bird life

I've seen a Snowy Owl!

2011-11-30T14:06:00.001-05:00

The call goes out: a Snowy Owl at Stratford Point. Not much more than a 20-minute drive away. Grab binoculars, camera, car keys, jump in car. Frank Gallo gives me directions to this place I've been a million times before but of course can't remember how to get to. He's giving exceptionally good directions, but to me it sounds like: words, words, diner, turn left, words, words, airport, other words, more words -- what is wrong with me? Anyone who gives me directions may as well be talking in Abyssinian. I know that even once I've plugged the street address into the GPS, I will still get lost. Now why is everyone suddenly obeying the speed limit? It's un-American. Why won't that giant SUV get out of the overtaking lane? What the hell is that guy in the giant Cadillac tank-boat-thing with Tennessee license plates actually doing? Certainly not driving. I take a wrong turn. Yes, even with the GPS. Somehow I get there. Step out of car. Cell phone falls out of pocket onto pavement, falls into more pieces than I realized a cell phone consisted of. The bird is astonishing. It's just sitting there, 20 yards away from a knot of birders, napping, occasionally opening its eyes and swiveling its head, absorbing the warmth of the rocks. I get that dissociated feeling you get when you're in the middle of an accident that's unspooling right before your eyes: It's happening, yes, it's happening, but somehow it's not happening; you're registering it all from a distance. All this time -- more than three decades -- and here I am, face to face with this creature. It's head is so rounded, so boofy -- somehow I only fully notice this now, being able to watch it turn that head. And there are barely perceptible ear tufts, fluffing up now and then in the wind, which always blows cold and hard out at Stratford Point. Thank you, Scott Kruitbosch, for finding this beauty today, and Frank Mantlik, for setting up his scope so I could get a good look!

Protesters occupy Foley Square! I still haven't seen a Snowy Owl!

2011-11-17T19:18:00.001-05:00

So I was umming and ahhing over whether to go into the city and see the OWS Day of Action today. How weird it would be, I thought, to see subway stations occupied by the masses. (Oh hang on, what's weird about that?) Anyway, my urge to see my first Snowy Owl was more pressing, so I went to East Haven.

(You know, I probably should use that photo-straightening tool in Windows Photo Gallery, but somehow it always seems like cheating to do that.)

Wow, that is a welcoming little place just off Cosey Beach Avenue, in East Haven. Why did I always used to think of "cozy" when I saw that street name? There were "No Parking" and "Private Property" and "No Trespassing" signs everywhere. Um, yeah, okay.

This is the inviting rock where the Snowy Owl was -- yesterday, for hours, when I wasn't:

Whoa, check out that horizon! Was I drunk? No. East Haven most certainly has some kind of strange electromagnetic ley line vortex effect going on.

No Snowy Owl today. The quest continues. And I can't complain, really. It is so quiet down there at this time of year, so unpeopled, that the gulls and Brant and Sanderlings are in a world of their own -- a busy, methodical world of turning shells over and winkling around with their bills to find food. The only sound was the tinkling of shells along the foreshore.

Attack of the 50-foot gull

I have been delightedly looking at Keith Mueller's pictures of the Snowy Owl, which he took yesterday. Now I want to see one myself even more. That a killing machine so powerful it can take down a great big eider duck looks so freaking cute when it yawns is just amazing.

Occupy Wall Street, or look for a Snowy Owl?

2011-11-17T11:49:00.001-05:00

There are two birds that I have wanted to see since I was small child: the Wandering Albatross and the Snowy Owl. Both thanks to my mother. The Wandering Albatross became a fixation after she took me to see a live production of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" one night in our town's only big cathedral. I still remember the lead striding down the aisle between the pews -- "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" -- albatross (well, probably a Silver Gull, truth be told) around his neck. I finally saw Wandering Albatrosses this year, on a SOSSA pelagic trip out of Wollongong, in eastern Australia, in August. Even whilst heaving over the side of the boat (turns out I have no sea legs), I was still in awe as the albatrosses sailed by like small, silent planes.

The Snowy Owl, though, huh. Almost every year one turns up in coastal Connecticut for a day or so, and it always seems to be when I am stuck at my desk. The Snowy Owl thing happened thanks to my mother attending art college, painting a giant canvas inspired by a picture from National Geographic of four Snowy Owl chicks hunkered down on a desolate tundra. The idea of tundra, permanently frozen ground, was so appealing to a humidity-hating child stuck in subtropical Australia. Those chicks had gimlet eyes, and they looked somehow superior, as if they knew something the rest of us didn't; I loved that. The picture is still on my parents' wall, those chicks glaring at everyone.

So today I'm torn: Go to NYC to the Occupy Wall Street protests on the 2-month anniversary and soak up history and take photos and you know, BE there, or try and see the Snowy Owl that was hanging out at East Haven yesterday. It's OWS vs. OWL. The inner dialogue is going something like "I'm kind of tired, do I really want to go all the way to the city and tromp around and blah blah..." Then "I might get arrested; I don't want to get arrested" Where did that come from? I'm not really at all scared of being arrested. And "What if it turns violent?" Pfft. Let's face it, I'm just coming up with rational excuses. Neuroscientists have pinpointed the moment that the brain makes a decision, before we even know about it. Then it tells us about it and kindly lets us think that we've made a conscious choice. My brain has already decided that OWL beats OWS, so off I go to try and find that bird...

One of these things is not like the other

2011-11-10T13:31:00.000-05:00

We have a new visitor in Milford harbor -- a Pied-billed Grebe. After four years of walking by the harbor every day, you just don't expect to see something different, but there it was all of a sudden a couple of weeks ago. Boink. It popped up from under the water, looking like a rubber ducky compared to the Mallards. And it's stayed around. Now that the weather's getting cold, it's sidling up to the Mallards, coasting along with them. You would think that it might try to do its best to just get along with everyone -- but no, not only is it trying to be a duck, it's trying to be the alpha duck. I saw the cheeky bugger lean forward and bite a female Mallard on the tail, seemingly just for the hell of it, and then dive immediately under the water, leaving just a ripple -- and a confused Mallard turning to look behind her -- in its wake. It was such a soft, fuzzy, fog-advisory Milford day, everything just looked like a Turner painting.

Spot the dinky little interloper

Cue "Jaws" music -- going in for the tail bite

Who? A grebe? You crazy.

Mallards really are beautiful.

What bird are you?

2011-10-29T08:45:00.003-04:00

Ruby-crowned Kinglet
by Dan Pancamo
via Wikimedia Commons

You can tell a lot about a person by their favorite bird. I just might start up a birders' dating agency, my algorithm centered on one question, "What is your favorite bird?" There are the bold-hearted Chickadee people, taking on all comers, big or small. The Great Egret, graceful, composed, deliberate in its actions. There are the Starlings, garrulous and social. Belligerent, possessive hummingbirds.

(Yes, I am totally anthropomorphizing. I think part of what makes birds so appealing is that they are like a canvas on which we can project human qualities, while we're simultaneously in awe of their avian, distinctly nonhuman, abilities.)

Soon after moving to Connecticut -- my first fall, colder than any winter I'd ever known -- I was living in a quaint, well-to-do New England town like a postcard that had been breathed into life. My apartment was above that of the only drug addicts in town, so there were raids and my address made it into the local paper's police blotter every second week -- but on the plus side, for a couple of weeks in fall the tree outside the living room window became like the best type of Christmas tree: one decorated with Ruby-crowned and Golden-crowned Kinglets.

The Ruby-crowned instantly became my favorite bird -- it was something about their incessant flitting and wing flicking and their eye ring, so much like the Silvereyes I loved when I was a child. It was something about the way they look both hearty and vulnerable.

I was sitting in the living room one day when -- thunk! -- what looked like a squash ball bounced off my second-floor window. Kids playing, I thought. But then I thought, what if it was a bird? I ran downstairs, and there was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet, dead, on the ground beneath the window. I was about to walk away, feeling a little shaken, when I thought, "What if it just looks dead? Would it hurt if I at least tried to warm it up, just in case?" The wind was howling and the sun was close to setting, and if it wasn't already dead, it probably would be soon. So I bent down and picked up the stiff bird. It didn't appear to be breathing. I sat on the ground, enclosing it in both hands, and I felt scratchy and irritable and sad. There always seemed to be a truck idling loudly out front of the downstairs neighbors, and yes, there it was, churning exhaust in my direction as little baggies and cash were exchanged through the window. For some reason, that damn truck and the little baggies and the cash were what tipped me over the edge and made me feel weepy holding my window-crash victim.

And then I felt a slight movement against my palms. The bird was breathing! It began to stir, so I opened up my hands. It looked up at me; I looked down at it. A tiny, dull olive-green bird. At that time of year in Connecticut, people often walk past a whole flock working the undergrowth -- flitting from branch to branch, catching insects -- and don't even realize they are there. They're unobtrusive; they live their life on the down low. You barely see the male's ruby crown unless another bird really presses his buttons . . . and then appears flash of crimson, a tiny feather flag of agitation that pops up. That's when you know that there was something dramatic lurking beneath all along.

This bird hopped up my arm, so light I could barely feel it. It's legs were thinner than toothpicks. It sat on my shoulder for a minute to two, catching the last remaining rays of sun and gathering its wits, and then it called once in my ear -- jit jit -- and was off on the wing, back to the tree to rejoin the flock.

There was a Ruby-crowned Kinglet here,
about a millisecond before I hit the shutter -- honest.

And here.

Oh, and here.

Things I am grateful for today

2011-10-09T09:47:00.000-04:00

Autumn air, which smells of sunshine and dry leaves and dreams deliciously dissolving into memory.
Seed pods scattered all over the sidewalk, which crunch under your every footstep and crackle in a way that makes you feel like a child again.
A fish crow making the weirdest mewling sound, so that I looked under a hedge for the kitten that must be there, then around the corner for the mother that must surely be pushing a baby on their afternoon walk, and then finally at the roof line above, and the crow looking down at me, making this soft, plaintive sound.
Three young yellow-crowned night-herons that swooped into a part of the harbor I have never seen them in before, silent and gray like stealth warplanes.
Funky Duck, the mind-bending hybrid of mallard and who knows what else, still bobbing around with the mallards as you did all summer, somehow fitting in with them though you are double the size and have those crazy white spectacles.
An osprey standing in the shallows bathing and drinking as though it were on holiday from the swooping diving flapping fish-snatching hawk life, staying there so long that I began to rehearse in my head the phone call to a wildlife rescue service about this injured, defenseless osprey stuck in Milford harbor.
The man at the dock who didn't make me feel like a fool when, thinking I was all alone, I laughed out loud as the osprey shook like a dog and took off, then shimmied mid-air, realizing the job of shaking off those droplets wasn't as complete as it had thought -- clumsy and awesome all at once.

