Cryptozoics

Not Nessie. Not Bigfoot, but Sparrows, Warblers, and Shorebirds. The longer I Bird, the more I believe Birding may be the real Cryptozoology.

I suspect we’ve all heard of the expeditions into the Pacific Northwest looking for an eight-foot ape, or the sonar sweeps of Loch Ness looking for a leftover plesiosaur. I have to admit, I admire the searchers tenacity; I suspect they’d make good birders.

Birding, particularly once the leaves come out in force, is, in my opinion, the real essence of cryptozoology. Cryptids are animals that defy observation, leave scant evidence of their existence, seem to vanish into thin air, and may lead to friends and family wondering if they need to stage an intervention. Legions of people tend to ‘believe’ in the cryptids, festivals occur, the devoted often have specialized equipment, there are all sort of websites that support their efforts, and they sometimes form clubs. In addition, most mainstream folks think the believers are probably harmless, but slightly odd. I feel that this loose definition fits for both Birders and Sasquatch hunters.

Personally I don’t think you need a trip to Scotland to experience the frustration of searching in vane for a cryptid. You just need a pair of binoculars and a local trail, woodlot, or a good bit of our arid scrub.

Consider the sparrows and the warblers. Montana has 28 species of sparrow and 33 species of warblers. That’s about 15% of all the birds that pass through Montana. That’s a lot of animals. Let’s take them each in order.

Sparrows are perfectly colored and patterned to vanish when they fly into a bush even when it’s dormant and leafless. Add leaves to the equation and their coloration and disruptive patterning is camouflage any military if the world would envy. Once they get comfortable in their state of near invisibility, they often begin to sing. For the observer, finding a singing Lincoln’s Sparrow in the willowy brush is a masterclass in focus, patience, and controlled breathing. 

You stare at each branch that moves even a little hoping to see the spiky mohawk of black feathers or a slightly warmwer shade of brown agaist the grey-green bark.

You hear a complex song coming out of a thicket less than 20 feet in front of you. You freeze. You raise your binoculars. You stare into the tangled branches until your eyes water.

Nothing.

You begin to lift your foot to get a better view. The song stops. A rustle and slight motion occurs ten feet to your left. You shift your gaze and are left staring at a dead leaf or pinecone that looks vaguely like a bird, wondering if the one you were looking for ever existed at all. Seven years into birding, I’m still trying to see several species for the first time and get halfway decent images of several more. 

Then there are the Warblers. During spring migration, these tiny, hyperactive birds inhabit the canopy of nearly every fully leafed-out tree you pass. You can hear them. You can see flashes of motion. But any pictures you take will usually end up being of branches and leaves where the warbler just vacated.

A warbler tends to be about the size of a thumb, is almost constantly in motion, and seems to move at an unreasonable speed through dense matrix of leaves and branches. You catch a fleeting glimpse of a yellow undertail, or a blur of yellow wings, but little else. Was it a Yellow-rumped Warbler? A Northern Yellow Warbler? An Orange-crowned Warbler? Or was it just a leaf catching the morning light? Warblers are beautiful when you finally do see them, but they are frustratingly cryptic.

This is where Merlin Bird ID become your best birding partner. Merlin can add sound to the mix and help you ID the birds that you are seeing or almost seeing. Yellow flashes in the canopy but no sound? Be patient or move on, birder, move on.

If the visual camouflage isn’t enough, some hidden birds seem to excel at ventriloquism. They seeming throw their voice to a spot, but they themselves almost never appear. Consider the Sora. The Sora is a marsh birds that lives in dense foliage along shorelines or deep into marshes. You can stand on a trail and hear a Sora making a sound like a descending whinny or a whistle just a few feet to your right. The plants might be thin at the edge of the thicket, yet, there is absolutely no physical bird there. They are the cryptids of the wetlands – all voice, zero mass. They appear to exist only as a sound wave designed to test your emotional fortitude. It was at least two years from the time I heard my forst Sora to the moment I saw my first Sora, and another year or two before a got a halfway decent photo. Their cousins, the Virginia Rail are no less cryptic.

The last story in my cryptozoologic storyline is that of the Yellow-breasted Chat. TMD and I heard tales of local birders seeing Chats every summer for several years. Chats, they claimed, were found along backroads, two-lane highways, steams, and trails. Some folks even posted pictures they claimed were of the mythical birds. To top it off, ‘they’ seemed to have gotten to the publishers of field guides. 

Guides refer to the Chat as widespread across the US and Mexico, though it can be uncommon to see them as they live in dense understories. TMD and I were solidly in the skeptics camp – having not only never seen one, but never even heard one despite being in the field birding 2-300 days every year for going on 7 years. Not one Chat in close to 2,000 days of being ‘out there’ specifically looking for birds. We were were skeptics. 

Then, on June 14, 2025, we became believers.

It started out innocently. I heard a sound I didn’t recognize. Then Merlin Bird ID lit up with the ‘grail words’ Yellow-Breasted Chat. TMD was a few hundred feet to my right and I dared not yell. I kept looking for any sort of motion within my field of view.  Eventually she came to a spot where she could see me and I motioned wildly for her to come over. Then we both saw a lovely bird with a long tail, grey back, bright yellow breast, and white belly – hardly cryptic coloration. We took pictures (lots and lots of pictures). Then a second one showed up. Finally, as quickly as they appeared, they disappeared. 

Birding may be the purest form of cryptozoology we have- or at least the most widespread. It requires the same obsessive persistence to take and analyze lots of blurry photographs, spend an enormous amount of time in the field, and finally end up making hundreds of audio recordings. The only real difference? The birds in the trees eventually get seen- they are entirely real. I want to believe Nessie and Sasquatch are out there, but it’s not looking good.

All of that being said, a trip to Scotland would be quite nice. I understand they have a rarely seen ‘giant grouse’ called a Capercaille.