Ring-billed Gulls in Illinois and Indiana have pink plumage. The answer is twofold: 1) Carotenoids in food—yellow, orange, and red organic pigments that are produced by plants and algae; 2) Staining, specifically with iron oxide, and specifically among those that breed in East Chicago, Indiana, where there is a a steel fabricator and a coal distributor.
The reddish color in the image above is likely iron oxide, which is used in the manufacturing of steel. It can be piled up for storage, it can color the byproducts of the steel-making process (slag), or it might settle from dust in the air or be deposited from water runoff. Breeding bird surveyors have noted the proximity of breeding gulls to the red substance, but the exact route of exposure is uncertain.
I did some counting on one of my visits to this beach and consistently came up with 32-35% of the *close enough* ring-billed gulls that showed some visible pink color–I realized early on that my ability to perceive more subtle color was affected by, among a number of factors, distance. The number of birds counted was on the order of ~35/100. This is about 3x the proportion of ~10% pink ring-billeds figured by Terry Walsh on the North Side of Chicago–I encountered this same percentage in a couple different locations in the city.
Woody goes on to note leg color differences in the stained birds as well. There’s some variation with time of year, too. Read the full piece here.
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Ben Crenshaw, the golfer, is a birder, too. And, of course, at least two U.S. Presidents: Teddy Roosevelt (who kept a White House yard list), and Jimmy Carter. Jimmy and Rosalyn traveled all over for birds.
My husband (a former indoor boy now outdoor) really loved this. He is a musician. Plays about 5 instruments but guitar is his favorite. He grew up listening to Metallica. I now consider my husband an amateur birder. So when I fwd him this article...he was really excited. His words exactly were, "that makes him even more hard". So thank you for sharing 😊!