By Holly Hilliard
This is a space to share RARE and/or NOTEWORTHY birds seen in Allegheny County. Share the species and your EXACT LOCATION using the maps feature. Include relevant details for finding the bird, including time seen and geographical features. If unsure about ID, provide photo(s) and note relevant field marks. This is NOT a place for unnecessary chatter. Do NOT share sensitive species, ESPECIALLY OWLS. Welcome!
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Esther Young was at a volunteer training for her local Bird Collision Brigade when her phone buzzed with an incoming message. There were at least thirty other people at the training, all of them crammed into the glossy conference room at the Frick Environmental Center, and Esther heard several phones buzz at the exact same time as hers. She figured it must be an Amber alert, but when she glanced at her phone screen, it all made sense. Someone had just messaged the Noteworthy Birds chat.
Kevin Smith: Golden-winged warbler at Sewickley Heights. [Pinned location]
Esther had commonly seen golden-winged warblers back in Wisconsin, where they were much more common than in Pittsburgh. They looked like chickadees wearing yellow berets.
She turned her phone facedown on the table in front of her and tried to re-focus on the training. The speaker was recounting how many dead birds the program had discovered during spring migration, which Esther would have been interested to learn—except she noticed that three people were trying to sneak out of the room. One of them, whom she recognized as the current number 2-ranked birder in Allegheny County, Patrick McCullough, was staring at his phone as he exited the room, and he accidentally rammed his shoulder into the door frame on his way out.
They were chasing the golden-winged warbler.
Esther gritted her teeth in frustration. She wasn’t friends with any chasers—or “Pokémon-Goers,” as her ex jokingly called those addicted birders who were willing to drop everything at the first mention of a rarity. Esther wasn’t friends with any Pittsburgh birders, period. The only birding organizations here were run by retirees who were old, white, and uninterested in encouraging younger birders to join. There was no BIPOC Birders Alliance, no Queer in Nature affinity groups. Esther tried to make friends through volunteering, but lots of people showed up to volunteer in couples or with pre-established groups of friends.
Maybe she’d meet some younger birders if she were willing to chase rare birds, but following coordinates posted by someone online seemed antithetical to the concept of birding—a point which Esther liked to make, loudly, to her Feminist Bird Club friends back in Wisconsin. Esther preferred the hope and wonder and possibility of finding a rare bird on her own. Chasing took something special and made it rote.
If she was being honest, she was also intimidated by the folks in Noteworthy Birds. The man who ran the chat, Zachary Kirby, was particularly vicious about the rules, which he’d made up himself. He scolded people for posting too often. He scolded people for not posting enough. He lost his mind if you shared the location of an owl, because owls were supposedly more sensitive than other birds. He even called one woman an “OWL MURDERER,” in all-caps, because she had shared the location of an eastern screech-owl. (If too many people went to see the owl, they might accidentally scare it off and force it to abandon its daytime roost. Then it may be too tired to hunt for food at night. Thus, its eventual demise. Thus, the murdering.)
The Bird Collision Brigade coordinator walked around the room, handing out location assignments. Esther smiled as the coordinator gave her a crisp new folder, but he continued on without really looking at her, his eye catching on another white male retiree in the next row. Esther tried not to feel snubbed as she looked at the printouts in her folder: instructions, emergency contacts, observation forms. For the next three months she would wake up early one day a week and walk the perimeter of the shiny Google office at Bakery Square, patrolling for injured birds who had collided with the glass during their nighttime migrations. If she found any dead birds, she would carefully pack them into a Ziploc bag and take them to the Natural History Museum. If she found any live birds, she would collect them in a paper bag and transport them to the wildlife rehabilitation center in Verona.
She was glad to have been assigned to Bakery Square, where parking would be simple and the streets were well-lit, but it was a thirty-minute drive from her apartment in the South Hills. She didn’t feel great about burning all that gas, but this wasn’t the same as driving across town for the sake of adding a rare bird to your collection; this saved lives.
Another ping in the chat.
John Harris: Warbler continuing near creek. [Pinned location]
Birding isn’t about winning, Esther chanted in her head.
