In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen articulated an idea that he had entertained for a long time: that yetis—the woolly snowmen of the Himalayas—might be real. Matthiessen wasn’t regarded as nutty. He was a well-respected naturalist and writer who co-founded The Paris Review and won the National Book Award for both nonfiction and fiction.
But like many people—even those comfortably within the mainstream of American science and letters—he loved the idea of a mystery embodied in a cryptic creature (hence his quest for a snow leopard). Today, people continue to devote enormous energy to searching for animals like the ivory-billed woodpecker: Holy Grails that hover in the liminal space between the tangible and the hoped-for.
The instinct is a good one that has led to some amazing finds, even if it is sometimes misdirected (which, in many cases, remains to be seen). New birds, like the inti tanager of Peru and Bolivia, are still being discovered, even after years-long searches. And others—like Kaempfer’s woodpecker, which disappeared into Brazilian bamboo groves for 80 years—have gone decades without being observed by scientists, only to reappear.
Such things might still be possible in South America, but what about the Midwestern U.S.? To the average observer, the Midwest might seem a sadly cryptid-depauperate realm; a desolate plain on which the few intriguing stones were overturned long ago, piled up into fences, and replaced by rows of corn. But assuming as much would be a mistake, as numbing oneself to wonder always is. The last week of April, for example, often delivers a Midwestern mystery that intrigues the cryptozoologist in me.
It is during this special week of the year and the ensuing first week of May that ruffs reliably appear somewhere in the Great Lakes region. Indeed, one was seen yesterday in Champaign, Illinois, which is located in the heart of one of the corniest plains in the world.
Ruffs are wonderful birds, to which the adjective “harlequin” applies perhaps better than to any other animal. The males are both dashing and comical, with black, red and white costumes that are incredibly variable. They’ve been compared to Elizabethans and wealthy divorcees.
But ruffs are intriguing not only for their getup, but their gumption. They are not supposed to be here. As in, the Western Hemisphere. Ruffs are Old World shorebirds (or waders, as they are known in the Old World, which is what biogeographers somewhat Western-centrically call the landmasses primarily in the Eastern Hemisphere). They spend their summers from the Netherlands to Lapland and Siberia, and their winters in Africa, the Mediterranean and South and Southeast Asia.
So what, exactly, are so many ruffs doing here every spring—dropping into puddles at places like the Smeds Tennis Center in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the Cardinal Greenway in Muncie, Indiana—when they should by rights be on their way to Finland?
For one thing, Eurasian birds appearing in North America is not an unprecedented phenomenon. The Eurasian wigeon (a duck) is another bird that does this with some regularity: But even it does not eclipse the ruff in either frequency or total individuals recorded as the most common Eurasian visitor to the interior of North America.
Other long-distance migrants from Eurasia and Africa like the sharp-tailed sandpiper, black-headed gull, tufted duck and curlew sandpiper have also appeared many times, but none has achieved the impudent, clockwork predictability of the ruff, which seems to flaunt its comfort level with transoceanic migration in a way that matches its showy character.
The prevailing wisdom among ornithologists is that these birds are lost: They somehow crossed the ocean on their way back from Dakar to Delft, perhaps, and they are either going nowhere, or back home via a very circuitous route. If they do continue north, they might end up in suitable breeding habitat in the Yukon, say, but they will find no other ruffs there, and will display as lonely performers without a mate for a thousand miles.
Maybe so.
The other possibility, or course, is that vagrant American ruffs know where they are going. A note in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology in 1965 suggested that they might breed somewhere in North America, and one nest was in fact found in 1976 at Point Lay, Alaska, at the absolute northwest extremity of the continent.
A single nest notwithstanding, though, one factor that complicates the possibility of an undiscovered North American breeding population of ruffs is that they have a complex and fascinating breeding system. Until recently, it was thought that there were two types of males: independent males (80-95% of males), which usually have either black, red or checkered collars, and “satellite” males (5-20% of males), which wear white.
The independent birds often defend small territories (“courts”) and display near one another in assemblages called leks, which females visit to assess the prospects. The satellites, meanwhile, lurk nearby, hoping to display without offending the dominant birds enough to incite them, and scoring an occasional mating while saving the significant energy that is required for defending a territory.
The system seemed to work well enough. In 2006, however, scientists discerned the presence of a third type of male, a permanent female-mimic called a “faeder” (<1% of males). These birds look like adult females, and impersonate them, attending leks and sometimes even copulating with other males, only to surprise the attending females by mating with them, too.
The trio of male ruff types has existed on parallel evolutionary trajectories for as many as four million years, their strategies balancing one another’s relative abundance. What would a small North American population or these birds look like, and would females find enough diversity within it to choose a partner?
If I were a billionaire, I would be more interested in answering questions like these than in going to space or buying Twitter. Tracking vagrant birds is not an investment that most scientists find defensible, because their assumption is that most of these birds have deviated from the life cycles that sustain their populations, and are not worth studying with expensive equipment.
As such, our understanding of ruffs might stand to benefit from private capital. Less than 20 years ago, they surprised us by revealing an entire cryptic mating strategy that has no known equivalent in birds, though it has been recorded elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Might they surprise us again if vagrant birds were tracked?
Ruffs would not be the first birds to link Africa with the American Arctic: tiny wheatears were recently proven to fly 9,000 miles in order to accomplish this feat, while bar-tailed godwits make nonstop flights from Alaska to New Zealand.
A ruff in Wisconsin this week last year spent so much time warming up his routine that an eBirder marked him with a “C,” for probable courtship. Is it too much to imagine that somewhere on the Nunavut tundra there is a ring where itinerant ruffs display beneath the midnight sun, perhaps for an audience of approving bigfoots?
They’d wear sunglasses, I expect, to ward off the paparazzi. ◆