Serpentine bird

2011-09-26T10:48:00.000-04:00

Everywhere you look on the Daintree River are sinuous lines, no straight edges. Mangrove roots and trees and vines tangle together. Green tree snakes tangle themselves around branches like tiny garden hoses. And the Great-billed Heron has a neck like a serpent, with a life of its own.

Great-billed Heron, Daintree River, Queensland, Australia

This is Australia's biggest heron, and then its bill is over-sized in proportion to the rest of its body. Shy, skulky birds, they lurk, standing like statues, waiting to stab passing fish.

We had all but given up hope of seeing this bird after a couple of hours on the river. We'd had Wompoo Fruit Dove making their spooky wollocky-wom-pooo call, Papuan Frogmouth so much like tree bark, Little Kingfisher flitting, impossible to photograph. But no Great-billed Heron, until in the gathering gloom, what seemed like one of the muddy, twisted tree roots unfurled great wings.

The photos I took where you can see the bird in all its plumage somehow don't capture the essence of the bird. Sometimes truth gets lost in the details. It's in silhouette that you can see its Great-billed Heron-ness. That gigantic bill, that snaky neck, the predator crouching like a cat.

Sunset, Daintree River, Queensland, Australia

Egrets, I've had a few...

2011-09-22T07:27:00.000-04:00

The whole time I was in Far North Queensland, the lyrics from The Go-Betweens "Cattle and Cane" kept running through my head in a loop. Coming from Brisbane, I especially loved that band because in the '80s who else sung about being in our corner of Australia?

I recall a schoolboy coming home
Through fields of cane
To a house of tin and timber
And in the sky
A rain of falling cinders

I was scared even of fireworks when I was little, yet I remember the sight of a whole cane field ablaze by the side of the road when I was on holidays seeming awesome and cool, not frightening.

The railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle
Through fields of cane

Home. It was weird being back in Queensland, because it at once felt so normal -- as normal as the sight of my own hands and feet -- and so exotic. Trees that look like roots and vines that look like trees, not worrying all that much when it's red-bellied black snake that crosses your path because at least it isn't a brown or a taipan or a tiger snake, having to brake in the middle of a winding road for Brahman cattle that look like they just wandered off a Delhi street, and the Cattle Egrets that follow them everywhere, eating the bugs the cattle kick up in their wake.

This species is expanding everywhere in the world that land is being turned over for grazing. They came to Australia from Asia, and multiplied like crazy. Their huge numbers in Far North Queensland are a sign that the ecosystem is out of balance, that too many trees have been cut down for hamburgers -- yet even environmental mistakes can make a beautiful sight. The egrets fly in great numbers down the Daintree River each night to roost. I can't blame them. When I think of true stillness and peace, I think of the Daintree River. (Well, I think of those things and giant crocodiles.)

Rainbow Bee-eater

2011-09-20T22:23:00.001-04:00

The thing I love most about watching birds is that exciting moment of confusion as the eyes and brain try to make sense of a random flash of color, to resolve it into something knowable. A burst of blue-green from the corner of my eye; we're near a pond; this is Far North Queensland, Australia. A kingfisher? No. Brain flips rapidly through the rest of its files . . . images remembered from a field guide . . . Rainbow Bee-eater!

Rainbow Bee-eater, Centenary Lakes, Cairns, Australia

These are not rare birds, but they were to me, as somehow I had never seen one before. For twenty minutes or so, Frank and I watched as it flew precise sorties, to pluck dragonflies from the air and return to its perch to dash the insects against a branch before gulping them down. It was gorging itself. So many dragonflies were meeting their doom that I lost count. It seemed the bird couldn't possibly fit anymore in its tiny stomach, yet somehow it kept going.

At first glance, the bee-eater is like a gorgeous piece of jewelry, a decorative folly of iridescence and tail streamers. But to an insect, it's a killing machine. Beneath all that finery is a nervous system wired to hunt. This bird sat on its perch in a state of complete alertness, scanning for any movement, and it almost never missed its target, many metres away in midair and invisible to my weak human eyes.

I love this bird's name. Rainbow Bee-eater, Rainbow Bee-eater, Rainbow Bee-eater. So improbable sounding. Yet for once, this bird has a name that actually makes sense (shock!) as it does eat bees. It eats wasps, too. It rubs them against branches to get rid of the stingers and venom glands.

Nature Conservancy Digital Photo Competition

2011-08-15T17:22:00.000-04:00

I wish I could take a photo like this. For that matter, I wish I could have even been there just to see this.

Northern Saw-whet Owl; Megan Lorenz/2010 Nature Conservancy Photo Contest Runner Up

And this.

Great Egret; Graham F. Owen/2010 Nature Conservancy Photo Contest Runner Up

These are two of the runners-up from last year's Nature Conservancy Digital Photo Competition. You have until September 12 to enter this year's competition. This is what the folks at TNC say:

The Nature Conservancy is holding its 6th Annual Digital Photo Competition. This year, it's easier than ever to enter using your Facebook log-in info - http://photocontest.nature.org/ or through The Nature Conservancy's Flickr Group - http://my.nature.org/photography/flickr.html.

Original digital photos that feature the natural wonders of the lands, waters, plants, animals and people around the world are all eligible for the competition.

This year at least 35 photos will be selected as honorable mentions and finalists, and our online community will vote for their favorite images to determine the winners. The grand prize winner will be featured on the cover of the 2013 Nature Conservancy calendar. Proceeds from calendar sales help support our many programs to protect wildlife and their habitats.

Photographers will retain the rights to all their submissions. This competition is open to all photographers age 18 years or older regardless of residence or citizenship, as long as the laws of their jurisdiction allow participation. You can find more details at http://my.nature.org/photography/rules.html. Photo submissions must be uploaded by 11:59 pm PST Monday, September 12, 2011.

The Nature Conservancy do some pretty incredible things. I love the fact that they are starting to grasp that urban nature is important, not just majestic mountainsides and forests. And this story about how a teenage boy went from being in a homeless shelter to doing environmental work in the Ecuadorean Andes was so compelling that I had to borrow the TNC magazine from my therapist's waiting room. (I'm returning it next week . . . oh, and subscribing to the magazine . . .)

Gray-hooded Gull, aka Most Bizarre Birding Excursion Ever

2011-07-30T22:48:00.004-04:00

Forget bucolic backdrops and a nice ride in the country for a spot of birding. Why do that when you can go see a super-rare bird . . . on the boardwalk at Coney Island, amid tattoos and thongs, beach umbrellas and giant pina coladas, and signs boasting "Live Freaks, Cold Beers"?

Gray-hooded Gull, Coney Island, NY, July 30, 2011

The Gray-headed Gull that has been hanging around Coney Island recently is a truly beautiful gull--with its icy, translucent eye and those red-licorice legs. When it flies, the bright flashes of white in its forewings make it stand out from the many Laughing Gulls that call Coney Island home. And this bird is sassy. I guess it would have to be gutsy to have somehow made its way here from South America. And now it has really made itself at home on the boardwalk. Twice we watched it chase a hapless Laughing Gull off the top of a lamp-post, and no other bird was getting near it once it perched on there.

Laughing Gull that was soon not laughing, as it was about to be evicted from its lamp-post

Patriotic Laughing Gull

I don't chase birds all that often, but when I do, I never expect that the bird will just fly right at me. Yet that's exactly what it did. Out of the flocks of Laughing Gulls swirling above the beach umbrellas and gold bikinis, the Gray-Hooded Gull peeled off and came and sat on the lamp-post we were standing next to. I was so shocked, I could hardly turn the camera on or remember how to use it. If anything, the bird seemed curious, although no doubt it was probably just calculating whether we had any french fries.

The fact that we were looking at such an extraordinary rarity (only one has ever been recorded in the United States before this) was made all the more surreal by the surroundings.

That's Frank Gallo getting some beautiful shots of the bird after it landed on the lamp-post.

It chose lucky lamp-post number 13 to perch on. Looks like it wasn't the first gull to have done so.

Flight shot showing the glowing white forewings (copyright Frank Gallo)

There are a lot of remarkable things about this bird, but for me it is those icy eyes. When the bird moved to perch on a roof next to other gulls, the lightness of its eyes was so distinctive.

Laughing Gull (in molt), Gray-hooded Gull, Great Black-backed Gull -- on the roof of the public toilet (really, this was the most pristine, scenic birdwatching experience ever)

Gray-hooded Gull on left, with Laughing Gulls

We celebrated with freshly squeezed lemonade.

Though it was hard to resist the tastefully presented pina coladas in naked-lady glasses.

Thank you, Coney Island, for your super-rare gull, your burlesque girls, guys with snakes wrapped around their necks, and girls with Amazon parrots on their shoulders.

Things I am grateful for today

2011-07-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

The Catbird that I see patrolling the same section of fence every afternoon. It is his fence, and don't you forget it.

That while I was not seeing a White-winged Dove I'd set out to see earlier this week, this Song Sparrow landed beside me instead.

The sanity of trees at moments when all else in the world seems crazy.

And that only two days after I called the Milford Police to tell them that my neighborhood park had racist and sexist graffiti in it, I returned to find this:

Tree Music

2011-06-17T22:05:00.000-04:00

Black-throated "Green" Warbler
(Pic by Dan Pancamo)

About a month ago, there was a profusion of birds in my favorite park. There were four Scarlet Tanagers hanging around on their way to wherever they go to nest. There was a Bay-breasted Warbler, a seemingly bottomless supply of Yellow-rumped Warblers, Black-and-White Warblers, Common Yellowthroats, even a Yellow-breasted Chat. There were so many Black-throated Yellow Warblers (I know they're Black-throated Greens, but really...green?) doing their little song that reminds me of when I had to do the cha cha at ballroom dancing classes at school when I was 12 -- cha-cha, cha-cha-cha. I imagined them up in the tree tops dancing with little maracas. (I had just been to see Rio that week.) And there were vireos.

Most of the migrant songbirds blew through, stopping for just a day or two to refuel on the bugs in the park. But two Red-eyed Vireos have stayed. They sing nonstop. Really, nonstop. This is one of them, doing a duet with a train in the distance.

