Bird #598 — Couch’s Kingbird

tyrannus couchii

Clark County, Arkansas — Alcoa Bottoms — Hasley Road

Tuesday, April 25, 2023 — 7:55 am

This bird was discovered near Arkadelphia last week but not entered on eBird until yesterday. I was birding in Little Rock when the email came through yesterday. It would have taken me less than an hour to dash down and see it in the beautiful afternoon weather. But like a moron, I mistook Arkadelphia for Texarkana, which is considerably further away, and I mistook Couch’s Kingbird for Cassin’s Kingbird, which I’ve seen several times in Arizona and Colorado. So I didn’t go. It wasn’t until I got home and my brain kicked in that I realized Couch’s would be a lifer—and one that was fairly easy to get to.

I got up at 5:30 on Tuesday and headed south in the dark. It was an overcast day with rain in the forecast. I arrived at the reported location around 7:45. If this had been Illinois or Colorado, there would have been a clump of birders there already, either looking at the kingbird or looking for it. But this is Arkansas, and there was nobody around.

The reports said the bird was seen north of the bridge on Hasley Road, but the coordinates that were given were south of the bridge. (I later realized there were two bridges and the bird was located between them.) I started walking the wrong way, but soon decided to trust the coordinates and turned around. I spotted the bird almost immediately. It was about 80 yards away, perched on a roadside wire next to a dense thicket of small trees. (You can see the bird as a dot in the upper left of the photo, although when I first saw it, it was down further, close to the pole.)

It was so gloomy that the bird was just a silhouette against the sky. I could see that it had the basic shape of a kingbird and that its belly was yellow, but that’s all. Before I could get any closer, it flew off over the trees. I walked slowly down the road in that direction. After perhaps five minutes, I heard four or five sharp “cheeps” from the thicket. A few seconds later, the kingbird flew out of the thicket at about head height and landed on the wire (where it is in the photo above). It had a large insect in its bill. It proceeded to beat the insect repeatedly against the wire, until, I imagine, it was dead. The bird then spent about a minute positioning the insect for swallowing, including throwing it up in the air and catching it a couple times.

After the meal was over, the kingbird stayed in the same spot for another couple minutes. It was looking about alertly as though searching for more insects. I took a few steps closer, and it flew off and landed in a snag at the top of a tree on the other side of the road.

I later realized I’d had my camera on the wrong setting, which is why (coupled with the gray conditions) the pictures are so bad. By the time I figured this out, it was raining too hard to get better shots.

The bird flew off to the south, and I walked back and forth along the road to see what else there was to see. A road grader came along, and the driver stopped and asked me “Have you seen it today?” I established that he was talking about the kingbird and told him I had. I answered some questions about it and told him where it’s normal range is. He said “The world is changing,” and proceeded to explain that the bird was here because of global warming. I didn’t bother arguing with him.

It began raining, so I returned to my car and drove further down the road. When I drove back through the same stretch, the kingbird was back on the wire, south of the pole this time. It was raining hard and I couldn’t see anything but a shape. As I passed, it flew off over the thicket, and I headed for home.

The Couch’s Kingbird is native to Mexico. It summers in south Texas, but is rare this far north. So far as I can tell from eBird, this is only the second one ever found in the state. It looks almost identical to the Tropical Kingbird (which I saw near Pine Bluff—also a rarity—in December, 2020, and down in Arizona in 2022), but the calls of the two birds are very different. I heard the Couch’s call four or five times in the thicket before it emerged with the insect, so I don’t have to rely on the testimony of others for confirmation.

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Highlights from Recent Reading

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself, for better or for worse, as his portion; that through the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, ed. Ralph L. Woods

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One of the things we have to be thankful for is that we don’t get as much government as we pay for.

C.H. Kettering, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, ed. Ralph L. Woods

__________

[In his farewell address, George Washington said,] “The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principals.” In other words, if this country of different states was going to stay together, people needed to focus on what they had in common, not their differences. “There will always be,” he said, “reason to distrust the patriotism of those who in any quarter may endeavor to weaken [the Union’s] bands.

