The book enjoys universal acclaim among birders and has attracted wider notice in the field of nature writing, but we got to talking about how Kingbird Highway ought to be taught in American literature classes, and especially American history classes, in high school and college. So it was natural that our conversation turned at one point to Kingbird Highway. Nick and Nell and Hannah and I are interested, each in our own way, in the intersection between watching wildlife and writing about it. We found one, hardly a surprise, and we clicked a few photos. I’ve seen thousands of roadside kingbirds, but I think this is the first time I ever specifically sought an encounter with such a bird. Hannah and I went looking for a kingbird. Nick and Nell had just hit the road, that lonely stretch of I-80 west of Cheyenne, back to their homes out in Albany County. We’d seen a dozen-plus western kingbirds, plus another eight eastern kingbirds, during five solid hours of birding on foot at the ranch. But I had a hankering this sunny Saturday afternoon for an encounter with a kingbird. No, the ranch is best known as a “vagrant trap,” a magnet for rarities.
One doesn’t ordinarily go to the Wyoming Hereford Ranch in search of workaday western kingbirds. We left early, while it was still dark, so as to beat the holiday rush we didn’t stop for gas or fast food on the drive up to Cheyenne we sported face masks and toted hand sanitizer we wore gloves, too, not for the cold, but in case we had to open doors or unlatch a gate and we coordinated beforehand with friends Nick and Nell about social distancing while in the field together. So it was with some amount of self-consciousness, I must confess, that I headed out with my daughter Hannah to the bucolic Wyoming Hereford Ranch, just east of Cheyenne. It was the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, and I hadn’t birded away from home for more than three months.
Not in this new era of “Stay at Home” orders and “Safer at Home” recommendations. Travel by car isn’t something we take for granted anymore. Because what could be more unremarkable, I might have mused, than a kingbird along a country road? No longer. Wyoming Hereford Ranch, Laramie County, Wyoming photo by © Ted Floyd.Ī few months ago, I would have answered that question with a shrug. Except that travel by car, in the West or anywhere, is a suddenly problematic undertaking. This is a western kingbird, the sort of bird that you might see dozens or even hundreds of while road tripping across the American West.
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