Every morning I would hear them -- one at one end of the park, another at the other end. "Hello...How are you? I'm fine...what're doin'?" over and over and over. I assumed they just sung like this in the morning. So I went in at lunchtime. "I don't know...How are you? I'm fine...what're doin'?" Still going. I went mid-morning. Afternoon another day. Early evening the next. Still going. When do they find time to eat? Exactly how many bugs do you have to eat to fuel all that singing and hopping along branches? Please tell me they don't do it at night.

At first it was a little maddening that I could hear this beautiful music yet so rarely see them. I would be standing under their trees and see just this --

Singing leaves!

Today was a day of nonstop thunderstorms and torrential rain, one cell rolling in after another, and this evening as the sun was setting and the thunder was still rumbling in the distance I was in the park for five minutes, and all I could hear was a Red-winged Blackbird. Part of me went "Ha ha! See, you can't sing all the time!" Most of me went "Oh. You can't sing all the time." Then just as I was about to leave, there it was, ringing out "Hello, how are you..." Truly, nothing stops these birds.

The sound is so loud and clear when I stand beneath one of their trees. I crane my neck. Surely the bird must be right there...no, just leaves. I do catch a glimpse of them every now and then, but mostly what I have come to love is the moment when I walk through the park entrance, hit the trail, and yes, they are still there, calling their hearts out.

Things I am grateful for today

2011-05-08T21:10:00.001-04:00

Time alone to think.

Pine Warbler, Addison Bog, Conn.

Time to share and commune.

Pine Warblers, Addison Bog, Conn.

Life that unfurls itself as soon as the ground thaws.

Addison Bog, Conn.

Moss that looks like tiny pine trees.

Club Moss, Addison Bog, Conn.

That I know where to find the Bluebird of Happiness,

even if she does half turn her back on me sometimes.

Eastern Bluebird, Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

Old stone walls.

Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

Blossoms and blue skies.

Weir Farm, Wilton, Conn.

That Baltimore Orioles always make me think of orange sorbet.

Baltimore Oriole, Woodcock Nature Center, Wilton, Conn.

Woodcock Nature Center, Wilton, Conn.

And that even though they have been back in town only a couple of weeks,

their nests are already works of art.

Female Baltimore Oriole with nesting material, Grace K. Salmon Park, Westport, Conn.

Her nest.

Secret mountain wilderness

2011-04-21T14:07:00.000-04:00

There are so many images flickering in front of our eyes every day; so much stimuli that sometimes it all blurs together. I was trawling through the pictures I have on my computer, looking for one that I needed for a job I was doing. I always say I'm going to organize my files, but I never do, so I always have to scroll through hundreds of jumbled-up pictures to find what I'm looking for. As I was rushing through them, out of all the thumbnails on my screen, that raven on the left seemed to peer out at me, saying, Stop for a minute, remember me? Forget all those ads and horrible news stories and words you've been absorbed by all day, and remember me.

I kept on scrolling and did my work -- and saw a whole lot more ads and horrible news stories and words. But when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, the image of these ravens -- especially that cheeky character on the left -- appeared again in my mind. It was still there when I woke up.

The moment that I took the picture had seemed special at the time: It was late February. It had just snowed, but spring was on the way. Everywhere you looked there were ravens wheeling through the air in courtship displays, jet black against the bright blue southwestern sky. But I had never seen them be quite so gentle and intimate as on this day. They were preening each other, in what seemed to me a tender and respectful way.

The ravens were a kind of greeting committee at a parking lot we'd randomly pulled into north of Sedona, in Arizona. They seemed a good omen. It only got better when we saw the sign for the park.

Secret mountain wilderness. Some linguists and clever clogs like Tolkien (and perhaps more importantly, the English teacher in Donnie Darko) say that the most beautiful-sounding arrangement of letters in the English language is cellar door. Give me secret mountain wilderness any day.

The goofy, serious Northern Shoveler

2011-04-17T11:38:00.004-04:00

The dabbling ducks. When I hear that name I think not so much of a type of bird but of a bunch of ducks just hanging out, dabbling at whatever takes their fancy -- watercolor painting, the local amateur theatrical society, playing the fiddle.

Northern Shovelers, Bosque del Apache, New Mexico.

Of course they are busy all day long doing dabbling of a much more serious kind: puddling about looking for food. As the last ray of light was fading here at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico, these Northern Shovelers had a true urgency about them; you could feel it. The weather was especially cold this February, so no doubt they needed every calorie they could get. And there was a storm rolling in.

Snow was on the way, and bitter, cold winds.

Actually, this guy looks kind of irritated with me for taking his attention, doesn't he? This lasted for all of a second, and then he was back to his job, as though I wasn't there at all.

That yellow eye is kind of glaring at me.

This is the view I'm most accustomed to seeing of any dabbling duck, a.k.a. the headless duck:

Headless Northern Shovelers.

But Bosque del Apache is a magical kind of place, a birder's fantasy, where you can see birds relatively close and at your leisure. Being able to sit and get a good look at these Shovelers as they got up out of the water onto the ice, it suddenly struck me just how odd looking these ducks are. They are like bills on legs.

There is something especially cute about a creature that is so serious and businesslike yet looks so fantastical. And what they do with their bill makes them seem all the more fantastical -- half bird, half whale. As they scoot along through the water, the fringed edge of that bill, like a comb with more than 100 teeth, filters the water so they can harvest tiny invertebrates. (This photographer captured a shot of the lamellae, those projections on the bill.)

The poor dull-looking female Northern Shovelers -- when I got home I realized I had taken hardly any photos of them. But a female Northern Shoveler is an awesome creature: When a predator comes to her nest, she poops on her eggs to make them unappealing. Hah, take that!

Female Northern Shoveler - less spectacular with her brown eyes and plumage, but awesome nonetheless.

Why we like birds

2011-03-16T11:28:00.263-04:00

Mom said that people are interested in birds only in as much as they exhibit human behavior—greed and stupidity and anger—and by doing so they free us from the unique sorrow of being human . . . I told Mom my own theory of why we like birds—of how birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.
— Douglas Coupland, Life After God

The other day, I walked out my front door to go to the post office and heard a frenzy of crows caw-caw-cawing. Maybe there was a raptor somewhere, I thought. I looked up, and there were five crows mobbing a Red-tailed Hawk in a tree. The hawk, despite having claws for spearing prey and a beak for tearing it apart, flew away like a dart. The crows pursued it for a minute or so, until it was nowhere to be seen; then they returned, victorious, to their tree.

The ruthless simplicity of nature—that's one of the things that draws me to watching birds. The decision was simple for the crows: Hawks kill our babies, we must attack. It was equally simple for the hawk: Too many beaks coming at me all at once, time to find another tree.

Our complex brains, with layers added one on top of the other like blankets on an evolutionary bed, make all kinds of exquisite options available to us that aren't available to birds. Crows are intelligent and playful; they can even devise their own tools. But they can't blog about their experience with that threatening hawk. They can't paint a picture of it or write a poem about it fleeing. They can't design and build an aircraft based on the way that hawk flew.

And there are moments when I envy them for that, because it also means that they can't get tangled up in anxieties and neuroses and trivial things. Online shopping. The strange, lost-lonely feeling you get when you realize you really don't know whether you want 1 for billing or 2 for account inquiries. That someone else always seems to be more on top of things or happier or nicer to people than you are. Memories of long-ago embarrassment or shame or regret that feel as fresh as if they happened today. Standing in the grocery store and feeling overwhelmed by choice but never being able to find what you need or want . . .

Birds in the wild have concerns, too, but they can be reduced to one thing: the blood-pumping, oxygen-sucking urge to stay alive and nurture new life. (The next day, one of the five crows was using its beak to ferry wads of lovely soft mulch material from a garden bed up to the treetop to build a nest for the spring.) Watching birds reminds us that beneath all the layers, all creatures, including us, are driven by one thing: the simple urge for life. Birds turn the volume down on the noise inside our heads; they let us glimpse for a moment a reality that we spend most of our waking lives too busy to see. They remind us that it is time to live right now, this moment. Time to suck in that oxygen and feel your heart pumping!

American Crow image: J. J. Audubon, Birds of America (public domain)

Sandhill Cranes at Bosque del Apache

2011-03-14T21:39:00.003-04:00

If going to Bosque del Apache (the Woods of the Apache) in New Mexico taught me one thing, it's that there is a place on this Earth for all approaches to life; there is a niche for every creature, no matter what its disposition. The relaxed and unhurried, the frantic and driven; the casually sociable, the desperately communal. Take the wintering Snow Geese. They huddle close together on the ice for the night, and the very first instant the sun hits them, they pop up, one by one in rapid succession, as if someone flipped a switch --

And all at once, as if they were each a part of one much larger creature, they snap into the air, with a deafening, disorienting, exhilarating beating of wings. They have fields to eat their way through, and they must do it NOW, with everybody else.

I love Snow Geese. I've loved them ever since I read "The Snow Goose" by Paul Gallico when I was a kid. I liked the idea of being that migrating Snow Goose, having the freedom to fly away and then return each year to the friendly man in the old lighthouse who'd saved it from hunters. But at Bosque del Apache, I had to admit that I am nothing like a Snow Goose at all. The Sandhill Crane lifestyle is much more my speed.

A half hour or so later, most of them are still clacking around on the frozen pond, doing a slow-motion tap dance. No rush for them. There is preening to do. And spying --

They don't feel the need to conform and all fly at once. It's an individual choice, it seems. But there is a lot of umming and ahhing about it. First there is the pitching forward of the neck. They always pitch themselves forward like this when they are about to take off. But the simple fact that a bird is pitching itself forward does not mean it's about to fly. No, it might well change its mind. What is it waiting for? Who knows.

Well, there is more preening and spying to do.

Wings to stretch.

And talking. A lot of talking. Sandhill Cranes are very chatty.

Eventually, a bird will not only pitch forward but will move to the next phase and actually take a few loping strides forward across the ice and begin to lift off -- with all the lightness of a C-130 cargo plane. There is a kind of uplift, but then after a few flaps there is a moment when you think "No, it can't possibly get fully airborne," but then after a few more flaps, the bird is arcing through the sky gracefully -- yet making a call that sounds like a person joyously and enthusiastically trying to play the bugle for the first time.

That the Apache camping here hundreds of years ago probably watched the ancestors of these birds do exactly this just makes it all the more extraordinary to witness.

