Non-Chasing Birder Explains the Restraint While Describing Four Vagrants Seen From the Same Bench

The fourth vagrant cleared the salt flat and Dara Okonjo did not, which is the whole of her argument.

She had held the west-end bench since before the tide turned and held it after, through the departures, because, as she put it, "a chase is a bird finding out how fast your car goes." In all the seasons she has kept this marsh she has never driven for a rarity, never crossed the county line for one and, by her own account, never once stood up for one.

Okonjo supplied this reporter with the list unsolicited, in the order the birds arrived. A male Vermilion Flycatcher worked the channel marker's cross-arm for most of an afternoon, hawking out over the drainage ditch and returning to the same rusted arm, scarlet underside against a sooty mask, close enough that the scope did the arguing. A Red-necked Phalarope turned in the tide pool eleven o'clock from her knees, spinning with the water while a Lesser Yellowlegs walked through it without interest. A Rock Wren worked the gravel at the base of the seawall, rocking on its legs the way the species does, tail lifted, indifferent to the surf. The fourth, she describes a possible Lucy's Warbler working the saltbush, is unconfirmed: no recording, no photograph, no second opinion, and Okonjo has not moved to obtain one.

"Getting up is the chase," she said. "The bird did its part."

Wendell Ojeda, who pursues such things, arrived after the Vermilion Flycatcher had finished for the day and sat down beside her. "I left my house in the dark," he said. "She watched it eat a mayfly off the signpost and did not put her coffee down."

Petra Evers, of the standards board, has settled the matter twice and in writing. "The criterion is displacement," her ruling reads. "The bench is bolted. Therefore no chase occurred, and the list is admissible while the method is not creditable. Whether sitting constitutes discipline is outside this board's remit."

Vera Ortega's monthly bulletin then filed all four vagrants under a single hotspot code, and the marsh acquired a bench problem. People now arrive, ask which bench, and sit, sometimes for six hours, sometimes with a thermos, sometimes with nothing. Vera Iverson, attempting the method on its second week, brought a folding stool, two flasks and three checklist apps open to the same status, then left after forty minutes to look at a flicker by the boat ramp.

This reporter checked the county's shoreline inventory: the bench is public furniture, maintained on a rotating schedule and free of admission. The plank Okonjo credits has been resurfaced once since she first sat on it, so the object that watched four vagrants is not quite the object she is occupying now.

The Lucy's Warbler record remains open pending a recording. Okonjo has not gone to get one. Getting up, she says, is the chase.