The sound brought me up short. A raspy little stutter emanating from the grassy confines beside the road.
Tssk, tssk.
“Ahhh,” I thought, I breathed. “There’s my Sedge Wren.”
If you don’t know what a Sedge Wren is then you fall into a broad band of the human spectrum called: “The Vast Majority.”
Most people on the planet don’t know what the hell a sedge wren is.
If you fall into this category then I hope you draw comfort from the fact that you are average.
If this troubles you it probably means that you live in Cape May (which lies about 180 degrees and three standard deviations this side or that of normal). Nobody who lives in Cape May wants to appear or be considered normal. You have one chance to redeem yourself.
You can apply your uncommon intellect (a quality that more and more seems alien to the Vast Majority) and analyze the name.
Sedge. Wren.
Start with the obvious.
Few people on the planet (even those heralding from the Vast Majority) will fail to recognize that a wren is a bird.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
You’re right! Proceed.
Most people, too, will be able to draw from their intellectual stockpile of unused lore and be able to attribute characteristics to the label “wren” that serve to distinguish wrens from other birds.
Small, brown, nervous, jerky.
Armed, now, with this knowledge, were you to appear on some TV game show like “The Bird is Right” or “Birder of Fortune” and some guy wearing a catskin toupee and a grin as white and wide as a piano keyboard were to flash pictures of a dodo, an aardwolf, and a wren, you’d be able to pin the name to the wren with less than a moment’s thought.
“It’s the small, brown, nervous, jerky one.”
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Now comes the hard part.
Sedge. Might be a name (you think). The bird could be named for the guy who discovered it. Yu Sedge or Sedge Hammer.
“But,” your uncommon intellect intellectualizes. “If this was the case, then there would be an apostrophe “s” following the word. It would be Sedge’s Wren, not Sedge Wren.”
So sedge must relate to a place like “Barnyard Goose.” Or a characteristic like “Hoot Owl” or perhaps the habit it lives in like “Sea Gull.”
Hmmm. Challenging.
You decide to fall back on the old process of elimination trick. Considering first the possibility of what a “sedge” could be.
A place? Unlikely. You’ve traveled all over New Jersey and never been in a Sedgeville, Sedgetown, Sedge Township, much less Sedge City. In a state so crowded they had to use names more than once (Moorestown, Morristown, Mauricetown–all pronounced M’rstown) you’d think there’d be a Sedge something-or-other here if there was going to be one somewhere.
A characteristic then?
Possibly. But the bird say’s “tssk, tssk” not “sedge, sedge” and if “sedge” related to some act or action wouldn’t it then be called the “Sedgish Wren?”
That leaves habitat.
Oh, you are uncommonly smart. And a sedge is, in fact, a plant–a sort of three-sided blade of grass found in wetlands.
The possibility exists that the birds have little to do with sedges (there is a bird called Palm Warbler and it doesn’t live in palms) but the higher probability is that Sedge Wrens live in or are found in…
Sedges! Which they do!
So there you are. There you have it. Five minutes ago you thought you’d never heard of a sedge wren and now you discover you know all about them.
You’re a birder! What could possibly be more less-normal than that?
HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM ALL THE STAFF AT THE CAPE MAY BIRD OBSERVATORY!