Things I am grateful for today

2011-03-09T08:40:00.003-05:00

The sound Mute Swans' wings make as they fly overhead, like a piece of rusty old farm machinery shooting through the air.
The Song Sparrow who was singing on my morning walk. I didn't even realize I'd missed your call all winter long until I heard it again today. I'm glad you no longer have to huddle down in the grass, hiding from the bitter wind.
The rat-tat-tat of the Belted Kingfisher flying up and down the harbor. You're such a mystery to me -- darting by so fast, appearing and then disappearing, like the Phantom. You nest somewhere within the earth on the banks of the harbor each spring, but you do an amazing job of keeping the location a secret.
The wail of a gull that I mistook for a baby for a second.
The Northern Cardinals who are going off like alarm clocks all over the neighborhood. Spring! Spring! Spring!
The Buffleheads who spent most of the winter in Milford harbor, the first time I've seen that happen. You guys have no idea how cute you are, diving down then popping up like rubber duckies in a bath tub. Stay. Have babies.

Beautiful and deadly

2011-02-02T15:55:00.000-05:00

Everything looks made of glass here today. I am packing for a flight tomorrow to Phoenix, Arizona. First bird we hope to see: Rufous-backed Robin that's been spotted just outside of Phoenix. Sunny Phoenix. But first there was the small matter of making it ten paces or so across the back yard (i.e., mini skating rink) to the garage to get the tripod for the scope out of the car. It took me about five minutes to get about halfway across, kicking holes through the ice with my boots . . . and then I hit a patch of such solid glossy ice that I chickened out and came back. To me it seemed a suicide mission. Frank is braver. He somehow got across . . . to discover that of course the tripod was inside the nice warm, dry house, not the car. All the while, in the distance a confused Cardinal was calling as if it was Spring.

A good day at Hammonassett

2011-01-30T16:08:00.005-05:00

My upbringing was all brightly colored, screeching subtropical parrots, and it seemed as likely that I would make a trip to the moon as see an auk with my two eyes. But we had a rare treat in Connecticut this morning -- the first sighting in the state of a Common Murre, at Hammonasset State Park. This photo won't be winning any awards, but you get the idea -- a miniature floating football with a beak.

Common Murre at Hammonasset, Connecticut, 01/30/11

Every time I see a rarity I'm surprised all over again by how the bird always appears unfazed by the fact it has landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. This murre looked so nonchalant, so at home in Madison, with its very good book shop, its restaurants and cafes and bars. This bird is meant to be out in some cold storm-tossed ocean. The way it was occasionally paddling its legs like a lazy vacationing swimmer made me chuckle.

Other birds often know that something's not quite right, though. This time it was a Short-eared Owl. It appeared out of nowhere and circled several times above, calling. I didn't realize what graceful flyers they can be -- when it flapped it looked like a bat or a giant moth, but when it glided it was all elegance. It was hard to take a photo at all because with two such amazing birds in front of me at once my brain kind of popped.

Short-eared Owl, Hammonasett, 01/30/11

Meanwhile, on the other side of us, Horned Larks were calling, running across the snow. I wish all precipitation came in the form of snow. What a glittery hushed world it would be.

I'm heading to the southwest later this week -- Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, maybe southern California -- where the weather is warm and snow is reserved for mountaintops. I can't wait to chase new birds I've never seen before -- Rosy Finches, maybe the Taiga Bean Goose (I just want to see that because of its name). But I am sad to leave the snow. Spring will come and melt it all anyway, I know. Soon enough the world will return to noise and motion. Yet already I mourn these quiet moments we're having right now and the joy of everything being so unrecognizable in these drapes of sparkly white.

Pics of the Common Murre: Talking Nature and Shorebirder have proper photos where you can actually, you know, see the bird.

Wordless Wednesday: A Gaggle of Gulls

2011-01-19T09:49:00.000-05:00

Ninja Heron

2011-01-17T10:17:00.001-05:00

Juvenile Black-crowned Night-Heron at Milford Harbor

So stealthy, so unexpected. Sometimes in the summer I see Night-Herons doing their Ninja thing in Milford harbor -- standing like statues, waiting to suddenly lurch forward and stab at fish. But I think this is the first time I've seen one in the middle of winter. It took a minute or two of standing gazing at the pretty snow scene for the bird to resolve itself in my vision. What a lovely thought: that there is all manner of cryptic beauty out there waiting to be decoded.

Ghostly wings

2011-01-09T23:18:00.002-05:00

One of the most surreal moments I have ever had while out in nature came when I found myself looking into the eyes of a hooting Barred Owl only a few yards above me in a tree. It was as if someone had hit time's pause button. Looking into those enormous black eyes I grasped as I never had before what the words hunter and prey meant.

There is something inherently thrilling about having an encounter with an owl. Scott Bowen just wrote a great blog post about the spooky joys of hearing Barn Owls in his Pennsylvania yard. And this New Year's at Nantucket I saw and heard Barn Owls for the first time. I was out with a group of friends doing the Christmas Bird Count. In the bright daylight we had seen a stand of evergreens where Barn Owls had habitually been feasting on their prey. The ground beneath was littered with owl pellets, small gray fuzzy logs that once were voles or mice. How bizarre and diverse life on this earth is: A creature exists that swallows its prey whole, breaks down the nutrients and absorbs them, then spits back up a ball of all the bits it doesn't want -- the fur, the bones. Pull one of these pellets apart, and inside you will find a whole, tiny white mammal's skull.

At the end of the day's count, as the last of the light was fading, from across an open field came pale wings, barely visible in the gloom. I'd been told that owls' wings are specially designed to be whisper quiet so that prey doesn't know what's about to hit it. But the utter silence with which this bird flew seemed unnatural, other-worldly -- as though it wasn't just flying silently but was draining the air of all sound. It flew behind a Barn Owl box, out of sight. It gave a call -- a tinkling sound that rang out like chimes. From out of the box unfolded another pair of ghostly wings, which took off into the darkness. Out of our line of sight, the two joined in the air and called to each other. This time they gave that bone-chilling Barn Owl sound I'd heard about -- a rasp like death, and so much louder than I'd imagined. Together, they doubled back over the box and passed over our heads, now giving the tinkling call back and forth. And off they flew to hunt the dark fields.

To hear the death-scream (well, that's what I like to call it) of the Barn Owl, click here.

Illustration: Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds (1847)

Wordless Wednesday: Nantucket, New Year's 2011

2011-01-05T18:07:00.000-05:00

Winter storm birds

2010-12-29T22:28:00.000-05:00

The edges of the Chesapeake were frozen this Christmas weekend in Havre de Grace, Maryland.

Bald Eagles stood sentry.

Then the snow began to fall, and the wind began to howl, tossing the full bird feeders around like toys.

The wind whipped the snow into mini tornadoes that went skittering across the plowed cornfields, and there was a weird light to everything.

The birds, normally swarming all over the feeders, hunkered on the ground, finding little niches in the snow.

And popped out between gusts to take the seed from the ground.

Merry birdy Christmas!

2010-12-17T17:26:00.000-05:00

Things I am grateful for today

2010-12-13T11:52:00.003-05:00

The common but beautiful birds you see when you're meant to be looking at a rare bird that's been blown off course from the other side of the country, or Scotland, or Greenland, or heaven knows where.
The Northern Harrier standing on a post out in the field with the rare geese, the afternoon light hitting it in a way that makes you truly see the bird in a way you never have before.
The four billionth Tufted Titmouse that's zipped past while you're hoping to spot the Mountain Bluebird and that you give in and finally take a look at--that big liquid eye looking right back at you as it cocks it head.
The Chickadee sitting on a branch above the Calliope Hummingbird that should be basking in Mexico but is inexplicably in snowy shoreline Connecticut. Next to the tiny hummer the Chickadee looks like some gigantic mutant from a 1950s sci-fi movie, "Attack of the 30-foot Chickadee!"
The people who spot these rare visitors and put the word out so everyone can take a look.
And the International Bird Rescue Research Center and WildRescue. A disturbed person has captured gulls in San Francisco and put tight collars made of cut-up beer cans around their necks. The IBRRC and WildRescue are doing their best to recapture them, cut the collars from their necks, and release them. It would be easy to dwell on the dark things going through the mind of the person who has been cruel to these birds. But watching the rescuers handle a gull so gently while they remove the collar and check it over is enough to make your heart melt.

Wordless Wednesday: Fish crows

2010-11-17T12:30:00.000-05:00

Gulls in the mist

2010-11-07T07:48:00.001-05:00

Ring-billed Gulls, misty day in October at Haddam, on the Connecticut River

Fly away

2010-11-06T09:35:00.007-04:00

Do you ever have the urge
to fly away from yourself?
To leave just a memory trace of feathers
against a bright blue sky.
To fly way up high,
to Siberia,
to Tasmania,
to a world that isn't your own.
Just for a time, not forever.
Like the rogue bird that separates from the flock
and flies miles from its range,
puzzling everyone,
defying explanation.

I do.

The White-tailed Kite that strayed to Connecticut for much of the summer
and has now been spotted in New Jersey, still far from where it's usually found.
Photo copyright Frank Gallo.

Wordless Wednesday: Fall

2010-11-03T08:57:00.000-04:00

Mondo Pond, Milford, Connecticut, where Greater Yellowlegs roost

Birding as an excuse for eating

2010-10-28T13:50:00.000-04:00

Fall is well and truly here, with biting winds. Late after work the other day, while watching a peculiar Canada goose with a stumpy neck, I thought my fingers were going to snap off like those icicles that form in the freezer. Okay, so the goose was distinctly different to the other Canada geese in the flock, and maybe it was a lesser Canada goose or . . . well, normally I would have been quite interested, but what my mind was consumed by was how glad I was that though all manner of very important things have broken or fallen off my old car and it makes a symphony of strange and somewhat disturbing noises, miraculously the heated seats still work.

And dinner. I had room in my brain for thoughts of dinner.

Perhaps I am not the only cold and hungry soul out there for whom outdoor pursuits are a good excuse for a slap-up hot meal. So I offer up my antidote to a cold afternoon: easy hearty chicken soup with sweet Italian sausages.

