botanizing

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.

The Impaler

There was a pounding on the house today.  It was close to the connection of electrical wires to the house, which can be a sidetrack for the coven of squirrels that prowl and plot among the surrounding trees.  The sound was too insistent, too solid and focused for a squirrel. Flicker, I thought, or perhaps one of the magpies that can create nearly any annoying sound or distracting havoc.  I opened the door slowly, hoping not to scare the culprit, hoping for a look.  Nothing moved.  The pounding continued.  I stepped slowly toward the pounding.  When I had nearly reached the pounding, it flipped and flew toward me—I ducked back to avoid being impaled by a Red-Breasted Nuthatch.  The nuthatch stopped in the small maple by the house to take a good look at me.  “You incredible fool!” I could hear him mutter.  I had dared to distract the bird while he was thoroughly engaged in excavating my wall.

Rustle and Run

Leaves rustle. A moment later a magpie runs, like a chicken on stiff legs, down the rail that edges my deck.  The early morning sun rides slipshod, a wavering blue, on the back of the running bird.

The Squirrel and the Owl

My roof is a racetrack.  Squirrels leap to the roof from the two maples on the west side of the house, then race eastward to my wires, which they tight-rope walk to the Douglas Fir and then climb into the enormous cherry—from there they venture outward to the broader world.  The wood of my ceiling is mostly my roof, and when a squirrel hops from a tree to its surface, especially at first light, the thud is significant.  Usually, it’s not just one squirrel, but a pair, especially first thing in the morning when they are particularly playful.  This play often involves scurrying back and forth in fits and starts, changing directions and tumbling over each other.  At the dusky cusp of morning, when my dreams are not of squirrels, the thwaap thwaap thwaap of paws around and across the roof is a sharp and unpleasant way to wake.

There has been a Great Horned Owl in the neighborhood for several weeks.  It sits in the evening in a willow down the street or beside the chimney on a neighbor’s house behind me.  The owl’s reeeek . . . . . reeeek . . . called well into the night last night, and I heard it again when I woke early this morning.  It’s a plaintive call, and I wish the owl success—in all ways. 

While I was writing this evening in the living room, I caught a gray sweep in the corner of my eye.  Broad sweep.  Owl, I thought.  I looked up to the roof through the window.  The owl was on the edge of the roof—it’s body still but it’s head swiveled slowly, then swiftly, as if deceptive but determined to catch an unexpecting rodent’s motion.  I thought gleefully about the pleasure of a squirrel dinner for the owl.

The owl sat quietly on my roof.  Then I heard a gallop—a twallllup, a multi-stepped race in a heart-beat’s rush slipped into two syllables—and the squirrel went from western trees to eastern wire and hopped into the secluding conifer.  I have never heard a squirrel move with such speed, and I can only imagine its surprise when it hopped in the evening dim to the roof and saw, sitting 12 feet away the dark outline of the owl.  And with the twallllup gallop of the squirrel there was also the broad whoosh of the owl—it was fast across the face of the windows and only a moment behind the squirrel into the conifer. 

I was cheering for the owl.

Screams and a Lullaby

I looked to the scream of a hawk. My attention had been on the searing heat, which seemed to come not only from the sky but also from the tub of slickrock and sand in the wash that I descended above the Colorado River. I caught the bird as it back-pedaled—despite the pale orange that shown through its tail from the higher, sharp light of the sun—it was a flutter of white, standing back from harassing a Golden Eagle.  As the hawk backed, the eagle rolled.  The sound was immense, high above me:   WHUUP—the rolling eagle’s wings swept the sky.  Out of the roll, the eagle wheeled, and the hawk had flown on a tangent but turned back for a second attack.  It came fast till just above the eagle, where it pulled back, holding its wings as sails, just out of range of the eagle’s roll: WHUUP—the long wings pushed around the air.  As the eagle righted, the hawk was with it—they flew together into the sun—which blinded me, and I turned away, squinting, but heard then the eagle’s evasion as the force of its wings turned sky to wind: WHUUP.

As I had tea on my deck, the ravens and magpies were in an uproar.  A raven, launched from a tree, became a black projectile, till just short of my neighbor’s roof, wings flapping to slow its motion, it pulled back, squawking and pushing its claws forward.  The raven held stationary—except its beating wings and loud screams—for a moment.  A Great Horned Owl sat on the edge of the roof just before the raven’s claws—it ruffled, then roiled its wings, a flutter, the arched wings flapped. The owl was quiet.  The raven returned to its tree and continued to squawk loudly, along with the magpies, through the rest of the evening while the owl, which moved to the top of the house’s chimney, sat quietly, turning slowly, repeatedly its head.

The next evening the Great Horned Owl returned, but the ravens remained quiet.  The magpies clattered but hid.  The owl called: reeeek . . . . . reeeek . . .And that’s the sound to which I settled that night—the shrill imploring of a Great Horned Owl, my lullaby.

The Passions of Sparrows and Others

The window before my writing table is level with a tree’s canopy.  While I worked today editing a manuscript and preparing datasets for analyses, I watched the passion of a House Sparrow pair.  They have been gathering fine materials for a nest, but today their work accelerated.  This pair, I’ve decided, prefers the slim remains of last year’s compound leaves for their nest.  These dried rachises are about the size of pine needles, and the sparrow pair is harvesting them from the crooks of branches where leaves were caught over the winter.

Amid the morning work of rachis harvesting, when the female sat still, looking out toward the street, the male in a swift move down from another branch came to her and held himself in flutter of wings at her back.  Then they were both off.  The gathering of nest material continued later—both flying into the tree, one after the other or together, gathering a rachis on each trip.  It was later when the passion peaked.  The female was on the same branch as before when the male flew to her tail and held himself at her back in an exceptional flutter of his wings—it was passion at length and finally he flew—through the branches and around the tree and he was back to her back for another brief mating, then flew up to a branch for just moments before he returned again to her for the last of the day’s fluttering passion.

Over the weekend on my return from Washington, I stopped at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on Great Salt Lake.  Despite driving by the Refuge relatively often over the years on my trips between the University and fieldwork on the Colorado Plateau, this was the first time I had stopped.  I had a wonderful time watching the birds on the wetlands that I don’t normally see since I am drawn most often to arid landscapes.  White-faced Ibis probed the water of rush thickets. Black-necked Stilts picked at a mud puddle on an access road.  A White Pelican flew past and a Snowy Egret waded, lifting its yellow feet at each step, through the dark water of the marsh.  Not just the feet, but also the legs, were yellow on the Greater Yellowlegs that fed in the mud.

There was passion as well in the Refuge.  Killdeer, hardly less common than the House Sparrows outside my apartment, but less fluttery in their passions, met on the mudflats among the Greater Yellowlegs for quick trysts.  Mosquitoes too, in a variety of species, were joining abdominal tip to abdominal tip on the cattails and fences for a few moments of still, steady—species prolonging—passion.