Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Feeding Gulls

Feeding Gulls
Originally uploaded by WhitA

Been scanning old pictures and putting them in. Clearly this was shot by someone competent.

I Win! My Father's Day Had an Orange Slug

Joe and I went to a local nature park today, a nice little one where there aren't any signs that say you shouldn't go down in the water to tick off the bugs and worms and other creatures that really probably pretty much wish you would just Stay A Higher Life Form And Stop Bothering Them.

So we bothered a bunch of creatures. We looked at the damselfly nymphs and the little worms and the frogs and the whirligig beetles who Failed To Get Away. Also at the water striders. And I think my favorite, the "Small Unidentified Creatures." The word "rotifers" springs to mind, but heaven knows why. Pinnipeds. Homophones. Whatever.

There were also snails. Snails! What is this, a mangrove swamp? Their shells were transparent, or at least translucent, and they slooged down grassblades for all the world like alien creatures of Great Wisdom. Which they weren't.

Joe told me what a wonderful time he had. We saw a blue-winged warbler. That's three for me, ever. They are so beautiful, as beautiful as a pickle jar with a frog in it, and as cherries pitted while you sit on a board walk where an iris is blooming.

A first sign of spring

The spring peepers are singing, the snowdrops are blooming...

...and the roadkill has thawed.

The Rare African Eastern Wood Pewee

There are worlds of criticism a person can write about Hollywood, right? Portrayals and stereotypes and Pauly Shore. The list goes on.

Add one more: Blood Diamond's background bird calls are egregiously bad. In a fairly good movie (with some banal dialogue here and there), the bird calls in the background are so wretchedly chosen as to be as jarring as that scene in Bang The Drum Slowly when the boom mike boings all over the top of the frame.

Throughout, they dub in a black-throated green warbler, which lives in eastern America (and which happens to sing my favorite bird call, so it stood out). Now, I heard it a few times, and I thought what an arrogant you-know-what I am, to be thinking I know better than people making a movie. What are the chances, right? There's probably a black-throated-green soundalike in Sierra Leone, I figured, some sort of ill-tempered parrot that decided to mimic the little warbler.

That was when I heard the Eastern Wood Pewee.

For those of you who think me pedantic? It's like calling a Corvette a T-Bird. (My son is 6; we crossed in front of a T-Bird yesterday and he said, "Look! Dad! A T-bird! HOW COOL IS THAT?") It's like pointing to a gyrating Little Richard and saying, "Look at Elvis go!" It is very, very wrong to play American bird calls in the soundtrack of an African movie.

OK, sorry. Back to your regularly scheduled clicking.

Learning to Fly

The weekend before last, it was time to take off the training wheels on Joe's bike. It was hard for me, when I learned, so long ago -- 1973, I think -- to take off my wheels, which meant, to return the bike we had borrowed with training wheels, and to borrow someone else's, without. I learned on Stuart Avenue, on a sidewalk, in the Fan. I remember it took me a while to go straight, and longer still to turn, in the two-square pavements on the sidewalk I was allowed to ride.

It took Joe no time at all. He started on Saturday, when we took the wheels off. And by Sunday, he was riding straight, and turning when he chose, and it was all - all - the perfect moment that we all wish for. On Sunday, we started the day with Carol and I holding the seat of his bike while he rode, running and quick-walking as fast as we could, and by the end of the day, he was riding away, far away, to smack into the curb or bounce off a hard turn into his path. But he did it on his own.

I have a picture very much like this on my phone. I showed it to a friend of mine in Massachusetts, and she said, "There he is, riding away."

On the same day he was learning, I heard a characteristic whistle - the sound of a red-tailed hawk, learning to fly. They sound a little like a broad-winged, then, I think, the baby red-tailed frustrated and scared and unclear on its role in the sky. Red-tails are the most numerous large airborne predator, it seems (consult someone who knows to see if this is true), and yet of course they are both epigenetically and realistically always second to the eagles, even if those predators' numbers are greatly reduced now from the primeval era (and the red-tails, presumably, increased).

The whistle they make is plaintive. It is nevertheless beautiful. And as they learn to fly, you see them everywhere -- high, and low, and in the middle, often accompanied within hundreds of yards or only a few feet by their parents. It is so lovely.

It was, of course, mostly coincidence, all but the beauty. There was Joe, learning. there was the hawk, a baby with a killing beak and a future of frequent and necessary murder, learning. We all have to let go, to give them their wings. What luck. What a scary moment. What a terror. What glory it is.

And it's still only beginning.

Bird Feeder

Joe: "Hey, I know what would be a good idea! We should get a birdfeeder and put deer in it! Then it would attract turkey vultures!"