But if I rank in the Top 10, people will finally know who I am.
Esther didn’t like to admit that she cared about eBird rankings. eBird was a website where birders recorded their sightings; it was used by ornithologists to better understand bird populations and trends over time. To get birders to participate, eBird had gamified the system, ranking birders based on how many species they’d seen. It was late August and Esther was currently ranked 22nd in Allegheny County. She finished last year in 29th.
As an outsider, it had taken her two years to get added to the Noteworthy Birds chat. Even then, the invitation had been completely coincidental. About a month ago, she’d come across an olive-sided flycatcher at Frick Park. It was a good find, and she was still floating as she walked back to her car. On the trail, she passed an older man with binoculars, and then, because she was in a good mood, she turned around and told him about the flycatcher.
He seemed skeptical. “Where did you say it was?”
She described how it had perched on a snag at the top of the hill, and then, to prove her identification skills, she said it had a dark vest and white tufts on the sides of its tail.
“White tufts,” the man said with a nod, as if she’d passed some unspoken test. “Did you put this in Noteworthy Birds?”
She said she didn’t know what that was, and he added her, just like that. She’d never come across him again, which she didn’t mind. He hadn’t seemed very friendly—probably because she was a woman in her late twenties, and because he could sense, with some sort of old-school Pittsburgh intuition, that she wasn’t from here.
“What location did you get?”
The question snapped Esther out of her negative spiral. It came from the woman on her right. There was an empty chair between them—Esther had gotten here early, and no one had chosen to sit beside her—but she thought it was nice that someone was trying to bridge the gap. The woman looked older than Esther, maybe in her early forties, and she was beautiful. Deep brown hair pulled away from her face. Clear-framed glasses. Racially ambiguous.
“Bakery Square,” Esther answered. “What about you?”
“I requested the downtown route so I could do my shift before work,” the woman said.
Esther nodded. She hardly ever went downtown, with its tangle of narrow streets and looming office buildings. Two years in Pittsburgh and she still didn’t know her way around this gloomy city. Her ex—before she was an ex—had moved here for a job, and Esther had followed. She got dumped three months in, and when she went apartment-hunting, she stupidly thought she should stay in Pittsburgh just in case. Now her ex was engaged to someone else, and inertia was the main thing keeping Esther here.
A man in the row behind them leaned forward. “Hey, are you the girl who does those bird videos on Instagram?”
Esther thought she was the one being addressed. She had an account where she occasionally posted bird photos, but she was mostly a lurker. She said, “Sorry, I think you have the wrong—” but then the woman beside her said, “You got me!”
Esther froze. The man started talking about how much he loved this Instagram account, and Esther learned that the woman’s name was Jay, aka SteelCityBlueJay. She was new to birding, so she posted reaction videos whenever she saw a bird for the first time. Her most recent video was about buffleheads, which told Esther that she wasn’t an absolute beginner, but she also wasn’t on Esther’s level. Esther had learned about buffleheads four years ago.
When the training was over, more people crowded around, wanting to talk to the SteelCityBlueJay. They stood behind Esther’s chair, making it difficult for her to escape. Jay smiled and accepted their praise and forgot about Esther completely.
That evening, Esther spent hours going through Jay’s backlog of posts. Jay had ten times as many followers as she did, and her photos were taken with a cell phone camera while Esther’s were taken with an outrageously expensive DSLR, which had eaten up two years’ worth of holiday bonuses from Esther’s job as a remote Customer Success Associate.
Esther clicked through reel after reel. She was enthralled. Many of the videos featured Jay’s voice as she freaked out from somewhere off-screen: “Oh my GOD, it’s a NASHVILLE WARBLER!” “Have you ever seen a Canada Goose look THIS majestic?”
But it was her laugh, Esther suspected, that people were drawn to: an explosive, joyful exhalation that would have been impossible to replicate. It didn’t matter whether Jay saw a rare shorebird or an everyday, run-of-the-mill house sparrow; she delighted in them all.
Esther followed Jay on Instagram, but Jay didn’t follow her back.
