Whit's Blog / 1000 Recordings

Ooo-doot Is in the Air

 Joe and I were at the zoo today, and there's nothing like the zoo in springtime to give a Dad plenty to explain. Why are those zebras so frisky? Warm air makes them happy! Actually, the zebras did not spark any comments, because the semiotics involved were rather, well, subtle. But give them a week or so.

And some of the aspects of the season are, because they are less obviously anomalous, easier to enjoy with one's four-year-old. The Tropical America house was alive with birdsong, for example, including a sweet call-and-response from the local blue-crowned motmot. (I recorded the call at the zoo itself.) The call, like that of the whip bird I saw in Australia, is an affecting continuous ritual of matching the male to the female. If you listen to the call, you'll here the "woo," and then the "ooo-doot." The pictured male (I think male; you motmot fanciers out there -- and you know who you are -- feel free to correct me as necessary) is making the second sound. I thought about uploading the video, but I think it's safe to say that a motmot saying "ooo-doot" is unlikely to get me that golden guy Sunday. You can kinda see his feathers kinda fluff out.

Anyway, in a year when The Aristocrats doesn't even get nominated for Best Documentary, what's there even to discuss? Exactly.

Gimme Shelter

Inspired

What can I say? The kid likes owls. A lot. Nice owl suit, huh?

A Hoot

Joe and I were up on the top of Brown's Hill at Wachusett Meadow today eating a pear and an orange and some cashews. The rain was falling thicker and then not as thickly, and the fog out over the Beaver pond pulled apart like teased cotton balls and then mashed back together. (The fog was still thick back where we live, where it was lower.)

I asked him if he wanted me to try to call some birds. He said sure. I tried my screech owl call, which 7 or 8 years ago actually pulled an owl in on the Niobrara. It's handy to get in juncos and chickadees and others among the avian righteous. And sure enough, we heard some jays, and then some cedar waxwings off in the distance close by (you know what I mean if you know their call). And so I declared victory and departed the field.

We walked back down, and as we were going down, Joe was jumping off rock shelves and relying on my grasp to catch him, which was OK except for the part where I fell myself on my bottom and said "Doggone it." I would like the record to show that I am being accurate in saying that is, in fact, what i said.

And then I saw a flash of pecan color in the branches. Bright brown, if there is such a thing. Just the back of a bird, turning and flying, dropping down out of the branches, in a deep short arc mostly in the bottom. Only thing it could have been was a screech owl, probably pulled out of its nice dry hole by my calling up on the top of the hill. Joe didn't see it, but he believed me when I told him that was what it must have been. (This trust is the nature of fatherhood, the birthright that every day I wait to turn to a mess of pottage.)

And so I said, listen. Listen, we got to walk down the path a bit, so the bird -- we startled the bird -- doesn't know it's us. The bird thinks, that's them up there on the path. But if we get farther down, maybe it won't know it's us. So we got a little farther down. And I said, we have to hide. And so we got behind a tree.

Joe hid, in his tomato-red dinosaur raincoat, behind a tree roughly two-thirds his thickness. And I flipped up my hood. And I started my owl call, again.

At this point, Joe realized that the knapsack, in which the sacred snack had been carried, was in the clear. I saw a small hand in a glove with a flame decal appear and drag the knapsack behind the tree. And I kept up with my owl call.

And I was joined. Joseph gave it his "gruuuuuuuuuuuuuuh!" call. Which sounds like a screech owl call, but without the whistle.

Long before this moment -- let's face it -- I knew there was not going to be an owl. We had been, as they say, made. What matters in the world, though, is not whether there will be an owl, but whether we will look for the owl. And so I whispered, when Joe stopped, "Hey, Joe -- try again!" And he did.

But the owl didn't show. And I said to Joe, "No luck. Maybe we'll try again another day."

And he said, "Dad! Aren't you going to wait?"

The owl never came, but the rain kept falling. Joe thinks, maybe tomorrow there will be an owl. And he might be right. 

The curve of a bird's two wings through the trees

I think it was an owl, or a woods-hunting red-tail. In Heaven, we don't know what we saw, but the glimpses will cause no sweet peering anguish and if we walk down to where the leaves are thicker on the ground, then we see the bird, its beak wet with the blood of what it found, as clearly as we might wish. And there's not laundry to do instead, or miracle son to discipline, or VCR to set up the timer on. Just the curve of the wing and the knowing, if you need it, that day, in Heaven.

Saved by a Bolus of Vulture Yark

I have spoken to people in Rome. I have been translated into Portugese in real time. I have asked Bill Gates a question. (He thought it was stupid, which, as it turned out, it may have been. Let's not go there.)

And yet, it is only now that I have now experienced the apex of my public speaking career. I have talked to about 10 pre-schoolers (it was a like a swarm; there were so many I could not possibly count them) about birds for 25 minutes IN A ROW.

They -- I refer here to the nightmare swarm of small faces, hands, feet, arms and legs -- have been learning about birds and bugs this month. I was invited in to speak about birds. And I brought, like, 6 books with pictures. And I made notes. And I got there, and babbled. I used pictures as a helpful aid. Have you ever REALLY looked at the Audubon paintings? There's some ugly stuff in there. I mean, I knew one kid -- one of my son's friends -- liked peregrine falcons, so I turned to that page. That duck looks like aliens burst out through its breast. Turns out, of course, that they LIKED that stuff. Blue jays eat other birds' eggs? Hey, nature, red in tooth in claw, they responded. One kid even volunteered that the jays probably eat baby birds.