What worried Washington more than anything else was what might happen if a president’s chief priority was to divide rather than unite the American people: “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasional riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”

from Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy, by Nathaniel Philbrick

__________

Once in Paris I consented to pose for a young man who called himself an abstractionist or a sur-réaliste, or possibly it was an abolitionist. … For five afternoons I sat for him. One might have surmised that he was executing a photographic miniature in which every hair is depicted, so exacting was he, demanding that I stay still as marble and studying me with a piercing scrutiny while he refused to let me see the canvas until it was completed. When he finally bade me look, I was considerably taken aback to confront a picture of a purple chick coop resplendent under a yellow crescent moon. I apparently gasped, for the young man asked me if I could fail to understand it. To my feeble reply that I didn’t realize I looked quite like that he explained, with contempt, that it was a portrait of my soul. Which led me to conjecture what a curious-looking place Heaven was going to be.

from Excuse It, Please! by Cornelia Otis Skinner

__________

The modes or presentation that work best for TV—stuff like “action,” with shoot-outs and car wrecks, or the rapid-fire “collage” of commercials, news, and music videos, or the “hysteria” of prime-time soap and sitcom with broad gestures, high voices, too much laughter—are unsubtle in their whispers that, somewhere, life is quicker, denser, more interesting, more … well, lively than contemporary life as Joe Briefcase knows it. This might seem benign until we consider that what good old average Joe Briefcase does more than almost anything else in contemporary life is watch television, an activity which anyone with an average brain can see does not make for a very dense and lively life. Since television must seek to attract viewers by offering a dreamy promise of escape from daily life, and since stats confirm that so grossly much of ordinary U.S. life is watching TV, TV’s whispered promises must somehow undercut television-watching in theory (“Joe, Joe, there’s a world where life is lively, where nobody spends six hours a day unwinding before a piece of furniture”) while reinforcing television-watching in practice (“Joe, Joe, your best and only access to this world is TV”).

from the essay E Unibus Pluram in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace.

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One might supposed that with cultural influence so thick in the [newspaper] local room all copy would have been free from error, every edition a masterpiece of clear, classic English and typographic excellence. But, alas, it wasn’t. That was why the style sheet decreed that no reporter, rewrite man or copyreader should ever refer to a ship as a “she.” Whatever a ship might be elsewhere she was “it” in Mr. Eastman’s paper. And the reason, yellow and crumbling, was pasted on the bulletin board where all might see … a paragraph out of a society column that in hasty make-up had become mixed with a piece of shipping news:

“Mrs. Henry Garland of the Chicago Beach Hotel writes that she has had a pleasant summer visiting friends in the East. She went first to Bar Harbor, thence to Kennebunkport, Maine.                                                                                                               “After encountering heavy weather off the Virginia capes she put into Hampton Roads to have her bottom scraped.”

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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[Instructions from a newspaper editor to his staff about a minor story] “Not much on this,” he ordered. “Give me half a paragraph.”

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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Once the pundits decided that no story in the Examiner should begin with A, An, or The. And shortly after the promulgation of the rule Mr. Avery was called upon to write a piece about the finding of the body of an unidentified woman in the river. That did not bother Mr. Avery.

“Hello everybody,” he wrote. “Take a look at this! The body of an unidentified woman … etc.” That got into type, and the rule was changed the next day.

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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We always had an information clerk, principally to keep cranks from wandering into the local room. But we never had one that functioned. One of them stopped me every morning for two weeks asking me my business. I would always ask to see myself. He’d go to get me and I’d follow him into the room. It puzzled me not only that he should have failed to recognize me after repeated experiences but that he should have failed to recognize the pattern of the gag.

from Such Interesting People, by Robert J. Casey

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My mother would say, “You know, if you make one wall of a room a mirror people think you have an entire other room.” …

My parakeet would fall for this. I would let him out of his cage. He would fly around and he would go “BANG” right into the mirror. …

Even if he thinks the mirror is another room, why doesn’t he at least try and avoid hitting the OTHER parakeet?

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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We go to the beach, go in the water, put your wallet in the sneaker.

Who’s going to know? What criminal mind could penetrate this Fortress of Security?

“I put it down by the toe. They  never look there. They check the heels, they move on.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Some products are really very candid about their nutritional quality. Certainly those Oscar Mayer cold cuts labeled simply “Luncheon Meat” fall into this category.

Here you have a product where it seems even the manufacturer is not quite sure what it is.

All they’re telling you is “It’s some kind of meat and you should eat it … around noon.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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It’s hard to imagine being the head of a household when my life at this point consists mostly of wandering around my apartment, kicking underwear up in the air and trying to catch it.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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I saw a study that said, the number one fear of the average person is public speaking. Number two is death.

Death is number two! How in the world is that?

That means to most people, if you have to go to a funeral, you would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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There is a certain critical line of sports enthusiasm where it can get a little uncomfortable … Where people start to act like they are in the game. They say things like, “We won! We won!”

“No, they won. You watched. Just calm down. I saw the whole game. You did not play. It’s one of the main reasons they won.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Players go to different teams. Teams move from city to city. The uniform is the only constant. … We just want our clothes to beat the clothes from the other city.

We’re rooting for laundry.

