If you’re into birding and/or slightly obscure humor, you won’t want to miss my brother Mark’s account of Christmas Bird Count 2008, just posted in the sadly neglected Plummer’s Hollow blog. The count took place back on the Saturday before Christmas, but Mark’s been too busy playing Scrabble, scarfing cookies, and driving back to Mississippi (1000 miles in one day — I don’t know how he does it) to finish the blog post until now. Here’s how it starts:
On Brush Mountain, Christmas Bird Count — always on a Saturday in mid-December — has normally been bigger than Xmas (the one with Baby Jesus and all that) itself. 2008, the 30th year we have participated in the Juniata Valley Audubon Society’s Culp Count, was no exception. I mean, Christmas itself is OK, what with all the cookies, carols, coffeecake and pagan revelry, but at heart it just isn’t as fun, at least for 3/5ths of the Bonta family, as a day of dawn-to-dusk hardcore birding in any and all weather conditions, followed by a potluck count supper at the Hoyer’s on down the mountain.
Yesterday was the dull gray of a river stone.
This morning snow covers our neighbor’s roof,
sky the color of an indigo bunting’s cap.
Fresh from sleep we reach back for summer’s green,
fecund and ridiculous. At our feeder a blue jay
cracks open a seed to warm itself on the fire burning
in the hull. To the west fields are bare and my mother
wears a heart monitor. She rises slowly from bed
to bathe, hope against hope that her heart won’t flutter
like the wings of a sparrow, the furious beating
of a finch as it tries to bring the body into balance,
an agreement with the wind, the rhythm
of the blessedly invisible air.
I went out turkey-stalking this morning, armed only with a camera. Half-way along the old woods road to the Far Field, I found three sets of tracks. The snow was beginning to melt in the strong sunlight, but these looked very fresh. I put the camera on video setting as I approached the last bend.
And there they were. They started running as soon as they saw me. It wasn’t the best view I’ve ever had of wild turkeys by a long shot, but for once I had my camera with me. I was only sorry they didn’t fly. They’re intriguing enough on the ground — there’s definitely still a bit of the dinosaur about them — but when a flock of turkeys takes to the air, it’s a heart-stopping experience. One never expects something so large to fly so well. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to catch that on film someday. (Yes, I know — some of you in the suburbs, where turkeys are never hunted, get much better views.)
When I got to where they’d been, the ground was all scratched up. They’ve spent most of the autumn down in the valley gleaning corn, as usual, but now that turkey season is safely over, the turkeys have moved back up on the mountain. Unlike their domestic cousins, wild turkeys are extremely canny birds. We do allow turkey hunting on our land, but many years go by without a single bird being taken. If our friends are any indication, turkey hunters are a pretty dedicated lot, but sometimes I suspect they’re just looking for an excuse to spend a fine autumn day out in the woods.
The snow was just right for tracking: neither too wet or too dry, too deep or too thin. I crossed paths with ruffed grouse, raccoon, deer, squirrel, and a couple species of mice. But the best find of the morning had to be the very graphic remains of someone else’s Thanksgiving feast — almost certainly a red-tailed hawk’s, judging by the size of the wingprints. Here’s a slideshow of the struggle, in the order I think it unfolded. (Those with slow connections can access the set here.)
As I waited for a shadow to move off the remains of the squirrel, I could hear the twittering of a mixed winter flock of songbirds drawing near. The hawk’s leftovers won’t be going to waste, I think. As for me, I was just grateful for this photographic bounty to share with y’all. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it, and thanks for reading. I don’t know if it makes sense, logically or theologically, for an agnostic to feel blessed, but I’ve never claimed to be a logical person. All I know is my blessings are too many to count.
Again this morning, a northern harrier
haunts our forty-acre field,
coursing low
over the spent goldenrod & brome,
the white flag on her rump flashing
as she banks & hovers, her wings
in a fluttery V:
mixed signals for those who would see her
as nothing more than namesake
for a flying weapon.
She drops
into the grass
& reemerges with a squirming meal.
Old fields like ours
are rarer than they used to be, & perhaps
she would prefer marshland,
but most of the marshes were drained
a hundred years ago, & so
for four days we have watched her
appear & disappear like
a magician’s handkerchief
along the top edge of the field.
Left alone, the land
reinvents itself
in ways that contradict all expectation.
The cool wet forest felled
for charcoal in 1813
would’ve held — in root-nets,
in yard-deep humus & baroque
superstructures of wood —
as much water as
a small lake.
