botanizing

Neighborhood hawks

While seated on my deck a few weeks ago, one of the neighborhood hawks zipped twice overhead just above reach.  After the last pass, it caught air and curved upward to circle high above the neighborhood.  ‘Screee  . . .  screee,’ the hawk screamed.  I went in the house to get my binoculars.  Two Swainson’s Hawks have had a nest among the upper branches of a spruce that stands about 50 yards away.  After I swept my binoculars along with the hawk in flight, I focused on the nest, which was constructed on the far side of the tree and has been hard for me to see.  When I lowered the binoculars, I noticed a large nodule about the size of Jeffrey pine cone on the upper branch of the larch in my back yard. My near-sightedness didn’t allow me to resolve the nodule as anything more than a shadowy carbuncle, so I lifted the binoculars for a look.  What I saw was one of the Swainson’s Hawks, watching me with great scrutiny.  I was looking down the barrel of the hawk’s hooked beak.  It’s eyes were steady.

*

Through most of the summer I awakened early in the mornings to the ‘Screee  . . .  screee’ cries of the Swainson’s Hawks.  In the late afternoons when I came home from work, the hawks were often soaring above the neighborhood or I saw them fly from tree to tree, often with some other badgering bird about them.  Before evening, I again heard the hawks’ cries.  The shoulder-hunching cry inevitably made me look up.

*

In the past two weeks, I have not heard or seen the hawks. I have no idea whether the neighborhood mates had a successful nest—I travelled enough during the summer to have missed early flights of any young hawks that the nest might have produced.

The Swainson’s Hawks have most likely departed on their annual migration.  I hope they have good luck on their flight to Argentina.

Osprey

As we drove up the Selway River on Saturday, Adrian pointed out an Osprey on its nest.   The broad bowl-of-a-nest sat atop the thin point of a conifer snag that leaned ever-so-slightly over the river.  I think of those leaning snags, lost from the forest and bound eventually to meet the river, as composing the ‘Osprey zone’—the best spots from which to watch fish move in the water below.

The Osprey was chattering when I stepped from the truck to get a better look.  The bird looked up river and then down, up and then down, slowly and methodically.  The repetitive motion of the bird’s head shifted upriver when a hawk screamed—the Osprey focused quickly on the call of the other bird.

A light breeze above the river channel ran through the feathers of the Osprey’s head.  The loose feathers at the back, just below the bird’s crest, flipped in the wind.  They were yellow in the sun.

Bewick's Wren

There was a sharp dart, a brown zip, that landed in my Mahonia.   The dart, a bird, I realized as I focused my newly awake eyes, had a tail at a hard angle with its body.  A wren, I thought and reached for my glasses and then binoculars.  Magnified, I could see the bird had a band as pale as its belly above it eye.  A Bewick’s Wren, and, as I followed its movements, I discovered its nest. 

In early December one of our first winter storms brought heavy snow and wind that broke branches in the flowering crab in my front yard.  One broken branch fell across a lamp on a pole that stands in front of the house.  The lamp lost some glass in the mishap.  The Bewick’s Wren was now using the space of lost glass as an entrance and was building a nest in the lamp. 

I watched the nest building and quickly recognized that I had a mated pair of wrens at work.  When one would arrive at the lamp entrance with a stick, the other would fly out to gather more material.  They gathered sticks, leaves, and bark.  One would gather and then the other.  Inside the lamp, a dead white lightbulb stood, looking ever-so-much like the top of an egg in the growing nest. 

The nest has grown steadily this week, although I see the wrens at work only in the mornings.  This evening, when I arrived at home after work, the entrance to the lamp was covered by a loose gathering of leaves.  The lamp space looks full, and I wonder whether the time has arrived to lay eggs.