Chicken soup for the birder's ~~soul~~ stomach
Serves: 6 birders who've been standing around for hours on a chilly day

Throw the following in a big pot:

4 stalks of celery, sliced
1/2 butternut squash, peeled and cubed (that's 1/2 butternut pumpkin if you're in Australia)
4 medium-sized carrots, peeled and sliced
1 big potato, peeled and cubed
kernels cut from 1 corncob
6 medium-sized mushrooms (portobellos are good), sliced fairly finely
1 big onion, diced
1 clove of garlic, peeled, but it's okay to leave whole as it melts into the soup
4 skinless chicken thigh fillets, chopped into bite-sized pieces (thank you, feathered friends)
1 quart (1 litre) of chicken stock
1 teaspoon or so of salt
black pepper
a good sprinkling of dried parsley
bay leaf

Bring all this to a gentle boil, then turn it down and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until all the veggies are nice and soft.
While it's simmering, cook 4 sweet Italian sausages and slice them.
Rinse and drain a can of cannellini beans.
Add the sausages and beans to the soup and let them warm up for a few minutes. Taste to see if it needs more salt and pepper.
Eat with crusty bread rolls while ruminating on an obscure bird you saw that day.

Wordless Wednesday

2010-10-26T23:19:00.000-04:00

autumn storm

2010-10-21T16:10:00.001-04:00

I go walking after a quick and wild autumn thunderstorm, and the world is fresh. It has been scrubbed clean -- each leaf and berry polished and new. The tops of the storm clouds are white and puffy, away in the distance, but the air seems still to carry a charge.

A ball of starlings comes at me, panic in every feather.

The Cooper's hawk follows like a missile.

Crows scatter into the air, too, lifting off from the power lines. Fourteen, fifteen, I stop counting and just watch the raggedy tips of their wings, glossy in the bright clear light. The sky aches it is so blue.

I walk on and the colors of the trees defy language. Sugar maples glow pink-yellow-red as if they were their own light source.

I come eye to eye with a downy woodpecker on a branch. We stare at each other for a while. I don't know what goes through his brain, but for that brief moment I am blissfully without thought.

He turns his back to show me a pure checkerboard of black and white, and the church bell rings out the hour.

The Big Sit 2010

2010-10-15T14:34:00.001-04:00

I am that annoying person in a group of birders who is always wandering off. I see an especially plump clump of moss to take a closer look at, or a cloud in the shape of a skull and crossbones, and off I drift. So even in the unlikely event that I was ever good enough at identifying birds, I could never do The Big Sit, an entire day of identifying as many species as possible from within a circle 17 feet in diameter (5 metres). I could maybe do The Big 20 Minutes.

These guys, The Surf Scopers, are just incredible as far as I'm concerned. From 4.30 in the morning till about 8:00 at night they stood on this platform at Milford Point, looking out across Long Island Sound on one side and the Wheeler Salt Marsh on the other. They saw the sun come up and go down, and two low tides. And they saw an amazing 107 species of birds, breaking their previous record of 101.

The Surf Scopers: From left, Frank Mantlik, Frank Gallo, Tina Green, Patrick Dugan, Jim Dugan. Thanks to pledges by sponsors, their Big Sit efforts support the Connecticut Audubon Society's Coastal Center at Milford Point.

I took this shot of them when I went down to visit them late in the day. Who else but birders equipped with fine optic devices would still be cheery after standing all day shoulder-to-shoulder like this on a tiny platform? Maybe Tibetan monks, but really, who else? Birding is so utterly addictive. When will the next bird appear? Where? What will it be? By the end, when the sun had gone down and the scopes had been packed away, I found it hard to walk away from the platform, imagining phantom owls calling in the darkness.

Life on my doorstep

2010-10-12T21:55:00.003-04:00

There is a park near my house that doesn't look like much at first glance. People walk their dogs through it. People throw trash out their car windows into it. I like it in the summertime when the guys next door play games out there after work; there's something very sane about that. If you look just a little more closely, though, it turns out that this park in suburbia is bursting with little miracles. I walked 15 yards from my door yesterday. There were no birds calling, the park seemed dead. But then a flash of yellow caught my eye. It was a quiet, glowing-daffodil-yellow Wilson's warbler. Within 20 minutes or so, I had also seen . . .

a northern flicker
a red-breasted woodpecker
a hairy woodpecker
a white-breasted nuthatch, such a cool weird little bird
a blue-headed vireo
a flock of juncos
American robins
golden-crowned kinglets
red-winged blackbirds
common grackles
fish crows
white-throated sparrows
house sparrows
a savannah sparrow
black-capped chickadees
tufted titmice
scores of pigeons
double-crested cormorants, including one wheeling through the water going for a fish, looking for all the world like a platypus as it did
great egrets
great blue herons
great black-backed gulls
herring gulls
ring-billed gulls
Canada geese
mallard ducks, some of the males coming out of eclipse plumage, now gorgeous and iridescent again
a mute swan, looking alternately evil and elegant, as they do
and an osprey that I thought was injured and drowning but was merely struggling to get aloft because the fish it had just caught in its talons was almost bigger than its body.

I work alone in front of a computer all day, mostly in silence, and sometimes I find myself tumbling down a rabbit hole of solitude where minute facets of work assume gigantic proportions in my head. A comma. A colon. I inadvertently said something bad in that e-mail, didn't I? Maybe I better read over it again. For the fifth time. That's when I know I should step outside and forget myself for a few minutes, but usually I stay sitting at the desk for an hour more, and then another, as if I'm punishing myself. When I finally go out the front door, it's like lifting a heavy lead helmet from my head. There is sun! And air! I'm surprised all over again by the green out here, right on my doorstep. I had forgotten about life, but huh, it had continued on out here in full bustle. Why can't we remember what's good for us and just do it, every time?

Wilson's Warbler by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, National Geographic, 1917

The Swallow Vortex

2010-10-10T13:13:00.001-04:00

Summer has passed, winter approaches. All creatures turn their attention to survival, shelter, safe harbor. Each sunset at this time of year, hundreds of thousands of tree swallows are drawn to an island in the Connecticut River, to roost together among tall marsh grass. Now the breeding is done, the drive is to find safety in numbers.

The calm before the swallows descend upon their roost for the night. (Photo by Vanessa Mickan)

To start, you see one or two swallows, feathered darts overhead. Then as the light fades, the air begins to thicken with birds. They stream in low to the water, sometimes skimming the surface to sip a last drink for the night. They pour across the ridgelines, zigzagging randomly as they glean insects on the wing. The sound builds as they call to one another, racing toward their roosting place.

The swallows stream in from all directions. (Photo by Vanessa Mickan)

It is chaos theory in action. These birds have spent the day dispersed across a wide area and have each flown their own erratic path to get here; now, in the space of minutes, they form an organized system. They start to fly in the same direction, swirling around and around above the island, forming not so much a flock as a meteorological event -- a whirlpool, a cloud, a tornado. No human word can quite sum it up, because this event is a mystery to the human senses. How do the birds communicate? How do they organize themselves? How do they know to do this?

Photo by Frank Gallo

Something happens. Some signal -- the amount of light? -- is picked up by the vortex, and with the suddenness of a summer thunderstorm, the birds rain down hard. The ones at the bottom of the funnel plummet headlong into the grass, seeming to drag the rest down with them. The sky drains within 40 seconds. It is as if it were a dream, a hallucination. Where just a moment ago, you were in the midst of a swirling mass of life and noise and movement, now before you is a quiet sky. It is as if nothing happened.

Photo by Frank Gallo

The birds' day is done. Within the grass, they are no doubt jostling for position, finding their places to sleep, settling down. And now it's your turn. You head for the dark highway and begin to follow the red tail lights of the stream of cars in front of you. Your path may wind and zigzag, but it is a thread in a lacework of paths that leads to the city or the township where you live, the place where you and others of your species gather to roost each night.

Photo by Vanessa Mickan

The edge of the hurricane

2010-09-03T17:19:00.000-04:00

Skies are leaden, and the air feels heavy. The hurricane is about to pass many miles to the east tonight. This morning, I wake up at five o'clock thinking of the birds that may be blown off course and find themselves here tomorrow. I am excited to get out with the binoculars and perhaps see something rare, unusual, something I've never seen before. And yet at the same time, I identify with those birds whose lives are right now erupting into chaos. Perhaps I am dreaming, perhaps I am awake, but I am airborne for a moment. I am a tiny bird blown out to sea. Imagine the desperate survival urge. And what of the seabird that suddenly finds itself in a strange dry land? No one can know what consciousness a bird has, but we all can imagine the instinct to keep breathing till the very last second that we can't any more. Some of these storm birds will live, some will die. There is nothing new in that, but still it gives me a pang, a reminder that there are clear days for all of us, and storms to face, too.

Gull appreciation

2010-08-27T22:15:00.000-04:00

The last couple of days I have been walking the sands of Milford, thinking and trying to stop thinking, and in the early evening light everything looks beautiful. Even gulls, which my eye too often used to pass over. So pure-white. So bold. So loud. But so quiet as the day fades.

When I got to Silver Sands, the grassy dune by the side of the boardwalk had hundreds, if not thousands, of dragonflies hovering above it. I have never seen so many, like tiny silent helicopters.

The last days of summer

2010-08-26T20:58:00.000-04:00

Snowy Egret, John J. Audubon

The last days of summer are too precious to waste. As the sun sets, I am drawn to the beach. There are not many birds to speak of, but the white sails of the yachts glow pink in the dying light, and there is a breeze on my skin that is warm but holds the promise of autumn. A Golden Retriever puppy jumps up and licks the end of my binoculars. Now I really will have to clean them like I always say I'm going to. The shorebirds know to make the most not only of the last days of summer but the final minutes of every summer's day. At the water's edge they are trying for one last fish, one last mollusc. Gulls fly high to drop shells on the rocks, over and over until they crack open just enough to allow bills in to winkle out their salty treasure. A young Snowy Egret--its legs and bill still pale--does its dance, wiggling its foot in the sand to stir up . . . yes, a little fish, which it swallows down in a snap. If time could pause at this perfect moment, I would not complain.

Raptor beauty

2010-08-12T22:34:00.001-04:00

Raptors have an other-worldly quality: Finely tuned hunting machines, they have skills that are so foreign to me as a human. I saw the White-tailed Kite just as we pulled up at Stratford Point late one day this week. It was flying right above us, and as I jumped out of the car, it began hovering high over the tall grass. To me, it was a beautiful display of raptor skill. To an unsuspecting vole, it was a Very Bad Thing Indeed. The bird scooped its wings back and forth oh so quickly through the air, staring at the ground, then swoop, it plummeted down like an arrow . . . and shot back into the air, a limp vole clutched in its talons.

It looked like a precision tracking and killing machine for whom this was no effort at all. When I looked at its ghostly charcoal-rimmed eyes through my binoculars after it ate the rodent in the top of a tree, I could impart all kinds of perceptions, skills, talents to that bird. But these were just human fantasies that say more about the qualities I wish I had: It turned out that other people had been watching the bird hunting unsuccessfully for hours, lucklessly scouring the fields for prey. We just happened to arrive at its moment of glory. To the kite, catching a vole was no spectacular aerobatic feat, just an act of basic survival. It just looked so much more impressive than when I cruise the aisles of the supermarket.

