Birds

Watching Hoopoes

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Grove Koger

Maggie and I have seen the strange birds known as hoopoes several times over the years, and we count ourselves lucky.

Our first sighting, which was brief, was from the terrace of our apartment on the Croatian island of Rab in 2013. We noticed, across the way, a fairly large bird sitting on the bare branch of a tree. As we watched, it raised a tall crest of orange and black feathers above its head, lowered them a bit, and flew off. We may have seen it for 30 or 45 seconds, but the sighting set off a frenzy of online searching on our part, and within a relatively short time, we identified the strange bird as a Eurasian hoopoe, Upupa epops. But knowing what it was didn’t erase the bird’s strangeness. We had never seen anything like it.

Our next sightings came in 2017 on the outskirts of the little Portuguese community of Santa Luzia in the Eastern Algarve. There were small flocks of the birds in the fields we walked by every day, but they were far enough away that we didn’t realize for a time what they were. I’d like to think that we’ve since become a little more observant.

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John Gould, Family of Hoopoes, from H.C. Richter, Birds of Great Britain, 1862-1873

Our best sighting came in Barcelona in 2019, when we watched a hoopoe hunting in the grass for insects on the grounds beside our bench in Ciutadella Park. Its hopping, like its aspect in general, was somehow comic, but of course it was searching earnestly for lunch, and I don’t doubt that it found some. That’s it you see at the top of today’s post.

The hoopoe is the national bird of Israel, chosen in 2008 after a survey of that nation’s citizens. It appears, naturally enough, on Israeli stamps, as well as on those of several countries, since it enjoys a wide range. Thanks to that range and its striking behavior, it’s inspired quite a bit of folklore, and its earliest representations, according to the site Birds of the World, “date back to the Paleolithic Age,” when it appeared as the “bird-sun” in what are today Azerbaijan and southern Russia. In the Middle East, it was once regarded as “King Solomon’s messenger.” If you’re wondering about the hoopoe’s odd name, it’s an imitation of its cry, although the ones we’ve seen have been mute.

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Birds of the World explains that hoopoes breed across much of continental Eurasia and Africa, although the birds retreat from the cooler regions during the winter. And speaking of cooler regions, here’s a puzzle. It seems that large, flightless or near-flightless hoopoes (Upupa antaios) once lived on the remote South Atlantic Island of Saint Helena. Alas, the species went extinct about 1640, presumably due to the island’s discovery in the preceding century and the ensuing introduction of rats and cats. But I wonder how those hoopoes got there in the first place, since Saint Helena is some 1,200 miles from the nearest landmass. Presumably a pregnant female found herself blown far, far off course long ago, after which the ability to fly became unimportant, but we’ll never know.

It’s believed that Saint Helena hoopoes fed on Saint Helena earwigs, among other prey. The insects are better referred to as Saint Helena giant earwigs, as males reached a maximum length of 3.3 inches—making them the largest of their genus in the world. Alas, the insects haven’t been spotted since 1967, and are now thought to be extinct.

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Reconstruction by Apokryltaros of a Saint Helena hoopoe holding a Saint Helena giant earwig, reproduced courtesy of English Wikipedia

In the meantime, if you’d like to watch some of today’s hoopoes, YouTube provides opportunities here and here. For the best viewing experience, Maggie and I recommend that you open a bottle of Cava or Prosecco beforehand.

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Messiaen’s Exotic Birds and Ours

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Grove Koger

Maggie and I recently spent two weeks in a rented house on Florida’s St. George Island, enjoying the luxury of doing nothing that we didn’t care to do.

Among St. George’s many attractions are its animals, particularly its birds. To some of you, the birds we enjoyed so much are common sights, species that you probably take for granted. But to us Idahoans, the cardinals and mockingbirds and red-bellied woodpeckers and white-breasted nuthatches that serenaded us every morning as we drank our coffee were a revelation—an exotic serenade that, despite its frequently cacophonous quality, was an invigorating and inspiring start to the day. (There were also the occasional cries and croaks of birds we were familiar with—crows and gulls and ospreys and great blue herons—as well as the enthusiastic guttural rasps of tree frogs when the weather was rainy.)