Fly

Among birding’s dearest effects is a sense of universality, of familiarity and ease that leads me to a peace attached to what I know about what I see. I remember the first magpie I ever saw, or at least the first I got a good look at, in a national park in the American West. Years later, I remember the first one I saw in an ordinary place, in a yard in Nebraska as I drove west to see something exotic (I think it was yellow-headed blackbirds). I’ve seen them in Australia – they were the first birds I saw in Australia, playing on a radio tower – and in Hyde Park in London.

Today, I saw them in Barcelona, Spain, working the mid-sized corvid niche in the Parc de Montjuic. I walked in a piney section on a the hillside, wondering where the jays were, and it came to me that it wasn’t jays but maggies that owned the relevant niche here. Similarly, I saw some kind of tit (let’s hope that doesn’t set off the Internet surfing filters of my literally dozens of readers annually) in the pines. I heard them first, the scruffle of their feet and wings in the pine bark, and then the tik-tik-tik they make when they work the pine cones (I think). In the states, it’s a chickadee that would do that.

There were also finches of some kind, dead ringers for house finches but lemony instead of reddish. And something I didn’t know at all, with a black cap and a loud, melodious warble, which I wished would follow me home. I had considered not taking my binoculars, but I’m so glad I did. I did look like a tourist, but what the hell. I am a tourist.

I walked from the Paral-lel Metro stop up the hill toward the park, stopping to buy some pastry (and conducting the transaction in Spanish, miracles never cease), and then on past the funicular to the fort. Walking along the fort’s walls, I saw the finches and the maggies until I was familiar with their calls, the raspy doves and the squealing European swifts (which sound like someone’s crushing them in a wheel when they fight).

And miracle of miracles, I think I saw an eagle, far out among the gulls, soaring, big-tailed a gorgeous. It was no osprey, and I’ll have to look and see if there is another bird of prey, but my mind is shaping it now into an eagle’s profile, so it may be too late to see it whole in my mind’s eye.

Finally, I saw a little falcon, a Eurasian kestrel or a hobby, I think, taking the American kestrel’s place in the pattern of avian life. At the art museum, as I walked past, I saw there is an exhibit on still lifes – “natures mortes” – currently on display. I kept walking. I’ll take the living ones any day.

Simply perfect

From a letter to an old friend:

So, you asked a wonderful question, which was whether one of the reasons I care so much for birds was their mating rituals. And the answer is, yes, that is absolutely one of the things I like the most about birds. But it's (of course) not just that. The more I thought about it, the more I realized, it's two things:

1. Birds are the most visible creatures in the world. Because they fly (instead of scurrying around under leaves, for example) you can see them living their lives.

2. Birds are the most beautiful creatures in the world. They just are.

Birds are lovely beyond all description. They can fly! And with only a few exceptions, it's beautiful to watch them do it. In other words, it is not just the courtship rituals, it's everything. We can see hawks fall in love, which is a wonder, but we can also see them eat, and idle, and fight, and learn. One day near Chicago, I watched two hawks teach their juvenile offspring how to fly, and it was marvelous. They circled as far up in the air as you could see with the naked eye, and then they spun down again so close you could see their eye turn to look at you from fifty feet in the air.

Other courtships? One night I heard nighthawks above the building where we lived wheel down into dives that they broke just at the rooftop, and the buzz in their wings made a sound like a kid drawing his breath in to make a sound like a motorcycle. I've watched woodcocks go straight up into the moon and then tumble down, making a strange whistling sound that is jumbly and lovely, and you can barely see them unless the moon is full.

As for eating, I saw an eagle one-foot a fish out of a Nebraska lake, and it was stunning. Ospreys are more likely to smash into the water and come out with something. I saw a Shrike-Tit in Australia masticate a tree branch to get at what it wanted. In Australia I saw something like 40 or 50 species of birds -- and not a single mammal outside a zoo, the ENTIRE TRIP. I heard some on a rooftop one night, but never did see one.

So, the thing about birds, is that they display perfect beauty. They fly. They are grace incarnate, whatever that means to humans, inedible (at least now -- practically anything was considered edible 200 years ago) and lovely beyond all reach. We cannot be like them. We do not think like them; we do not look like them; we lack feathers and colors and the lovely voices they use to add a tonal fabric to our days outdoors like nothing else in the world.

When I was in Hyde Park, in London, about two years ago, I heard a brown creeper in the morning, and I knew what I heard the instant it called, a reedy soft whisper I had never heard in England. There is nothing like birds but birds. They are the most beautiful of the creatures on the earth. They will outlive me and you, and they predated us, and they will never know their own beauty. They just are, simply, perfect.

Meadows

I took a walk today in the woods at Wachusett Meadow, and, obviously, also in the meadows themselves. The summer woods are ^&** owned by mosquitoes. It was MOST impressive, and I relied heavily on and was satisfied by essentially rolling in bug repellent. It was as bad as I remember having been here in the frozen north. (You jest, but you ain't seen what it's like where it never freezes, and the wigglers have free rein.)

