Eurasian wigeons are ducks that, as their name suggests, are not native to the Americas. Like any migratory bird, though, they can be blown off course, and birds well outside their normal range are attractive to birders who are always looking to expand the number of species they’ve seen. Naturally, it’s more convenient to do this in your backyard than on the other side of the world. This is what drew to me to the Hollywood Reservoir on a Sunday morning in February: Someone had logged a Eurasian wigeon there on eBird the day before, and I’d never seen one.

The drive from where I live, just east of the LA River, is a little more than 20 minutes on a weekend morning and a death sentence during rush hour. It is simple with a navigation app and impossible without one, once you turn from LA city streets to the twisting capillaries of the Hollywood Hills. An analog map would do you no good without a rally car navigator; steep climbs lead to hairpin turns to five-way intersections to sudden declines where the bottom of the hill is hidden somewhere below your front bumper. But high within the labyrinth of claustrophobic roads, nestled between gleaming boxes home to thousands of facelifts, is a man-made lake that is perhaps the best home and safe haven to water-dwelling birds in the portion of the Santa Monica Mountains unprotected by state or federal park designation. It stretches north-northwest up from the Mulholland Dam, with two long fingers extended to the northeast, toward the Hollywood sign. Everyone here is grasping for the same thing.

The gray morning lazed overhead as I parked, painting the trees and water in flat, diffuse light that would make bird ID difficult and photography laughable. I wore a variation of my winter uniform: Mack Weldon joggers, a tee shirt, an egregiously priced and subsequently overworked Aviator Nation hoodie, and road-weary Stan Smiths that I’ve retired from social settings. No man inhaling lungfuls of eucalyptus and scrub oak could be more comfortable.

I set to work on the straighter path – across the top of the dam and up the western side of the reservoir. My ear, trained for years on the birdsong of New England, is still adapting to California natives, but I could immediately pick out the gentle, high-pitched honk of a red-breasted nuthatch, the screech of a California scrub-jay, and the constant melodious jumble of notes that spill from house finches. From the dam, looking on the water far below, I picked out American coots (dull except when they fly-run across the water), two species of grebes, a few double-crested cormorants, and a flotilla of gulls I had no interest in identifying.

Gull ID sucks, man. There are a million species with the tiniest differences between them, each species takes four years to mature, and every juvenile looks different for each of the three years up to that point. I hate it! Eventually, many years from now, I’ll want to log more bird species, and so I will study the field guides and go on gull-specific missions. But I don’t have to do that while I’m enjoying my life; it can wait until my 70s, at least. If I die before then, fine.

That said, technology has given us some shortcuts, the greatest of which is the Merlin app with sound ID, AKA “Shazam for birds.” With the gulls below me, I pressed record and watched the songs and calls of the species populate: mostly Western gulls at first, but then a glaucous-winged gull popped up, which is one of a handful of gull species I’ve actually studied in the past, back when my Februarys were spent at a frozen bend of the Connecticut River hoping to find a stray Iceland gull among the various species that were slightly larger and slightly darker (I never did find one).

Glaucous: of a light bluish-gray or bluish-white color. I appreciate that birding has repeatedly sent me – a sometimes writer and supposed Big Vocabulary Guy – scrambling to the dictionary to learn adjectives in birds’ common names: fulvous, prothonotary, hepatic, crissal. But I’d done my homework on the glaucous-winged gull: I pulled my binoculars to my eyes and found a floating gull with foggy, light gray wings that matched the pictures in Merlin. (Fun fact: there is a separate species that is simply the glaucous gull, which is presumably the same light gray color all over … except for all the months and years of its life when it’s not. Don’t ask me! I hate identifying gulls!)

The rest of my walk was pleasant but unremarkable: When the trail abutted manicured lawns, I heard a mockingbird going through its cycle of imitations (its red-shouldered hawk impression nearly fooled me). Raindrops fell, a mist so fine and light it sent me searching for a gentler word than sprinkle. (Mizzle? Mizzle is not a serious word.) Deeper into the canyon notch, away from houses, I saw three green herons – notably skittish in the presence of humans – repositioning themselves around the hooded mergansers swimming in the cloistered northern tip of the lake. I felt, for a moment or 90 minutes, that I was not in a city. This is one of my favorite feelings in any city.

I never did see the Eurasian wigeon. It could have been tucked into one of the northeastern fingers I couldn’t explore before having to return home, or perhaps it had flown away to a different location, or maybe it was misidentified in the first place. I’ll never know and it’s unlikely I’ll ever see it, though I may someday see a different vagrant of the same species. Perhaps one day I will fly to Norway and see flocks in their native habitat. But probably not.

That’s birding. That’s life. I had a morning among trees, near water, the air around me fresh and cool as birdsong lifted my spirit. An experience is not the absence of something; it is everything else that fills the space.