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Again and again as I listened, I was reminded of the music of avant-garde French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), who was fascinated by birdsong. He notated and transcribed the songs of individual species as he traveled, and he ultimately incorporated such transcriptions into his compositions, including several cycles for piano—Catalogue d’oiseaux (1956-56), La fauvette des jardins (1970), and Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (1985). Among his orchestral works, the relatively short Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds, 1953-56) in particular stands out for its exciting use of avian cries and calls and whistles and chatter.

The work is scored for solo piano, piccolo, flute, oboe, E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, trumpet, glockenspiel, 3 gongs (high, medium, and low), snare drum, tam-tam (very low), temple blocks, woodblock, and xylophone. So prominent is the piano that Messiaen characterized Oiseaux exotiques as “almost a piano concerto.” The 18 species depicted—if that’s the right word—are indigenous to the Americas, China, India, and Malaysia., and include the Indian minah bird (heard first), the prairie chicken, the bobolink, and the catbird.  

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Messiaen also made use of rhythms from Greek and Hindu music, but such details are for experts. I’ll simply say that it’s a work that, to my ear at least, seems to lack the kind of development that I’m used to hearing in music. But the conclusion, which is made up of a series of harsh, repeated chords, is clearly a conclusion, and an exciting one.

You can listen to Messiaen’s one-time pupil Pierre Boulez, who also commissioned the piece, discuss and then conduct it here. But Boulez was an intensely cerebral interpreter, and I think that the performance he elicits is a little cold. More enjoyable is the version by the Ensemble Oktopus, which you can listen to here.  

Messiaen once remarked that “among the artistic hierarchy, the birds are probably the greatest musicians to inhabit the planet.” So I urge you to sit back, clear your mind of whatever preconceptions you have about the way music ought to sound, and listen to the masters!

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The Pearl of the Adriatic

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Grove Koger

My initial experience of Dubrovnik came in 1972, when my first wife and I were heading down the Adriatic coast of what was then Yugoslavia on our way to the Greek island of Corfu. Approached from the sea during the afternoon, the city can be a stunning sight, its pale ochre walls and red tile roofs glowing in the sun. But to be perfectly honest, I’m pretty sure that our ferry put into the deepwater harbor at Gruž near the northern, less picturesque side of the city. In any case, we stayed several days with a family whose house lay outside the city proper, enjoying home-cooked Croatian food and giving our amicable hosts a bottle of cherry liqueur when we departed.

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Since then I’ve been lucky enough to revisit the city with Maggie twice, staying for several blissful days in 2005 in an apartment in a renovated house dating from 1780, the Family House Fascination. Among other attractions, the building offered several arbors and terraces as well as the only real garden left within the city walls. We sat outside with our glasses of pivo (beer) every evening, and as the sky faded to violet, the city’s swallows gradually gave way to its equally large population of bats.

Ten years later, in 2015, we revisited the city to research an article on Croatian art for Art Patron Magazine. During that period, the Pearl of the Adriatic, as it’s long been known, had grown into a tourist mecca, choked during the day with tens of thousands of foreigners like ourselves. But recently the New York Times reported that the current pandemic and the resulting drop in tourism have turned the city into a “quiet, almost unrecognizable” place. We’ll be watching to see how it recovers.

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Dubrovnik is said to have been founded in the seventh century by Greek refugees, but evidence suggests that there had been a settlement there long before. It passed through a period of Byzantine dominance, emerged as the Republic of Ragusa, fell under the control of Venice, then of Hungary, and so on—and on. Its complicated history defies easy summary, but suffice it to say that, over many centuries, it grew into a major seafaring state.

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Besides offering a myriad architectural wonders, Dubrovnik has several good (but rocky) beaches. A few minutes away lies the attractive islet of Lokrum, where Maggie and I enjoyed an alfresco lunch under the watchful eyes of hungry peacocks and swam off the island’s rocky shoreline.

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The image at the top of today’s post shows Dubrovnik from the sea; the second, an arbor at the Family House Fascination. Below it you see the old port as we departed for Lokrum, followed by a shot of the islet’s rocky coast. At the bottom you see one of Lokrum’s more colorful residents.