Save the Candor

Every tripod- toting birder knows it never nests on urban girders. Even fences set its scalded-crimson head askew, its waddle swinging, wings akimbo. Few have got it on their lists and fewer still have caught it singing, this endangered North American candor, cousin of the done-in dodo, big-eyed Big Sur tremor- tenor — only ten or twenty hang glide over Modoc County, humbly numbered (as their days are) for us crazy crown- and throat- and belly-gazers. Any niche as fragile as a candor’s renders its extinction certain. We can sabotage its habitat with half a laugh or quarter murmur, fluster coveys worth of candors off their branches, which, abandoned, soon are little more than snarking- grounds for minor birds, the common snipe, the yellow- bellied bittern.