That’s really all sports is. If a player leaves your team, then comes back and plays against your team? The hostility. “Booo … Different shirt.” Exact same human being. “I hate this guy. He’s in a different shirt.”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Went to the track to see some horse racing. …

Do the horses even know that its a race? … I mean, I’m sure the horses have some idea of what’s going on. They probably know that, “This guy on my back is in a huge hurry.” …

But the horse must get to the end and go, (out of breath) “We were just here! What was the point of that? This is where we were. That was the longest possible route you could take to get where you wanted to be. Why didn’t we just stay here?

We would have been first …”

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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The tattoo trend seems like the last gasp of a dying culture, doesn’t it?

So bored now, we’re just doodling on ourselves.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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A lot of wives complain that their husbands do not listen …

I’ve never heard my wife say this … she may have …

I don’t know.

from Is This Anything?, by Jerry Seinfeld

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Highlights from Recent Reading

With my father, one never knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next. On one occasion he and I were walking through an uptown street in New  York after dark. In those days Fifty-eighth Street was far uptown. We probably were walking through Fifty-eighth Street from one avenue to another. There were any number of house lots which had not yet been built upon. These lots had board fences to prevent passers-by from falling into the rock pit which most of the vacant places seemed to be. In front of one of these board fences, and in the very dim light of the infrequent gas lamps, a tough-looking specimen demanded money. It really amounted to a hold-up, although no pistol was involved.

My father was an extraordinarily powerful man and as quick as a cat. Before the man had finished speaking my father grabbed him and actually boosted him up on the top of the fence and pushed him over. What he fell into on the other side, how much he was hurt, how he got out, and what he thought had happened to him have filled me with wonder these many years.

— from A Genius in the Family, by Hiram Percy Maxim

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And sometimes just because you could have done better doesn’t mean you’ve done badly.

— Carlton Fisk (addressing his father during his Hall of Fame speech)

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On our way back to the motel and well within the city limits of Tucson, a coyote ran across the road. The coyote is a great favorite of ours. If every town had more coyotes and less people, the world would be a much safer place in which to live. You will understand that my aversion to the human species is not so much that I dislike people as that I can’t stand them.

Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt

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Birding takes one out of doors; it satisfies the craving of every decent person to brush the morning dew from the grass and inhale what is left of our pure air. It is an engrossing pastime and one never wearies of it but only from it. It affords endless hours of armchair debate and exchange of bird lore with like-minded friends. It is exercise, of a sort. It offers an inexhaustible treasures store of knowledge to be assimilated; one never learns the millionth part of all. It helps one meet other people and make friends—if you like that sort of thing. It interrupts your work, which, in almost all cases, is a very good thing both for you and for the work. But more than all this, it is adventure.

Adventures in Birding, by Jean Piatt

__________

Not many people would feel impelled to buddy up to Bob Gibson. I suggested that he must be exposed to a good deal of barside baseball expertise at his place of work [Gibby’s restaurant in Omaha], and he said, “Who wants to talk to fans? They always know so much, to hear them tell it, and they always think baseball is so easy. You hear them say, ‘Oh, I was a pretty good ballplayer myself back when I was in school, but then I got this injury …’ Some cabdriver gave me that one day, and I said, ‘Oh, really? That’s funny, because when I was young I really wanted to be a cabdriver, only I had this little problem with my eyes, so I never made it.’ He thought I was serious. It went right over his head.”

Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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Quisenberry [Dan Quisenberry of the 1985 Kansas City Royals] when pitching invites more similes than stats. His ball in flight suggests the kiddie-ride concession at a county fairgrounds—all swoops and swerves but nothing there to make a mother nervous; if you’re standing close to it, your first response is a smile. … The man himself—Quis in mid-delivery—brings visions of a Sunday-picnic hurler who has somehow stepped on his own shoelaces while coming out of his windup …

Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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In September 1986, during an unmomentous Giants-Braves game out at Candlestick Park, Bob Brenly, playing third base for the San Franciscos, made an error on a routine ground ball in the top of the fourth inning. Four batters later, he kicked away another chance and then, scrambling after the ball, threw wildly past home in an attempt to nail a runner there: two errors on the same play. A few moments after that, he managed another boot, thus becoming only the fourth player since the turn of the century to rack up four errors in one inning. In the bottom of the fifth, Brenly hit a solo home run. In the seventh, he rapped out a bases-loaded single, driving in two runs and tying the game at 6-6. The score stayed that way until the bottom of the ninth, when our man came up to bat again, with two out, ran the count to 3-2, and then sailed a massive home run deep into the left-field stands. Brenly’s account book for the day came to three hits in five at-bats, two home runs, four errors, four Atlanta runs allowed, and four Giant runs driving in, including the game-winner. A neater summary was delivered by his manager, Roger Craig, who said, “This man deserves the Comeback Player of the Year Award for this game alone.”

