BIRDS on the WIRE.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

It's a rare bird, indeed, that generates the kind of excitement that occurred near Fern Ridge Reservoir over the weekend.

Dozens of birders - many of them toting spotting scopes mounted on tripods - gathered Sunday atop the earthen dam and along the shores of Kirk Pond, located just across Clear Lake Road from the reservoir.

They came hoping to see a Falcated Duck, a native of Asia never before recorded in Oregon. The unusual bird with a striking appearance was first sighted in Kirk Pond at about noon Saturday by a Eugene couple on a Valentine's Day birding outing.

How so many birdwatchers came to be at the pond within hours of the Asian duck's first sighting is as much a story as how a duck that normally ranges between northeastern Russia and southern China might have found its way to Eugene.

The bird - if it's wild, as opposed to an escapee from an aviary - did it the old-fashioned way, with thousands of wing flaps.

The birders did it by wire - spreading the word via an Internet-based service called Oregon Birders On Line.

OBOL, as it is referred to by birders, is a computerized list-server that automatically forwards e-mails to more than 500 people. Many subscribers are dedicated bird-watchers willing to travel for hours for the opportunity to add another species to their "life lists" of birds they have seen.

Word of the Falcated Duck's presence was on the wire within minutes after it was first sighted by John Houle as he and Daphne Turner checked out the ducks on Kirk Pond from atop Fern Ridge Dam.

"All of a sudden I saw something I didn't know what it was," said Houle, a birder for nearly 30 years.

He didn't have his birding field guide with him so - while Turner kept a spotting scope trained on the strange bird swimming and feeding among hundreds of wigeons - Houle ran to his car to get it.

When he returned, Turner told him an approaching hawk had spooked many of the wigeons, but the bird in which he was interested remained on the water.

"With book in hand," Houle said, "ID was easy."

The male Falcated Duck has an iridescent green head and face, a white collar around its neck and distinctive long, sickle-shaped tertial feathers that form a prominent bustle when the wings are folded.

The bird's body is vermiculated with a fine gray herringbone pattern and has other distinctive markings, including a wedge-shaped yellow patch on its rear end. Overall, the appearance is as unique as it is striking.

Houle's guide to North American birds includes the Falcated Duck because it is found in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. But Falcated Ducks also have been reported in recent years in Washington and California.

Realizing the significance of what he was looking at, Houle used a cell phone to call Roger Robb, a longtime birding friend, and ask him to report the sighting to OBOL.

That was shortly after noon on Saturday.

Within the next couple of hours, eight to 10 birders alerted by Robb's posting made their way to Fern Ridge.

Meanwhile, the wires hummed as birders from Corvallis and Portland made arrangements to carpool to Eugene the next morning.

Among the early Saturday afternoon arrivals was Alan Contreras of Eugene.

"I checked my e-mail, left a few phone messages, jumped in the car and drove out here - without my camera, to my shame," Contreras said Monday between squints through his spotting scope. "It's quite a spectacular-looking thing and, if you see it, you'll know you have something exotic."

Also getting good looks at the Falcated Duck early Saturday afternoon were Robb and his wife, Betty, plus Dan Heyerly, Paul Sherrell, Jim Carlson and Sylvia Maulding, among others.

As far as is known, no one got a photograph of the rare bird before, in the company of a couple hundred wigeons, it flew off and headed toward the middle of Fern Ridge Reservoir at about 3 Saturday afternoon.

It hasn't been spotted since.

Ironically, the big group of birds lifted off the surface of the pond just as Maulding was getting ready to photograph the Falcated Duck from the side of the road.

"She started to set up a camera, and they all flew away," said Robb, who was with Maulding at the time. "She felt terrible."

Maulding posted "an apology to all who missed the bird" on OBOL, saying "I can only hope it will show up again."

Robb, however, said Maulding shouldn't blame herself, because the ducks could have been spooked by the approach of an eagle or hawk rather than by someone standing alongside a busy roadway.

Word that the duck had flushed from the pond was posted on OBOL later Saturday afternoon. But that didn't prevent birders from showing up in force Sunday, in anticipation that the bird would either return to the pond or be sighted on some other nearby waterway.

"If it's still in the area, it's probably going to come back to this pond," Robb said. "This is where it was, and it obviously likes feeding here."

Contreras said that when he returned Sunday morning, parking lots at both ends of Kirk Pond were full of cars and "40 to 50 people" were in the area.

"Birders were lined up on the dam from one end to the other ... it was quite a sight," he said.

"That's how the network works for something like this, which is going to show up once in somebody's birding lifetime. And that's the category this bird is in."

If the bird "had stayed put and had been something that was chaseable, people would have come from all over the West," he said.

Contreras believes the Falcated Duck he saw "got itself in with some Eurasian wigeons in northeast Siberia and, instead of going south on the Japan side of the Pacific, it ended up coming down this side of the Pacific with the wigeons and ended up right here. That's theory of those who hope it's a wild bird."

With waterfowl, he said, "it could be an escapee from an aviary somewhere. You never know."

Indeed, other birders have been quick point out in OBOL postings that Falcated Ducks are offered for sale on the Internet by at least three aviaries.

Contreras, however, says the presence at Kirk Pond of eight to 10 Eurasian wigeons - whose natural range overlaps that of the wild Falcated Duck - lends credence to the stray, wild, migrant theory.

"The nine Eurasian wigeons I saw the other day is the largest flock I've ever seen in one body of water in Lane County, and I started birding here in 1967," he said.

Only a handful of wild Falcated Ducks have ever been recorded outside of Alaska - two or three in Washington and British Columbia and one in California.

"This will be the first Oregon record" of a Falcated Duck, Contreras said. "It's a good record, but it's a sight record. There's not going to be any doubt about the (proper) identification, but when you get a first state record you normally want a specimen, a photograph, something that's a permanent record other than the descriptions that we will write up."

CAPTION(S):

Mike Danzenbaker's Nature Photography This adult male Falcated Duck was photographed in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost section of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Birder Jonathan Robertson uses a spotting scope Monday in hopes of spotting a Falcated Duck. Mike Stahlberg / The Register-Guard Mike Stahlberg / The Register-Guard Bird watchers Alan Contreras (left) and Roger Robb scan around Kirk Pond.