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September 13, 7:20 AM:
Virginia Hirsch: Worm-eating warbler at Harrison Hills. [Pinned location]
Zachary Kirby: Reminder that this group is for RARE and NOTEWORTHY birds. That is not rare for this area.
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September 28, 7:48 AM:
Dawn Messinger: Red-headed woodpecker at North Park! IMG_2990 [Pinned location]
Lauren G: Thank you, Dawn! The bird continues at 8:30 AM. IMG_990
Dawn Messinger: Wow, great photo Lauren!
Zachary Kirby: Reminder to keep chatter to a minimum. Over a hundred people are in this group, so keep in mind that you are sending them an alert every time you post here.
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October 5, 8:21 AM:
Zachary Kirby: Are people getting gun-shy about posting in this group? Just sat down to review eBird checklists and saw a report of a Vesper Sparrow with photo confirming. Wish the person who saw this bird had used our group for its intended purpose.
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It was dawn on a Tuesday in early October, and Esther walked past the Bakery Square Starbucks where the employees were preparing for the day, past the dark Anthropologie with its smooth glass façade, past the Jeni’s ice cream and the Jimmy Johns, her eyes focused solely on the ground. For nearly two months, Esther had given her Tuesday mornings to the Bird Collision Brigade, patrolling the sidewalks in case a window strike had happened overnight.
Her first Tuesday, there was nothing. Her second, there was a flock of cedar waxwings, seventeen of them, clustered at the Google entrance. It was as though they’d seen Medusa and turned to stone. Esther didn’t have enough Ziploc bags and had to cram them in on top of each other. She worried they weren’t really dead, that they’d wake up and glare at her as she drove them to the museum, but none of them did. She didn’t realize she was crying until the museum parking attendant asked her what was wrong. In answer, she held up three Ziploc bags stuffed with the most beautiful birds the average person has never seen: bright yellow tail tip, silken black mask, pop of red on the wing, plush cardinal-like crest. He made a face and waved her through.
She often wondered if Jay’s Brigade route was more productive. Jay had probably saved so many birds already, and special birds, too—migrating black-throated blue warblers and common yellowthroats and ovenbirds. Everyone in the Brigade had signed an agreement saying they wouldn’t share photos of dead or concussed birds online, and Jay had stuck to that—she’d never even mentioned the program on her account. But Jay wasn’t shy about sharing other successes. At the end of August she had been offered a spot on the board of the local Audubon chapter. Then she started writing a biweekly column for an indie newspaper about her journey into the birding world. Then she was interviewed on the local news, and she was invited to talk on several birding podcasts, and by October she had quit her day job in university administration to be a full-time bird influencer.
Esther would have loved to do any of those things, and she was more qualified. She’d been birding seriously for almost five years now, and she’d seen over 400 species worldwide. She’d been taking photos for three years and she’d volunteered at multiple bird banding stations. Her degree was in Environmental Science. But no one cared about qualifications. No one cared that many of Jay’s bird IDs were incorrect, that she didn’t know the difference between a hermit thrush and a wood thrush. They cared about Jay. In her reels, Jay occasionally talked about her life, about the difficulties of balancing parenthood with her career. She talked about being queer and about her lifelong struggle to fit in and about how hard it was for her and her partner to have a child. She never spoke out against the birding community, never called anyone out for being gatekeepers—but then again, Jay was invited behind the gate.
She was added to Noteworthy Birds at the beginning of October. It had taken Esther two years to get added to the chat.
What made Jay so appealing? And what made Esther so… invisible?
She mulled over these questions as she rounded the corner near the parking garage. Then her heart nearly stopped. A golden-winged warbler lay on the ground in front of her, smaller than a mouse. She bent over the bird, saw the breeze ruffle its downy chest feathers. Its throat was a dusky gray, which meant that this bird was female.
Still breathing.
With shaking hands, Esther scooped the warbler into a paper bag. The poor thing weighed next to nothing. Hollow bones. It had been on its way to Central America, to Venezuela or Colombia, and then it had struck the Google office. There was a message here, surely, but an invisible clock ticked in Esther’s head and she didn’t have time to pause and reflect. She raced to her car, painfully aware of the life she carried in her hands.