I was the entertainment for the kids while the teachers set up a play for them to perform. That meant that the parents were filing in while I was talking. It was at approximately this point that I imitated a screech owl, a barred owl, and a great horned owl, luckily without law enforcement hearing any of it. And in a final ending moment of desperation as the kids drifted across the carpet, no longer transfixed by the sight of a grown man imitating birds, I told them about how vultures defend themselves.

Got their attention. I think their parents thought it was cool, too. That was probably why they formed a posse and got a bunch of torches and clubs. I sat in the back row during the play.

The Living Disney

A slough is a thing of beauty. It was at a little slough, headed with some rubble for erosion control, that I saw some blue-gray gnat catchers. I know that they must wrestle for food, that they strive to eat, that they strive to migrate at the right moment, that they’re no Disney songbird from Snow White. But it is in us to love, and I have not seen a gnatcatcher in far too long. I remember a pair in Omaha at Neale Woods where the steward had found a nest. (He was very proud, and had every right to be.) I adored them until they flew off.

Also, I saw a palm warbler, bobbing his tail like he’s supposed to do, near the pretend beach pool. He stared back at me. Birds have such black, black eyes. Implacable is only a beginning for saying what they look like. Button is just a beginning. Glossy, deep, pitch, and lovely. He worked a few branches and moved on.

And in a very tall pine, high up, I saw the red-shouldered hawk sent by (as my friend Jim might say) Central Casting. I had wondered where the predators were, and there he was, announced by his “kee-ah kee-ah” as he loped in on wings. And then a great egret, incandescently yellow-eyed and unmoved by me, cocking his neck at some movement beneath his log, the white length of it kinking like flexible metal conduit.

Lovely Florida. It will outlive us all.

I walked back and went to work.

Ham, Shem, and Japheth, Please Meet Your Father at the Dock

The rain fell, and fell, and fell. The mushrooms became commonplace. There were orange fungi or slime molds or something sprouting out of the lichens in the weedy field down by the pond, and perfect toadstools in the woods, and delicate capped mushrooms angling out of the rotted bits of the firewood. The healthy pieces of firewood had smears of bright slick fungal ichor along even the faces of firm red oaken fiber. Water coursed in waves down the driveway. The safflower seed was translucent with waterlogging.

The light was so flat under an overcast sky that we found a yellow-rumped warbler, stunned, resting in a perfect crouch on the concrete porch, the first significant window strike. We threw a dishtowel over it and lifted it carefully; it mustered a wet chip and bounced into the weeping cherry. The woods were so wet that the dawn song of a Carolina wren sounded like a boom box amplification of a Lang Elliot CD. I heard a spring peeper in the woods calling evening, dawn, and night, and disbelieved my ears. One evening while the rain kept falling, and falling, and while the hot water heater ruptured downstairs, I found a peeper (the same?) crawling up the house in search, I assume, of somewhere dry enough for a frog to live. Carol found salamanders under the toy bin; I found them under the firewood.

One day, Joe and I walked through wet meadows at the headwaters of the pond, and we saw a miserable red-tailed hawk perched on an electric power stanchion. Its wings were half spread in supplication to the falling water, which made it look like a cormorant on a pier. By the time Joe and I had walked back home that day, he was so wet his socks needed to be wrung out. We had found a chunk of bone from a fox-killed goose we saw dead at the pond last year. Joe calls it The Unfortunate Goose, which it surely was, although Carol did point out that it left behind it a Fortunate Fox. The acorns we dropped in a wooden bowl as a keepsake waited a day or two before disgorging acorn maggots. The leaves we carried wrinkled up, some of them. And STILL the rain came down.

This morning, after 8 days, the rain stopped. The sun came out, after a fashion, and Carol and I found an enormous water beetle in the driveway. What was it doing? she asked. Probably flying overhead looking for water, I said. Looking for water? she said, and if ever there were a rhetorical question, hers was it.

Blue Wings

Give me joy, because this afternoon when Joe was arranging dinosaurs where they would be most appropriate ("Why," he reflected, "do the brontosaur and the diplodocus have to eat the same tree?" which seems likely also to have been top of mind for the ornamental plum in question) what did I see but the flutter of a non-sparrow.

I ran up to get the binoculars out of the liquor cabinet, which providentially is by the back door, and I sat. And saw a goldfinch with my old eyes, and I raised the nice glass and oh wonder -- it was a blue-winged warbler. My second in life. A glimpse, a teaspoon in the torrent of late summer life, when all the warblers seem to have gone to ground and the world is owned by blackbirds and waxwings and an incessant progression of baby chipping sparrows.

Blustery Isn't the Half of It

Not much at Moore State Park today in the foul weather, but it's always a find place to take pictures. Joe and I saw some tree swallows working the lake's surface (gotta keep that protein coming when it's still getting cold at night) and we heard the usuals, like robins and titmouses. As for live things, we had a few blooms, but mostly fiddleheads and hopes for chipmunks someday soon.