But with the recent arrival
of the woolly adelgid, we know
the old-growth hemlock will never
come back. Best
to make our peace
with light & drought,
with openness,
with curled flourishes of grass
& a migrating harrier fishing for voles
under the bluest skies.
I was one of fourteen authors who took part in the writing of a chain poem at the poetry collaborative. Like the other participants, I only wrote a single line, but apparently that gives me the right to revise it however I want and post the results here. I hope I don’t ruffle any feathers with the extent of my revision. Read the original to see how much I’ve altered, and who contributed which words and images.
Quite by coincidence, qarrtsiluni announced a new theme on Monday: Journaling the Apocalypse. Beth Adams and I are taking a turn as issue editors. Submit!
We thought it was a sign, the imminent
undoing of the sky. Canting prophets
consulted the lint balls in their navels.
We thought it a sign, the flying
out of orbit of the world — but what
to make of the coffee becalmed
in its cup, the street’s slow traffic
gangling past our doors and windows,
all bolted against the loud flocks
of grackles? An iridescent sea
broke across our lawns. Black
rainbows of wings blocked the sun.
But an old woman, bent over her stick,
warned it wasn’t the sky we should fear
but ourselves, how we fail to bear witness
to whatever happens in each & every
holy, unstable moment.
Cold out this morning, but
one cricket still managed
a sclerotic chirp. I watched
parallel furrows form
in the clouds to the east,
five lines. A large flock
of grackles flew across them,
accompanied by the usual
scattered notes. If I’d snapped
a photo at that precise moment,
there might’ve been a score
someone could play.
Instead, I sat thinking
how I’d like my own notes
to be so lightly anchored
to the page: an antidote
for all the heaviness
our tribe of meaning-makers
has inflicted on the world.
I am lodged in this body
not like a businessman
in some motel but like
a meteorite at the center
of a target its own impact created,
glowing for a short time
with the heat of its entry.
The truth isn’t out there
between the stars. The cricket
kept chirping in the herb bed,
and beyond, the wild rose
almost leafless now as the color
deepens in its shrinking
wrinkled capsules,
which are said to heal.
__________
UPDATE: We’ve decided to broaden this conversation and invite others to join in, because why not? It’s a world-wide web. See Dana’s response to me, and Lirone’s response to Dana.
A loud buzz summons me to the window to watch a male ruby-throated hummingbird rocketing back and forth in front of the spicebush, parabola flattened into an x-axis 18 inches long — not the usual U-shaped courtship trajectory. The revs are correspondingly shorter: rrRRR rrRRR rrRRR. The female sits a foot away in the shade, as green as the green leaves but more shimmery: polished jade surrounded by raw jadeite.
Long before hummer ever became a car, it was a bird with the fastest engine and a fierce red flag for everyone else in the race. In courtship displays, its manic energy is simply redirected. If you’ve ever hung out a hummingbird feeder and witnessed the constant dogfights, you can probably understand how Hummingbird-on-the-Left became a god of war to the Aztecs, in whose songs the heart was always a blood-red flower waiting to be plundered.
Evolutionarily speaking, it cannot be an accident that the eponymous gorget of the ruby-throated hummingbird is the same color as its favorite nectar sources. For the watching female, it must be both hypnotic and deeply alluring, this swinging blossom dangled right in front of her. For the male, I imagine, it’s as vertiginous as any great wager: Take me. Attack.
I was up on top of the ridge this morning, bending down to photograph some trailing arbutus blossoms, when I heard the brassy, jazzy phrases of a brown thrasher for the first time since last summer. Since I don’t have any other way to record audio in the field, I shot a video with my digital camera. (Note the traffic noise from I-99, over a mile away on the far side of the mountain.) An hour later, a thrasher was singing in my parents’ front yard — possibly the same bird.
If you’re familiar with either of its close relatives, the catbird or the mockingbird, you’ll recognize the tone quality and improvisational character, but what distinguishes the thrasher is his tendency to sing most phrases twice. He also does far fewer impersonations of other birds than either a catbird or a mocker, and is the most creative of the three:
So far, researchers have documented between 1000 and 2000 songs, depending on which researchers you listen to. Not only that, but brown thrashers actually sing two songs simultaneously even though they emerge from their throats as a single song, according to Barry Kent MacKay in his informative book Bird Songs.
Every year brown thrashers learn more songs despite singing only during a brief period each spring while they establish territories and attract mates.
*
This might be a good time to mention that the May 1 edition of the Festival of the Trees will be hosted at what I guess must be the world’s most popular birding blog, 10,000 Birds. Here’s the announcement post, including information on where to send your tree-related links for inclusion in what is sure to be a well-written and widely read edition.