It was only after she’d dropped the warbler off at the wildlife rehab, only after she’d talked to the vet tech and was told that the warbler probably wouldn’t make it, only after she sat in her car without turning the key, feeling a little bit stunned herself, that Esther realized she had found a rare bird. No one had sent her the coordinates. She’d found this bird on her own, she’d watched the subtle rise and fall of its lungs, and no one in Noteworthy Birds would ever know about it.
Even though it would have increased her regional total, she didn’t report the warbler on eBird.
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October 18, 4:43 PM
Jay Burgess: So has anyone seen any orange crowned warblers coming through?
Graeme Smith: Check Hartwood Acres. I had one there on Monday.
Patrick McCullough: Several reported on eBird. Recommend checking there.
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October 23, 9:13 AM
Jay Burgess: Anyone know where I can find a rusty blackbird?
Patrick McCullough: Try eBird, I saw a few reported there.
Marsha Miller: Yes, check eBird!
Zachary Kirby: Just a quick reminder to keep chatter to a minimum, if possible, please. You can use social media to ask about bird locations. :)
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Another month slipped by. Migration had mostly petered out, but Esther still patrolled her turf. She didn’t think she’d ever quit, even when the Brigade no longer wanted her data. She felt a sense of obligation to the birds. If there had been any collisions overnight, Esther didn’t want to fail them. She served an important purpose.
The mornings were darker now. It was already 7:30 and the sun had only just begun to permeate the clouds. Cars zipped in and out of the parking lot as people rushed into Starbucks for coffee, unaware of Esther and her mission.
She walked the entire perimeter of the Google building and found nothing. She crossed Penn Avenue to check the sidewalks around the newly constructed high-rise apartments.
She was almost finished with her route when she saw it. She thought it was a stuffed animal at first, dropped by a child. She walked closer and bent down to pick it up, and then she nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was a northern saw-whet owl. No more than eight inches tall, yellow eyes like marbles.
After the surprise came a rush of awe, and then Esther’s blood pulsed with panic.
The owl couldn’t be dead. It simply couldn’t. She’d never seen one in the wild; they were impossible to find. Seeing a saw-whet was like winning the lottery.
And Esther wasn’t lucky.
Her hands shook as she removed her supplies from her tote bag. Ziploc bag, paper bag.
The owl couldn’t be dead.
She was trying so hard not to cry as she bent down beside it. It didn’t move.
After weeks of procrastination, she had finally called the wildlife rehabilitation clinic yesterday to check on the golden-winged warbler. They told her it had died several hours after intake. The bird’s last hours were spent inside the dark must of a paper bag.
Now, she opened the Ziploc bag—and the sound seemed to jolt the owl back to life. It shot off across the sidewalk, veering left—something was definitely wrong—and it skidded off the sidewalk again before coming to land in the branches of a dense pine on the edge of Mellon Park. There was a soccer field nearby, and a shelter where families held barbecues in the summer.
Esther was at once relieved and terrified. She couldn’t simply let the owl go. What if it had a concussion, or a broken wing?
She tiptoed to the pine tree and peered up through the branches.
The owl was perched near the trunk, only a foot above her head.
God, she could put this owl in a teacup! She could hold it in the palm of her hands!
She and the saw-whet took in each other’s presences. Its expression was one of extreme annoyance. She wondered what it would feel like to pet its belly, whether those stripey feathers were as impossibly soft as they looked.
She took a step back and slowly, centimeter by centimeter, stepped away from the tree.
“Whatcha looking at?”
Esther nearly screamed. She spun around.
It was Jay, holding a cup of Starbucks coffee.
Esther reached for Jay’s elbow and dragged her a few meters down the sidewalk.