The raptor's stare

It was before 8.00 a.m. as I walked two weeks ago along the edge of the campus at the University of Colorado, where I was on my way to a meeting.  I sipped tea as I walked.  The morning sun, warm against the cool day, felt good on my face.  The sun heightened my senses.  The sun heightened the freshness of the morning. Birds chattered.  A mix of robins and sparrows foraged at the edge of a line of shrubs.  Then a charge hit, everything changed, and birds flew out like debitage from a hard struck stone.  The charge was gray, a streak from the sky, a raptor that pulled back and in its wings in the moment before it hit.   It hit talons first, grabbing tight a robin.  Feathers flew.  Screams and warning calls.  Sound and feathers followed the spray of escaping birds.  The robin—the held robin, the caught robin, the prey robin—twisted.  One of the robin’s wings extended and fluttered.  The gray raptor stared at me.  I stood ten feet from the bird and its prey.  I was as caught in the stare as the robin was in talons.  The sharp gaze did not lift.  The eyes bore at me down the curved beak that was still and glinting in sun.  When the feathers had settled, when the prey robin twisted less, the raptor flew—its wings bit the air in two quick beats—in a hop over the shrubs—sufficient distance from me—where the raptor landed and held still its talons tight around the robin. 

Bird chimes

There are wind chimes in the trees but no houses or people here where I walk near the end of a long, dry ridge.  I look in the trees for the chimes and find them.  They flutter at the tips of branches.  Irregular, sharp, and light, I begin to hear gyp gyp . . . gyp . . .  gyp, and those calls mix with the chaffing of wings against needles and scraping of toes against bark.  I have mistaken bird sounds for chimes.

A cone of a Douglas fir is tossed to the ground, where it crunches against the wiry, dry grasses.  I get my binoculars from my pack.

The birds are Red Crossbills at work harvesting seeds from the cones of a Douglas fir.  The crossbills maneuver at the tips of branches—there is a flash of wing and a body flips.  They slip upside down, sideways, head twisting at a cone as their bodies bob on the thinnest branches.  The birds poke and pull seeds.  When a cone comes loose, the crossbill tosses it away.

The flock flies—lifting nearly all at once—as I watch.  Hurried gyp gyp gyp from different quarters of the tree.  There is a flash of buff bellies, glints of red, orange, and yellowish green against the sun as they wheel and fly away.  It’s quiet now, except the wind—the chimes have flown.

Birding

Spotted Sandpipers are as common as the commas in my thoughts.  They twitter across the river and then come back.  Their short wings beat quickly, but the motion seems clipped, caught in steps of downstroke and up, as if the waves of the river created a stroboscopic effect.  The Sandpipers poke among the cobbles at the margin the Selway River.  They probe a few square inches of stones and then fly.

I walk up Meadow Creek, a wide tributary of the Selway River.  A Dipper does knee-bends on a tree trunk that has lodged midstream at the edge of a cascade.  Sure that the bird’s bobbing portends a dive into the cascade, I stop to watch.  The Dipper continues to bob.  I step back into a patch of shade and lean my chin on my hands at the top of my trekking pole.  The Dipper bobs and then preens, cleaning his wings and then under them.  A month ago on another tributary of the Selway I watched patiently as a Dipper bobbed for 15 minutes—I had hoped that bird would dive, but its knee dipping turned to nothing but preening, and I gave up.  I give up again as the Dipper on Meadow Creek preens its other wing.

The trail along Meadow Creek is crowded by thimbleberries that slap at my belly and bracken ferns that poke my chest.  I watch my steps in the green thicket—rattlesnakes are common in this area.  It is not a snake but the scramble and holler of small birds that gets my attention.  A mock orange stands high to my left and the debris of a fallen cedar lies to my right.   Small, dark birds fly among the mock orange and other shrubs.  They hop from branch to branch until they take reasonable vantages.  One sits in the mock orange just steps ahead on the left and another on a branch of the fallen tree on my right.  A third bird circles behind me, coming up on the right and down the trunk of the horizontal tree to land just behind the righthand bird.  Their alarm calls are loudly out of proportion for their tiny size.  They are wrens and almost solidly brown except for dark bands across their pertly upright tails.  I take my Sibley Guide from my pack to look at the possible wrens.  Winter Wrens—a new bird for me.  I love to see new birds.