Once More Around the Park, by Roger Angell

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[Politics is] the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor, on the pretext of protecting each from the other.

—Oscar Ameringer, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods

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A Bag of Tools

Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders in eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make—
Ere life has flown—
A stumbling block
Or a steppingstone.

R.L. Sharpe, from A Third Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph L. Woods

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You get exactly the same results in Colossians 3:16 when the Word of Christ dwells in you richly that you get in Ephesians 5:19 when you are filled with the Spirit. There is an old rule in mathematics that “things equal to the same thing are equal to one another.” If to be filled with the Word is equal in result to being filled with the Spirit, then it should be clear that the Word-filled Christian is the Spirit-filled Christian. as the Word of Christ dwells in us richly, controls all our ways, as we walk in obedience to the Word, the Spirit of God fills, dominates, and controls us to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

From In the Heavenlies, by H.A. Ironside.

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Lum & Abner Jot’em Down Store and Museum

From the early 1930s to the mid-1950s, Lum & Abner were a comedy duo that rival Laurel and Hardy in popularity. The characters were played by Chester Lauck (Lum) and Norris Goff (Abner), natives of Mena, Arkansas. They started their bit locally and soon became famous around the country as a weekly radio program. By 1940, they were starring in the first of several movies.

The comedy was set in Pine Ridge, Arkansas, around the store of Dick Huddleston. Huddleston, and many other local natives, were the models for characters in the skits. The store and a couple other buildings from the time have been preserved and now serve as a museum. I drove down from London on a Wednesday afternoon and was the only visitor at the attraction—and perhaps in the town.

It looked very deserted, and I was bracing myself for the disappointment of a wasted two-hour drive. I walked up on the porch to read the signs but soon was greeted by a women who strolled down from her house.

She asked if I wanted to see inside and I told her yes, but first I wanted to use a bathroom. She directed me to a field behind the museum.

A sign in the outhouse informed me that it was an “Eleanor,” named for Eleanor Roosevelt whose efforts to improve the lives of rural Americans resulted in outhouses with cement foundations and outside vents.

Back at the museum, Kathy (that was the woman’s name) let me in through the back door. Later she informed me that “If I unlock the front door, I get more visitors than I like to deal with.” I wondered if she’d had any visitors in the past month.

The museum consisted of four rooms with a hodgepodge of old stuff mixed in with photos and artifacts related to Lum & Abner.

Photos of real residents of Pine Bluff who inspired characters on the show.

Kathy had worked at the museum for 30-some years and had created a lot of the displays. These mannequins were rescued from a clothing store in Mena.

Kathy must have been close to 90, and while she still retained her passion, she was losing her words. Many of her sentences began or ended in the middle. She referred to Covid as “that think that made everyone stay home.” I don’t know how much longer she’ll be able to run the place, and I wonder if there’s anyone interested enough to take over when she’s gone. She was very nice, and I enjoyed talking with her.

I mentioned that my parents liked Fibber McGee and Molly, and she showed me this photo of Lum and Abner with the Jordans.

One room of the museum was made up like an old general store with items from a local store that had modernized.

Pictures of the Huddleston Store in the early days.

And one from after the show became a hit. Huddleston cashed in on its popularity.

The store contained the Pine Ridge post office, no longer active.

I bought a few souvenirs in the store, including a book on Lum & Abner written by Kathy in the 1990s. We left through the back door, and after she’s locked up, she showed me some things outside, including some rock stacks she’d created to look like presidents (see the video). I was there about 45 minutes and never saw a hint of another visitor.

In the evening, I found the first Lum & Abner movie, Dreaming Out Loud, online and watched it. The first part was the cornball slapstick I expected, but then it became a drama with a young girl being killed by a hit-and-run driver and a doctor dying of a heart attack while saving a young boy with pneumonia. It wasn’t at all what I expected.

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Weinkeller Restaurant

Altus, Arkansas, is the center of the state’s wine-making area. One of the vineyards, Wiederkehr Wine Cellars, is home to Weinkeller Restaurant, which specializes in Swiss-inspired food. The restaurant is one of several buildings designed to look like a village, but its obvious that the heyday—if there was one—was long ago.

Although it’s above ground, the restaurant is made to look like a wine cellar.

I noticed that the clientele—most of whom arrived after we did—were retired couples. Like us. Who else could eat lunch in the middle of nowhere on a Tuesday afternoon? We both ordered the smoked pork loin and were not disappointed.

The apple strudel we shared for dessert was good, but not great. Because of the pleasant drive through the country, the ambiance of the restaurant, and the good food, we may very well visit again.

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