Incredible photos thanks to Frank Gallo.

New life, and death ... and White-tailed Kite pictures

2010-08-03T21:43:00.012-04:00

It always seems to happen, and yet it always seems to surprise me, that when I fail to see what I set out to see, I experience something wonderful.

The White-tailed Kite that surprised everyone by suddenly showing up in coastal Connecticut, at least a thousand miles from its home, has been hanging around now for a couple of days. I want to see its wings slicing through the air again, see it hovering looking for prey, so this evening I went down to Milford Point, where it had spent much of the day. By the time I got there, the tide had risen and the bird had flown from the sandbar where it had previously been sitting eating some small creature.

There was no rare bird, but there was the sky. There was green grass growing in the salt water. Terns, plovers, American Oystercatchers.

I walked by the water's edge, and came upon a black blob. Just a starling, I thought. But hang on, there was something different. I put up my binoculars. It was fuzzy -- oh, a chick on gawkily long legs. I sunk down on my knees on the sand, and this black fluffy chick came right up to me and walked by. I don't think it was even aware I was there.

It was a clapper rail, Frank tells me, who's glad to discover that they're breeding at Milford Point. It's not a rare bird, but there was something about being there on the sand, just me and this little chick, that was just as special as seeing that glorious White-tailed Kite.

Looking at this vulnerable chick exposed on the beach, life seemed more fragile and beautiful than ever. That seems -- I can't quite find the word . . . pathetic? -- now that I've just learned that today in a different Connecticut town nine people lost their lives in another workplace shooting. But this was before my stomach had sunk at that news. Then, I was simply relieved when that chick scuttled on those stilt legs up into the long grass, where it was hidden from view, though still cheeping cheeping cheeping.

More White-tailed Kite Pics

Because I, along with every birder in New England, am still quite obsessed with the White-tailed Kite, I am savoring some more pictures that Frank Gallo took...

The Day of the White-tailed Kite

2010-08-01T19:39:00.000-04:00

I just circled today's date in the calendar and named it The Day of the White-tailed Kite. This truly amazing bird was spotted at least a thousand miles from home, in Stratford Point -- the first documented sighting in Connecticut, and one of the only times it's been seen in all of New England. Who knows how or why this bird arrived, or how long it will stay -- it's normally found in Florida and the Gulf states, or on the West Coast and in some Southwestern states. It perched in a tree in the meadow, flew sorties around the point, and hovered searching for mammal snacks, looking to my eyes like some kind of predator angel.

These photos are by Frank Gallo, director of the Connecticut Audubon Society's Coastal Center at Milford Point -- a man who runs like the wind when there is a rare bird to be snapped.

The calls went out, the crowd soon gathered.

Things I am grateful for today

2010-07-20T14:50:00.004-04:00

The drab little brown female House Sparrow I just saw having a dust bath that could only be described as gleeful. / That there was a local family so generous that a hundred years ago they donated a tract of land near my apartment as a bird refuge. / The fact that robins sound like flutes, and are everywhere. / That there are people who care about baby birds that have fallen out of trees. / Northern Cardinals providing a vivid flash of red in the garden when you least expect it. / That Chickadees and Titmice always seem to go together as a package deal. / And that I just had to stop at an intersection in the middle of downtown to let geese cross the road.

(Drawing of female House Sparrow by Wilhelm von Wright, 1810 - 1887)

Home

2010-05-21T08:34:00.000-04:00

Imagine if any treetop could be your home. The migratory songbirds flying all night on fast-beating wings are citizens of the treetops. The Canada Warbler I see on a wooded path beside a harbor on the Connecticut shoreline is just stopping over on its long journey from South America. We have chopped down so many trees that this bird is lucky to have found the habitat it needs. And yet for this moment in time, maybe just this one day, this patch of woods is home, the place where you eat and rest and simply live. The bird is alive in this moment, thoroughly inhabiting the space, its own feathery body, and this moment. Imagine if every room you walked into could feel like home. If you could carry home with you, inside your skin. If every moment you were truly alive, not constructing elaborate plans in your mind about your next footstep, but knowing that instinct will lead you to where you need to go.

Pic: National Geographic, Vol. 31, 1917

Voices in the green

2010-05-15T21:42:00.002-04:00

Spring brings on a kind of fever. People here in Connecticut are transformed. The many months of hunkering down and being solitary are a hazy dream. People have started saying hello in the street again. And smiling. Actually smiling. The nature reserve in my neighborhood is overflowing with baby squirrels. Squirrelets. Warblers are zigzagging out of the tops of the oak trees like so much popcorn. Baltimore Orioles are singing their bell-like song and appearing in the top branches like yellow-orange flames. Thrushes are creeping in the undergrowth. Catbirds are chortling and chattering and just plain showing off. They are such born performers. They don't flit away; if anything, it's almost as though they dance a little closer to soak up all the attention.

The sounds of the migrant songbirds overwhelm my brain. I try to keep track of the buzzy trills, the ethereal swishy songs, but they come from all directions -- and now that the trees have leafed out, there is just so much green. This time last year my mate spotted a Blackburnian warbler in this park and showed it to me. It's a tiny firey orange and black bird, and seeing it made me gasp, so incongruous and unexpected those colors were amidst the leaves. I want to see that bird again. I want to get that rush again. It's my drug.

Today, my mate, who has ears like a cat, picked out a Blackburnian's ear-splittingly high-pitched yet thin voice out from everything else. At last, I would see it again! The call was coming from that tree, that great big oak tree. I stealth-rushed to it; I stared up. I bobbed and weaved to look through branches. No, wait, was the sound really coming from that other tree? Creep, creep, creep . . . wait, that tree . . . It became a kind of madness. It was up there somewhere singing and singing. I had to see it. But I would never see it. Just green, a wall of green. Bless that little Blackburnian up there doing its thing, gracefully failing to cooperate with my desires.

Spontaneous combustion!

2010-04-14T16:25:00.001-04:00

For the friends who read yesterday's blog (and actually made it at least halfway through*), I have to note with great excitement that spontaneous combustion made the news today. No, not the News of the World, but an actual real news outlet, the BBC. And I am doubly excited because there is an Australian connection: A bloke in Warrnambool worked up so much static electricity on his way to a job interview that he caused a fire in the office building and one of the firies (that's "firemen" to those unfamiliar with the Australian passion for taking the gravitas out of every possible word) mused that he was carrying such an electrical charge that he could've . . . spontaneously combusted. Awesome! (I am ten years old again.) The question I am now left with is: Did he get the job or not?

*Yay, someone made it at least halfway through!

Ugly/beauty

2010-04-13T22:54:00.003-04:00

There is so much beauty to be had in even the most repulsive surroundings. Nothing is ever all ugly. The most exotic, the most gorgeous birds could care less that they're standing in a post-apocalyptic-looking hellhole. Actually, it seems to be that the places that are the grossest and most disgusting to human beings provide a bounty for birds. I have watched ducks in wasterwater treatment plants. Pond weed doesn't get this green without a reason.

I have gazed upon birdlife at the dump in New Haven. The furry outline left behind by a dead deer, seemingly melted into the ground--or perhaps spontaneously combusted, a possibility I was strangely obsessed with as a child--was just an added bonus.

I have stumbled through a desolate patch of dead frozen cabbages in the depths of winter looking for interesting sparrows. Well, for any sign of life, really.

On Nantucket Island, people stroll along the quaint cobblestone streets shopping and having Herman Melville fantasies. They miss out on the garbage dump, possibly the stinkiest and most toxic garbage dump I've ever experienced. Really disturbing-colored stuff was seeping up onto your shoes out of the silty mud everywhere you walked. And they apparently have a lot of explosives to dispose of on Nantucket.

The past Sunday found me at Sandy Point, by the harbor at New Haven, on the sand and mud right next to the sewage treatment plant. Apparently it's a good place to find shorebirds.

I've read about medieval notions of medicine and how doctors used to think that diseases were caused by miasmas, or nasty vapors in the air. And walking out along that sandy point and breathing in little sips of air, as if that would somehow save me from the foul stench, I truly grasped how they made that connection. I didn't have my camera. Try to imagine that you are about to direct a movie set in a post-nuclear landscape and are on a quest to find the ideal location, and then you go to bed and you dream of the perfect location.

This day there was little except for the usual parade of gulls, an armada of Mute Swans, and about six American Oystercatchers. I love those little black and white and vermilion fellows with their crazy long bills for winkling molluscs out of their shells. But I could go somewhere scenic to see those.

Then, while trudging back to the car, there was a plum-colored blue blob standing on the sand. A Great Blue Heron--no, it was a Tri-colored Heron. I had never seen one of those. That's because you don't, apparently, ever see many of them here. I think I actually gasped. It was the most elegant, graceful, improbably plumaged creature you could possibly hope to see while attempting not to gag because of a pesilential miasma. Utter anthropomorphizing on my part, but to me it looked like it was all dressed up for a formal dinner dance. Ready for the breeding season with a sweeping swatch of white plumage at the back of the neck. The three colors so subtle in the late-afternoon light: soft blue, creamy white like good vanilla ice cream, and a reddish blush on the neck. It was to be but a fleeting flash of beauty. Up it rose on its chopstick-legs, and it was gone--briefly mobbed by gulls as it departed--out to roost somewhere for the night.

Photograph taken by Dori, Wikimedia Commons

Ten minutes in the park

2010-04-06T09:21:00.000-04:00

It's spring! Ten minutes in the park this morning: The Red-winged Blackbirds are back, conkareeeeee. Robins are cheerily-cheery-upping. White-throated Sparrows are singing in their quavering little voices like something from an old dusty record. Cardinals, Northern Flickers, Downy Woodpeckers, screaming Bluejays. A Cormorant flying fast and low to the water. The squirrels are running around everywhere like crazy, chasing, fighting, clutching acorns. And there was a Red-tailed Hawk high in a tree, quitely devouring one squirrel that didn't run quite fast enough today.

In praise of the ordinary

2010-03-14T20:40:00.011-04:00

Planning is overrated. I had plans to go out this weekend with my new little audio recorder to try to capture the sound of spring: the first Red-winged Blackbird that has returned to Milford harbor and has been down there in the reeds calling, calling, calling. He'd come back to crystal blue skies and gradually warming days, and his calls had filled me with such joy because they mean change and growth and color will be here any day now.