In the late afternoon, I return to the Selway River to camp.  I sit about 20 feet from the river, which has a high, cacophonous roar, holding the whoosh of tons of water and the clatter of the flow against midstream boulders, and, yet as I listen, I can hear the softer lap of little marginal waves against shore stones.   I sit under western red cedar, Douglas fir, and ponderosa pine to read but a flock of small birds fluttering from branch to branch and tree to tree distracts me.  I twist in my seat to follow the birds—following their songs.  They sound like squeaky wheels.  Six squeaky wheels surround me, and I search the branches to locate the birds.  They are quick.  I fumble my binoculars.  Can’t get them focused.  Try one eye.  Focus on a branch.  Search for the bird.  The squeaky wheel moves.  Try another.  It moves.  I give up on the binoculars.  The birds are small—only four or five inches from beak to tail tip—and sleek.  Gray and unmarked to my nearly naked myopic eyes.  I guess they might be Bushtits but hardly feel satisfied with this.

I sit again, thinking I’ll read and ignore the squeaky wheels.  Crows converse on the opposite shore.  The Bushtit problem keeps my reading unfocused.  I catch a dark flight to a low branch near the river.  The bird settles and stays, and I reach for the binoculars.  A Varied Thrush.  What a damn good bird—it sits unmoving on the branch as I focus the binoculars and shows me a strong, steady profile as I watch.  If only all birds had the steadiness of the Varied Thrush!

Red Riding

A Redwing Blackbird rode a Red-Tailed Hawk.  This was in today’s wind gusts.  The hawk had flown from a tree and was gliding, wings stiff and straight, across a field.  The blackbird was behind and above the hawk—a nuisance bird of the sort that tails hawks.  This blackbird, fast over the hawk and flitting back and forth—its red wingbars flashing—slowed and settled on the back of the Red-Tail.  I watched its wings fold as it sat on the hawk’s back.  The hawk batted—tilting right and left—and the blackbird lifted—up a foot or two on quick wings—and just as quickly the blackbird settled again on the hawk’s back.  The blackbird seemed less interested in pestering the hawk than in catching a ride.

Dinner

As I came into the mountains along the North Fork of the Clearwater River, I saw movement on a rock beside the water.  Using binoculars through the windshield, I could see that it was a large bird.  I continued up the road in the truck, stopping nearly opposite the bird to look through the space of the lowered side window.   It was an Osprey on a broad, flat-topped boulder that angled to the river.   The Osprey was perched on a cutthroat trout.  The bird and the now headless fish were nearly the same length.  The stone had splatters of blood and bits of meat, and a pink stripe extended down the boulder from the fish’s tail. I imagine the Osprey let the fish hit hard on the stone and then dragged it a few inches to a more suitable spot for dinner.  The Osprey stood watchful for a few moments after I arrived and then went back to its dinner. It would tilt its head down and twist it to the pink meat of the fish’s shoulders. The bird tugged and then lifted its head; its beak was full of pink fish.  Sun shined on the yellow flank of the fish.

I camped along the river, setting up my canvas chair to face the water a few miles beyond the Osprey. For dinner, I had Bombay potatoes with chickpeas and an orange with a cold, Belgian-inspired ale. My plant press served as a table, and I leaned from my low seat to the bowl of spicy potatoes and chickpeas. I sopped the brown gravy with a multigrain bagel, and a few brown drops fell on the plant press.  After dinner, I heated water for tea on my backpacking stove, which sat in the sand at arm’s reach from the chair. Kingfishers flying from mid river stones to low, shoreline branches made blue flashes.

Hearts

Quail, at sunrise, called vigorously this morning. I lay in bed listening to the calls then rose to fix tea.  Despite a thin layer of new snow, a magpie was collecting sticks from the yard.

After pouring my tea, I watched a robin that sat squat, feathers fluffed a little, in the snow.  His wings and tail throbbed—just the slightest twitches—at that quick pace of a bird’s heart.

Owl Calls

I am between two owls.  A Great Horned Owl called twice in the evening—I was on the phone at the time.  It called again with a set of short hoots, and I heard a response.   I repeated on the phone what I heard.  The first owl was across the street and the other down the block.  By the time I hung-up the phone, the owls had stopped calling.