This year we saw Painted Buntings, a baby raccoon, a Ghost Orchid so high up in a faraway tree that it had to be viewed through a high-powered monocular on a tripod, bear shit, a baby alligator, and a giant alligator that surfaced silently from the algae on the pond in front of us. But the best thing we saw was a Prothonotary Warbler.
Prothonotary Warblers aren’t rare, but they are difficult to see because they forage in dense foliage low to the ground. Even bird-watchers and ornithologists get excited when they see one, and Alger Hiss’s boast of having sighted a Prothonotary Warbler became, for HUAC, one of the facts that linked him to Whittaker Chambers.
Now, unless you’re tragically incurious, drugged, or dead, you of course want to know what a prothonotary is. I’m glad you asked.
Prothonotaries were high-ranking civil administrators in the Byzantine Empire, 7th through 12th centuries. Prothonotaries still are high officials of the Roman Catholic Church, but they no longer wear the golden robes that give the warbler its name. In the Canadian federal courts, a prothonotary is a judicial officer with many of the powers of a judge. In Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the prothonotary is the chief court clerk, as he is in the Supreme Courts of the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria.
Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten all of this by tomorrow. It is, after all, a random collection of facts held together by a 12.5-gram bird. And cravings for complexity are quickly sated. My 12- and 14-year old boys forgot the Prothonotary Warbler even faster than tomorrow, first decrying the depressing ugliness of inland Florida strip malls as we drove back from Corkscrew Swamp, then demanding that we stop at one for Dunkin’ Donuts.
I had a Chocolate Glazed Cake Donut and a Chocolate Kreme Filled Donut, and, many days later, I'm still wondering where the salad course is.
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