It proved to be a good day for it. Where the mosquitoes did not own the field, the fungi did, and that's always a good thing. And there were more than a few late wild flowers, such as the pure wild lily here (if it's an escaped cultivar, don't tell me, k? My illusions are precious to me). Also, the Indian Pipes were up, as were the wintergreen blossoms, which always surprise me -- every time I see them -- with how lovely they are, such little jewels that you have to bend all the way over to see properly, and even then you can't crouch long enough (the whine of mosquitoes increasing in intensity and spirit in both ears simultaneously) to really get their benefit. In general, though, I believe that to earn the right to enjoy a place you have to see it out of season, or at least in all seasons. I was glad to put in my summer visit to Wachusett Meadow today, to hear the vireos and thrushes (hermit!) and the odd towhee that lives at the top of Brown's Hill with the odd accent. When I ate a blueberry (do NOT tell the people who run the joint, as I think that qualifies as collection) I ate one from a high bush and one from a low bush, and both (OK, six) were warm from the sunshine.

This is why the good lord made babysitters.

Say, Thrush

You can tell yourself all you want when you bird that you don't need a good bird that day to enjoy it, and I want you that I know it's a FAT DAMN LIE. Of course you want a good bird. It's like that study where it turns out people who win Oscars die slower than the people who don't. You want the best best good bird, and you want the second-best good bird first, like when you are just unbuckling the safety belt, so you know that the trip wasn't just one of those where you say "not today, I guess." And then the best-best good bird at the farthest point from the parking lot, where the mosquitoes have seventy-five legs and firearms and old half-mesh chewing tobacco hats. So you have a story to tell.

Unless you don't get that bird, like today, in which case you say, you know, you don't need that best-best bird to be outside in the mud and the sweat and the screaming bright sun with no leaves on the trees yet. Which is also true, as long as we all agree it is, just like it's OK not to shoot a deer if you hunt and what you like is just time outdoors and you need a reason.

So I started the day with a goal. Joe was not able to join because he had to be in camp. (Which he loves.) And so I threw myself in the car and bought a bottle of juice and a cup of cream coffee and called it breakfast and I threw myself up to Wachusett Meadow just as fast as I could. And I got out the car and started walking. Don't you love when you start walking and the binoculars aren't even focused yet and all the promise of the day leads out in front of you like a dirt road with a break in the bushes where it crosses the hill you see up ahead? I walked maybe 50 feet and what was that song? A purple finch singing on territory. I have never heard it before, and I tell you it was lovely, a new thing, a new feeling, a new sight -- a jumble that isn't a house finch or a song sparrow or the rose-breasted grosbeak. But what a pleasure to see the purple (purple!) berry of a finch fixed on a bare branch and roaring, because that is how it feels to him.

So I got my second-best bird upfront after all, I guess.

And then I walked down that old dirt road there. I was headed to the heron rookery, and when I got there through the pastures with their stone walls that probably predate the war I learned about growing up in Richmond, I sat down for a while. To sit down and watch! LUXURY. I sat and let myself think about all the things I have had to think about, but I listened, too, to the redwing blackbirds and the tree swallows (this is WARTIME for tree swallows) and the croaking herons, which sound like their call is cranked out of them on a strong winch. While I was sitting there the sounds got thick behind me, and I turned to find a swamp sparrow in the leaves, and then a fistful of palm warblers, the early warblers.

Forgive me, now, while I wax babbly on birding.

The point of birding is different for everybody. I wrote a friend last week that it is hunting for me, bloodless hunting, and I know squat. It's not hunting. It's yearning. It's wishing to be the river, or at least carried on the river of birds that sweeps north and south and that eddies in time. I saw my first palm warbler in 1987, in Key West, down the street from my parents' house. I have seen them in Mexico. I never heard one sing, I think, until today. This has been said better. To see the palm warbler, its tail absolutely never stopping bobbing, to see it on the winter grounds, northbound, southbound, to see it comb the dead leaves and the ends of trees' branches where the buds have the tiny spider webs, is to for a moment -- a mean dirty little moment -- get the chance to float in the airborne river. It's a wish to live forever, thoughtless and out of time. I watched the palms move like waves at three places where water stays on the land, three ponds. Perfect insect consumption devices. Everything is a shark, and finding transcendent meaning in any animal is an insult, but perhaps it is not to find the meaning in them all.

When I sat at Fire Pond, where last year Joe and I slogged with great joy while the rain poured on our heads, I saw water beetles and backswimmers and efts and frogs and salamander eggs. And I saw the flicker of movement, and like a pointed ghost a Swainson's Thrush snuck out of a woodsy corner to work the mossy ground. Mind you, thrushes are not so easy to define that I said, "Look, a Swainson's." I worked my Sibley like a cheap lighter. Spectacle, check. Pale-ish speckling, check. Drab coloring (roughly corresponding to my professional wardrobe), check.

I had my best best bird.

I am so glad for birds.