I found the entry in a dete riorating notebook in 1997. “I am looking out the window of my study at the bird feeder. I see the usual chickadees, but another bird with a tufted head. A bird which is not supposed to be here. A cousin to the chickadee, the same genus, but which will not cross water to get to this Island. The bird is a tufted titmouse. That bird there, which I am observing, is a tufted titmouse.”

Chickmouse mother and son. — Fan Ogilvie

Time to call Vern Laux, the bird man.

Vern was living on Martha’s Vineyard at that time, so it was relatively easy to leave a message or speak to him. When I told him on the bird hotline what I had seen, he came over in light snow to see the bird. I had to go out after he came, and as luck would have it, the birds on the feeder had gone on break. Vern was still intrigued by what I had spotted. He asked if he could stay and observe.

When I returned home an hour later he told me, “Fan, you not only have a tufted titmouse for sure — you also have what can only be called a chickmouse. Or a titadee. A cross or hybrid between a tufted titmouse and a chickadee.” He was the most ebullient of ebullient Vern. He returned often to photograph and take notes on this group of birds.

He asked me to keep quiet about the discovery, trusting that hundreds of birders would invade my privacy. After he had presented the findings to a birding conference, resulting in a change of taxonomy of the parent birds, he wrote the discovery in a separate chapter, called Martha’s Vineyard Chickmouse, in his captivating book, Bird News. He never revealed my identity or address.

I saw the chickmouse for three or four years. I do not know what happened to the family.

We saw Vern on the Patriot to look at birds on the way to Penikese. He dazzled us most with his binocular vision. He saw birds that were not there until they came within ordinary human scope. And that effervescent voice. About everything. We will miss his knock-out energy and total respect for all, knowing like Emily Dickinson that “Hope is a thing with feathers.”

Fan Ogilvie is a poet and artist who lives in West Tisbury.