For the first time I can remember, I was awakened by the alarm right in the middle of a bird dream. This was doubly disappointing as dreams of the past several weeks have only seen bird cameos, or snippets of stories that were just too murky to remember any detail worth passing on. So it goes...
(Northern/Southern) Carmine Bee-eater (Merops nubicus/nubicoides)
Image found online here
... I am in a car with two birders I know from Austin. Only one, the driver I can remember for sure - Stu Wilson. Great guy, great birder. We are driving down a small, two-laned, highway. It appears to be spring migration, as there's a lot of vibrant green. Soon after the dream began, a HUGE flock of birds flushed from both sides of the road, whirling and wheeling around only a hundred or so feet to our left. We oohed and ahhed for a few seconds, then collected ourselves in order to estimate three to five THOUSAND Carmine Bee-eater [which species was not determined]. (Large flocks appear in many of my dreams; probably because they never cease to inspire awe in real life.)
Not far down the road from them, we flushed a second, much smaller, flock of a few dozen medium-sized birds. They appeared to be approximately dove-sized, predominately slate blue with long white tails and rumps. Some richer blue, even purplish, was mixed into their upper body plumage as well. (There probably isn't a corresponding real world species. If anyone can think of one, by all means let me know.) Regardless, the third person of our trio declared it to be kind of "long-necked" something-or-other. Neither Stu nor I agreed with him.
At this point, I declared that both the bee-eaters and this species reminded me of two other "rarities", I'd seen before in this location. I think what I really meant by "this location" was "in dreams". Indeed, this WAS in reference to another dream I had with species vaguely similar in color and structure as these two. Although, I think one of the other dreambirds was a hummingbird, and the other a passerine. This original dream, was only a fragment I didn't bother to write down, as it was just too difficult to remember at the time. I will journal further on this to see if anything else crops up. Stay tuned.
We then turned left onto a new road, soon stopping to survey a small wooded pond flanking the right side of the road. I was still scanning, when simultaneously someone in the car called out a duck of some kind and the alarm annoyingly brought all this to a screeching halt. So it goes...
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