So of course when I planned to go out and try to record him, we were slammed with a wall of weather: 36 hours of unrelenting rain and brutal gales that left a few people dead, their cars crushed by trees. I would give you a listen to what the tempest sounded like from my porch, except that I can't get this damn thing to upload the file. Imagine the inside of Mawson's hut in Antarctica.

I finally ventured out this afternoon when it had calmed, but all the birds had very wisely cleared out. Except a pair of Mallards--there's always a pair of Mallards. Oh, and a shrubful of House Sparrows--there'll be House Sparrows at Armageddon.

Bored after being cooped up so long, I went for a drive to West Haven--and there they were, the birds. (Suddenly the name of the place made sense.) It wasn't the kind of birding that takes your breath away because you see something rare. It was just all the usual suspects there, as far as I could tell.

Except for a funny-looking goose. My point-and-shoot camera doesn't do this lovely goose justice. It was just majestic looking, to my eye. I watched it for ages, mesmerized by the soft caramel-colored patterns on its neck, the white blush on its face and rings around its eyes. This was no goose I had seen before . . . but no, it wasn't some rare find. It was a hybrid. A mishmash. A mixture of a Canada goose (they mostly inspire a yawn or a curse but little else) and just a plain old domestic goose, I'm guessing.

But to me it was just gorgeous, as astounding as any rare or noteworthy goose I might have hoped to find with my binoculars. Just the product of ordinary goose genes. Just an ordinary goose. Long live the ordinary!

Fantasy birds

2010-03-05T20:31:00.006-05:00

Things have been so gray of late. Interminable dark skies, frozen earth. It is a lonely, hard kind of a winter this one. The economy is still miserable no matter what the statistics say; my health insurance premium just tripled, which makes the petty sniping in Congress even harder to stomach. But I escaped last week. I was in Guatemala, a country as beautifully strange as its name.

And there at last I found my fantasy birds, all living amongst lush green fleshy plants, on rich volcanic slopes. Often I couldn't even see them, but only hear them calling to one another from deep within the greenness and the mist. Emerald Toucanets barking like dogs. Long-tailed Manikins that sounded like the sweetest clearest bells. Violaceous trogons doing a hollow haunting staccato sound.

My eyes found it hard to adjust to all that green life after being so accustomed to fields of white and bare twigs against a flat gray sky. But when I did catch a glimpse of one of these birds, it took my breath away.

Greens, turquoises reds, oranges, and yellows so rich and lustrous it didn't seem possible. Outlandish crests, extravagant trailing tails. Bright flashes of surreal shapes and hues flitting through the leaves so that at first I thought I had imagined them, dreamed them while awake.

I usually find it frustrating when I go birding and hear birds calling but can't find them, or when other people see a bird and I can't. But here, with an orchestra of bird calls all around me, big old trees, tangling vines, and the promise of seeing a flash of color and wing at any moment, I just didn't care. It was all beauty. And it was a source of joy knowing that I would never see some of the incredible birds that I could hear calling from behind towering stands of bamboo or across the other side of a densely forested valley. Here were the birds of my dreams living out their lives in secret. This was their kingdom.

Snow tree

2010-02-16T20:40:00.003-05:00

My favorite tree, look at you now.

Will there ever be birds on your branches again?

Seems impossible.

But then, the silence of the snow is beautiful.

Extreme birding!

2009-12-21T09:12:00.000-05:00

I went on my first ever Christmas bird count this weekend. Until recently I had no idea that in the weeks around Christmas teams of birders here split up and take districts and count how many birds they see. The data is compiled, and so there is a record of the number and species of birds rising or falling over time in the face of rampant overdevelopment, climate pressures, and conservation efforts. Sounds sane and reasonable -- if you lived in northeast America all your life, and snow and ice and wind that feels like countless microscopic razor blades is normal to you. Christmas for me was always cold roast chicken, a trip to the fish market for prawns, and collapsing under the shade of a tree in the backyard. In contrast, the Christmas bird count in New Haven county meant getting up at 3 a.m. and standing in below-freezing conditions by the side of lonely roads skirting dairy farms and fields and frozen swamps, listening for screech owls call their spooky calls.

Screech owls don't screech. (There seems to be a great tradition of naming birds seemingly just to make identification as counterintuitive as possible.) Screech owls in fact make a whinnying sound like a ghost horse. We went from one dark, quiet place no human has any business being in during the predawn hours to another and another, until the sun came up. The true cold descended just before dawn. I checked later, and it turned out that the "feels like" temperature -- taking wind chill and all that into account -- was minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 21 degrees Celsius.

Okay, sorry, but that's not birding any more. It's some kind of lunacy. Thing is, I discovered it's one of the most fun things I can imagine doing. The quietness and clarity. The surrealness of being out of step with ordinary life, like that feeling you get when you have to go to the emergency room in the middle of the night -- you're not tucked up in bed like everyone else but have stepped away into some other time and space. The world looks so different at that hour: Later that day we went through the same fields and wooded areas, and I had the jarring sensation that the predawn visit was a dream. Time got bent out of shape, and it seemed that we had done that days or weeks before, or in another lifetime. Those little owls were no longer active, and instead we counted comforting daytime birds -- geese, ducks, gulls, robins, sparrows, bluebirds.

Perhaps the most beautiful bird of the day was the Snow Bunting . . . at the dump. Birders don't get distracted by ugly or hostile environments. It's all about the birds. I love that level of focus. But I don't have it. I tend to get distracted and suddenly realize I've wandered away from the group, looking at trees or streams or clouds -- or in the case of the dump, a deer skeleton and the fur it left behind, melting into the ground in a rough deer shape. In a desolate cabbage farm -- the farmers had failed to harvest, and their vegetables were snap frozen in the ground -- there were frozen puddles in tire tracks that looked almost like fossils.

Fall fell

2009-12-04T20:31:00.008-05:00

The burning trees of early autumn are just a dim memory. I got a shock when I looked at my last posting and saw all those gorgeous colors. Was that really my park? The bright flurry was stunningly short lived. There were searingly blue skies, air that crackled with the smell of dry leaves, and the ground was thick with squirrels burying acorns. Swarms of tiny birds descended in a frenzy of eating before millions of wing beats took them to warmth and sun; I filled pages of my notebook with lists of species. Then in the swing of a pendulum, all was gone. Now the trees are gray twig fingers stretching up into a glowering sky, and to spot a bird is a special treat.

The tree that I spent every day looking at and willing to turn color lost all its leaves in one sharp day. A storm came, and the buttery leaves were gone. I have been walking past it every day lately and not even noticing that it's there. (Sorry, tree.)

This was it on October 27th and then October 28th.

The leaves are gone, but the colder weather has its own beauty. And it never seems to stop the Canada geese . . .

Nature will always surprise you

2009-10-24T11:02:00.002-04:00

Even when you are keeping a close eye on nature, it surprises you. All around me trees have been bursting into orange and red flames the past couple of weeks.

But the tree I have been tracking the progress of every day -- taking its photo, carefully observing for a change in color -- was staying resolutely green.

It sounds ridiculous, but I was almost getting frustrated that it seemed unwilling to surrender to the fall. I was beginning to get less enthusiastic about going out and looking at it. And then yesterday I walked up, and in front of me, seemingly overnight, the tree was light yellow. It didn't happen in patches; it didn't happen gradually. All of a sudden, the whole tree was noticeably changed.

And now look at it today, brightening into buttercup yellow. To someone walking along for the first time, it would be a different tree to the one it was only a few days ago. The changes that transformed this living thing were imperceptible to my eye in their increments, but they were happening nonetheless -- just like they are no doubt happening to you and me, under our own radar, but still day by day turning us into some new version of ourselves.

Autumn's progress

2009-10-10T17:29:00.010-04:00

October 7
Wake to drenching rain and leaden sky. I should test to see whether birds are out there. But bed is nice. Rain gives way to diabolical winds in the afternoon (30 mph / 50 kph). Flying branches and deadly high-speed acorns: I stay inside.

October 8
8:15 a.m. Tempest has given way to a glorious clear day. Sparrow Fest '09 continues in the reserve, and there are plentiful white-throated sparrows all frantically feeding amongst the fallen leaves and branches. Watch a male black-throated blue warbler chasing a female from twig to twig to twig. Fall has been given a hurry-up by the winds yesterday: The trees have lost a lot of green foliage; it makes a treacherous blanket on the ground hiding those damned ankle-twisting acorns.

October 9
5:00 p.m. Humid, uncomfortably muggy. What season is this again? Oh, that's right, New England season.
October 10
8:30 a.m. Rainy, still uncomfortably muggy. I did a course on Birding by Ear earlier in the week. This somehow only makes it more frustrating when I hear an impossibly melodic call coming from the reserve as I scoot through it rushing to catch the train for a day in New York. I am convinced I'll be able to commit the song to memory and call my birding expert friend so he can tell me what it is. Within about two minutes the tune has vanished from my mind like a wraith.

Later, when I come back through the park after my day in the city (those MTA announcements to beware of the closing doors, please, are a kind of birdsong to me, too) the weather has turned again. Whipping wind and dry cold air, and ice-crystal clouds high up in the sky. This is the fall weather I love, with its promises of frozen earth and naked twigs.

Ninja sparrows

2009-10-06T22:20:00.002-04:00

Your passage through the woods is generally attended by sufficient noise to warn birds of your coming long before you see them. They are then suspicious and ill at ease, but secrete yourself near some spot loved by birds, and it may be your privilege to learn the secrets of the forest.
Birds of Eastern North America, Frank M. Chapman, 1922

I was walking through the park yesterday in the dying afternoon light and had a freaky experience. Dark wings and bodies silently lifting off from the ground and flooding through the undergrowth like a vapor. I'd spooked scores of white-throated sparrows feeding in the dead leaves. I'd made them suspicious and ill at ease. I have to admit, they did the same to me. I'd never seen a big flock like this, and I didn't know anything like this happened in the park that I thought I knew so well. And there was something eerie about them; they looked like some kind of CGI effect, all ethereal wings and shadows. I stopped dead and did like the book says: secreted myself. The flock forgot all about me and went back to feeding. With the naked eye, I could barely even make them out. Only with the binoculars could I see that they were everywhere, all around me. The ground was alive. They were moving more stealthily than I realized sparrows ever could. Ninja sparrows, one minute they would be there right in front of me, the next they would just melt into the shrubs. Spooky. They were there again this morning when we went to check out the park. They must have decided to rest up a bit and feast before continuing south. We counted at least 50, but could hear probably 50 more, chirping 360 degrees around us.