“Sorry,” Esther said when they’d distanced themselves, “I know I seem crazy right now. It’s just…”
Esther placed a hand over her chest and tried to catch her breath. She usually loved the high of seeing an exciting bird—the jubilation, the triumph—but now she was faced with a dilemma. She didn’t want to tell Jay about the owl. She also needed to call the wildlife rehab and ask what to do, whether she should leave the owl or try to capture it, somehow, and take it in.
“What is it?” Jay asked, keeping her voice low.
Esther had to tell her. She didn’t want too much time to pass; she didn’t want the owl to disappear or drop dead or get eaten by a healthier predator.
“It’s a saw-whet owl,” she said to Jay, half whispering.
Jay’s mouth dropped open. “Where? Here?”
Her reaction made Esther feel smug. Esther pointed back at the tree. “Right there. I’m Esther, by the way. I know you’re Jay.”
“Hi, Esther,” she said.
Esther couldn’t tell if Jay had any idea who she was.
Jay crept toward the tree, and Esther hissed, “Careful! It might be injured. I found it during my Brigade shift and it just sort of—took off.”
Jay made a face, but she kept moving toward the tree anyway. She peered up at the owl, and Esther worried that she should have warned her to be quiet, like a scolding teacher—but Jay kept quiet. She looked back at Esther, her eyes comically wide. Amazed.
It was the way she always looked on her Instagram account. Esther was glad to know it was real.
Jay tiptoed back to Esther and asked if she could take a few pictures. Esther explained her current dilemma and said she hadn’t taken any photos, she hadn’t had time, but she couldn’t see any harm in Jay doing so. Jay smiled and snapped a few photos with her phone while Esther dialed the wildlife rehab.
The vet tech explained that it was probably best to leave the owl where it was. Trying to recapture it would cause the owl too much stress, and hopefully the fact that it had been able to fly meant that it would recover in the long run.
Somewhere in the middle of the call, Jay silently gestured that she needed to leave, and Esther waved her on, smiling. Jay put her hands together in an expression of gratitude, and Esther was pleased that this interaction had been so positive.
And then, an hour later, Jay shared the owl in Noteworthy Birds.
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November 8, 8:52 AM:
Jay Burgess: Look what I saw today! IMG_9021
Lauren G: Woah!
Will Anderson: Care to share where??
Jay Burgess: It’s a secret ;)
Zachary Kirby: This does not adhere to the group guidelines. I am deleting your posts.
Jay Burgess: Ok? Is a saw-whet not “noteworthy” enough for this group?
Patrick McCullough: Owls aren’t supposed to be shared here.
Jay Burgess: I didn’t share the location.
Patrick McCullough: There was location information in your photo’s metadata. Everyone could see where you were.
Jay Burgess: I didn’t post it on my Instagram. I shared it in this private group. We all care about owls, right? No one would go out there and actively try to harm it.
Patrick McCullough: The rules are right at the top of the group. “Do NOT share sensitive species, ESPECIALLY OWLS.”
Kevin Smith: Owls are sensitive to disturbance, and we don’t want large groups of people gathering around a bird that can easily spook.
Jay Burgess: I’m sorry, this is ridiculous.
Zachary Kirby: If you don’t like the rules of this chat, you can create a new one.
The chat continued, but Esther couldn’t bear to read the rest. She felt betrayed. She had finally seen the cracks in Jay’s façade.
And yet… Esther had resented Noteworthy Birds for so long. They were ridiculous. The whole concept was ridiculous. This wasn’t birding. This wasn’t community. This wasn’t anything but a bunch of people chasing a momentary high, feeling nothing real.
Esther scrolled to her settings, her thumb hovering over the option “Leave Group.”
But then she went back to the chat and scrolled up to the picture Jay had shared. There was the saw-whet—Esther’s saw-whet.
Esther put her phone away and took a sip of her Starbucks latte. The cold park bench pressed into her spine. She looked up at the pine tree five feet away. There was an owl in there somewhere, and she didn’t plan on letting anyone get too close.
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Holly Hilliard grew up in Hillsboro, Ohio and received her MFA in Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She now lives and birds in Pittsburgh, PA, where she is a member of the Pittsburgh Creative Corps. She writes about birds on her Substack: hollyhilliard.substack.com.