Dragonfly Tales: Case of the mistaken goatsucker

by Steve Melcher –

“Goatsucker!” came a Highlander’s shout from an elderly birder in the back of the bus. We all looked around to see what the fuss was all about. Her binoculars were pressed up against the glass in a spot where she had cleared the condensation. “Goatsucker! Stop the Bus!”, she repeated. I caught a glimpse of the driver glancing in the rearview mirror, raising his eyebrows as if to ask if “Goatsucker!” was some comment on his driving. We were on our way to a birding hotspot near Rockland, Maine. I don’t remember details of the trip, but my notes tell me we “scored” 63 species and that Joe Taylor was one of the birders on the trip. Joseph W. Taylor was the “Indiana Jones of Birding”. He was a charter member of the American Birding Association as well as president of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania until his death in 1992. He was the first member of the 700 Club, a group for elite birders who had seen or heard 700 different bird species within the continental United States. ‘The Big Year’, starring Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson, tells the tale of three intrepid birders on their quest to join the coveted 700 club. Joe helped to make “bird watching” the popular “sport” it is today. He was so passionate about his quest that he once borrowed Bausch and Lomb’s company jet to score a bird that was sighted on a dump just across the border in San Antonio. Remember this was all before the internet and even cell phones. There was a network of dedicated birders, of which I was one, who would share sightings through a sort of telephone tree. Mary Taylor, Joe’s daughter who still lives just down the road from her parent’s house, told me the story of Joe leaving a safari in Africa to fly back to Plum Island, Massachusetts just to “check off”  a Ross’s Gull that had been blown in by a recent storm.

I’m now living in the house that Joe and Helen built, a house that can claim: “Roger Tory Peterson Slept Here”. Joe and Helen Taylor purchased a few acres on Parrish Road in Mendon in the mid 60’s where corn, soybeans and hamburgers were growing. Honeoye Falls was truly the “sticks”  back in the mid 60’s and this was to be their retirement sanctuary. In 1969, a two bedroom home was built at the end of a long winding driveway that reached to Parrish Road. When the move was imminent, Joe took down the cantilevered flagpole from their home on Allen’s Creek Road and had it installed along the driveway overlooking the house. The Taylor family rolled up all the barbed wire that kept the bovines from wondering and planted grasses where soybean and corn once stood. The fields of grass were mowed every other year to provide nesting habitat for Meadowlarks and Bobolinks, a practice which continues to this day at Odonata Sanctuary. Joe and friends designed, built and installed nesting boxes for the then threatened NY state bird: the Eastern Bluebird. Joe and his wife Helen continued to bird around the world after their move to Honeoye Falls. Mr. Taylor wrote a column for the Democrat and Chronicle about those adventures, one that included the story of a birding trip in Maine where a wild haired birder from Scotland had misidentified a little brown myotis, a type of bat, as a Common Night Hawk – a member of the Caprimulgidae (Goatsucker) family.

Odonata Sanctuary:

Odonata Sanctuary is a nature preserve, active farm and sanctuary where abandoned farm animals find a home to spend the rest of their days and Eastern Bluebirds, Meadowlarks, Bobolinks and Monarch Butterflies find suitable habitat to thrive.

Further Reading:

Kingbird Highway: The Biggest Year in the Life of an Extreme Birder  by Kenn Kaufman

The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession by Mark Obmascik