The trees are chirping!

2009-10-05T09:00:00.003-04:00

October 5
7:45 a.m. Sunny, crisp, wind from the west-north-west. Birds are a reminder of how all creatures on this earth except for humans have no choice but to live according to the weather. The front that brought rain and dull skies passed yesterday, the wind changed direction, and now the migrating birds are on the move again. They flew through the night and then dropped down to feed this morning, surrounding my house so that I woke up to the sound of tzzzz-ing and chipping and chupping. The trees along the outer edge of the park, which get the biggest hit of morning sun, are overflowing with warblers. I have a ridiculous moment of panic when I realize I will never be able to spot and identify them all. There are so many different high-pitched notes coming from the treetops, from all angles, and I know I'm only seeing a fraction of the birds that are up there--twisting my neck and turning my head this way and that, I feel like those hapless fools in the Blair Witch Project staring out blindly into the forest trying to guess what's out there.

For certain, I can say black-throated green warbler, white-breasted nuthatch, downy woodpecker, black-capped chickadee, titmice, Eastern phoebe, ruby-crowned kinglet.

Quietness

2009-10-04T20:42:00.000-04:00

October 4
8:30 a.m. Foggy, humidity 93%, gray skies. I am sleepy. The whole world is sleepy, wrapped in a misty blanket. Nothing stirs. Water drips from every branch and leaf. If there are birds here, they're not making a sound or movement. I walk the trails and absorb the green-ness and the quiet. Just as I am leaving, I round the corner on a trail and startle a flock of at least a dozen mourning doves. Perhaps they thought nothing was stirring in the park, either: They were feeding on the ground oblivious, as though they were the only creatures here. At the sound of my footfalls they all flutter up into the branches and stare down at me, suddenly nervous, alert.

Fall diary

2009-10-04T20:28:00.000-04:00

I have a favorite little nature reserve, a strip of old trees hemmed in by harbor and suburban streets. The birds migrating south right now find this improbable pocket of leafiness irresistible, and on a good morning the trees are just alive with tiny flitting missiles. My friend who I walk in there with suggested that we should keep a daily record of the bird life we see. Amazing things happen in the fall, and it's too easy to lose track. So, no more ignoring the alarm clock. This is to be the season of getting up early every morning and observing what happens as the cold closes in . . .

October 1
9:30 a.m. (Okay, so it isn't exactly "early morning," but it is my birthday. My 40th birthday. Have mercy!) Lovely crisp day, sunny, no wind. Never actually make it into the park, though. Become utterly obsessed by a big tree at the edge, which has 5 or 6 warblers flitting in it. I have never seen these birds before, which is always exciting. Gray with yellow sides and yellow tails except for a black band at the end. It's so hard to get a good look; they won't stop moving, like hyperactive children. Can't they tell I am there with my binoculars trying to ID them? (Neighbors by now think I'm mad.) Spend at least 30 minutes back at home poring through the warbler section of my field guide until caving and calling my friend for help. American Redstarts. Young ones, which are not red at all. Yellowstarts, I think I'll call them.

October 2
7:20 a.m. It's like being in heaven. Clear skies and winds from the north-west. Waves of tiny migrating birds surge in to refuel. As the sun comes up and warms the treetops at the edge of the park the birds descend to snack on insects amidst the leaves. People are walking their dogs and taking their kids to school; mystified, they ask what we're looking at. I'm reminded that incredible phenomena are happening all the time, if only we could see. I point upward, and birds are pinging out of the treetops like corn popping, as they zigzag from one insect to the next. In just an hour we see killdeer, cedar waxwings, northern flicker, red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, eastern phoebe, red-eyed vireo, black-and-white warbler, black-throated blue warbler (say that three times fast), black-throated green warbler, northern parula warbler, magnolia warbler, American redstart, ruby-crowned kinglet, golden-crowned kinglet, white-breasted nuthatch, and bluejay.

October 3
12:30 p.m. (All right, it's not even morning. But it's Saturday. And it's been raining all night. Have mercy!) Cloudy; no wind. Very quiet. I hear only a bluejay and have nearly given up on seeing anything interesting, except for a giant fungus.

And then I hear a chipping sound I've never heard before. That-is-a-new-bird neurons light up like a Christmas tree in my brain. The bird is down low in the understory, quite close to the trail, hopping from twig to twig. I try to be systematic in observing its features, but I always find it so hard--part of my brain daydreaming about the bird's indefinable beauty; the other part trying to break it up into its components so I can find it in the field guide. Light olive-brown, black eye and beak, a white eyebrow, a small white spot on the wing. I actually get a little bit closer this time with the field guide before I have to cave and make a phone call, which makes me ludicrously overjoyed. (It is a female black-throated blue warbler. Turns out that only the males get the fancy black throat and blue feathers.)

Tree at the edge of the park I got obsessed with when it was full of American red(yellow)starts. I am going to photograph this tree throughout the autumn to track how the leaves change color and fall.

In Praise of the Nomad

2009-09-10T21:49:00.000-04:00

Before I went on vacation to Arizona and New Mexico, my therapist (that's a whole other long story) mentioned how important it is to get away. She noted that humans were, after all, originally nomadic. I hadn't (a) known that or (b) looked at holidays that way, but I think she was right. My two weeks of nomadism cracked open my brain like an eggshell. Maybe it had something to do with all those impossibly huge skies you get in the West. And the lack of phones and televisions and computers.

In the southwest, Apache tribes were nomadic. They moved between the sun-bleached hardscrabble lowlands, the cottonwood-lined arroyos that fill when it rains, the cool cave-riddled mountains covered in pines and sycamores. Though the threads of their traditions may have been cut, no one can stop songbirds, butterflies, and dragonflies from maintaining their migratory cycle. Habitat has been destroyed by humans, yet still many species are able to follow well-worn paths of migration, somehow finding just enough food, water, and shelter to meet their needs -- sometimes in landscapes that look as hostile as one of those molten vistas Salvador Dali created.

I've never been into having a lot of possessions. They make me nervous, and I'm suspicious of the illusion of permanence they create. One of my favorite activities is paring back, shedding, bundling things up for the Goodwill bin. So it brought me joy to see the masses of migrating birds and insects alighting on the nearest twig or stem and calling it home, fully committed to the idea, even though it would be for only a few wingbeats of time.

Strange beauty

2009-08-29T13:16:00.004-04:00

Southeast Arizona. Desert plains and mountains of mesquite and towering Saguaro cactus, almost frightening blue sky, relentless sun, puffs of white cloud that rise up into the sky, blush-bottomed as the light reflects up off the russet-colored mountains. The clouds promise rain, but it's just an illusion. They dissipate and leave that searing blue sky again. How can anything live in this beautiful hell? But the desert is alive. Cactus wren build their nests amongst the thorns of the Saguaro. Canyon wren dart out of the shaded crevices between boulders. Where there are trees, they're filled with tiny migrating warblers of every shade of yellow. Clouds of tiny chickadees dot the branches like Christmas tree ornaments. Hawks and turkey vultures circle high above the stark outline of the mountains, and I feel like I'm in a classic Western.

Owl Omelet

2009-07-06T08:19:00.006-04:00

I was just looking up the Long-tailed Duck because apparently one has been hanging around in Long Island Sound nearby, so I wanted to be able to identify it if I stumble upon it. It's a startlingly beautiful duck -- it looks kind of like a toy, doesn't it? -- but what really makes me want to meet this duck is this entry in Peterson's field guide:

VOICE: Talkative; a musical ow-owdle-ow, or owl-omelet.

Pic by Wolfgang Wander. (Don't you just love the way it's eyeballing his camera with a kind of a "You looking at me?" 'tude?)

Independence Day

2009-07-04T09:30:00.008-04:00

My neurons started firing wildly when I read somewhere that while they were debating which animal would represent America on the Great Seal, Benjamin Franklin argued for the turkey. My mind went wandering. I had visions of how American history would have panned out if perching atop flagpoles and stately buildings all across the land were great big dumpy turkeys.

But of course, like most "Wow, that's amazing," stories, the Benjamin Franklin thing turned out to be a little mythic. In fact, before the eagle was chosen, Ben actually suggested the rattlesnake as the best symbol of "the temper and conduct of America." Ouch.

The turkey vs. bald eagle story comes from a letter he wrote to his daughter, in which he mused that he thought the bald eagle was a bit of a dubious choice:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character.

He had seen bald eagles stealing fish from honest hard-working osprey, and backing off when harassed by birds that were not only much smaller but also had the unfortunately colonial name of kingbird. And then, when an artist took a stab at portraying the nation's new emblem, Franklin thought their draftsmanship was a bit off and that the result looked more like a turkey. Not that that was necessarily a bad thing, he mused:

I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.

Happy Fourth of July!

Predator in the City

2009-06-23T23:06:00.001-04:00

A while ago my dear friend Daniel and I took a trip up to Boston. Just as we arrived, New England decided to put on its one hot day for the entire season so far. It was sweltering, and somehow Boston with all its cobblestone and clapboard charm just seemed surreal. Late in the afternoon the first cool breaths of wind began pushing menacing storm clouds the city's way. We revived ourselves with cold white wine and had a stroll through the Boston Commons, which was now suddenly bursting with people out enjoying the promise of a cool change. It was the usual parade of people walking dogs, young couples canoodling, university students poring over books, kids eating ice-creams -- then I noticed a flash of feathers and the unmistakable swooping motion of what had to be a raptor. Right there in the middle of the city, a Red-tailed Hawk had snatched a pigeon out of midair, in one swipe of the talons.

The pigeon didn't even have a moment to register that it wasn't a pigeon anymore. We rushed over to the tree the hawk had landed on, and in a second we saw the pigeon's soft gray feathers start to drift down, as though someone had ripped open a down pillow.

And as we looked up at her devouring dinner, people began to look at us. They looked at us looking up, and then they looked up, until soon the hawk had an audience underneath that tree. An old African American guy, a couple pushing their baby in a pram, a young couple, and still more people gathered -- everyone transfixed and smiling, a little exhilarated by this reminder that even in the city we're living in nature, with all its fabulous gory drama.

Nesting

2009-06-07T05:33:00.000-04:00

In our relationships with other people and the choices we make in how to live our lives, are we looking for a lot of the same things as birds are in the springtime, when they're busily collecting dry grass and twigs and interesting leaves, carefully carrying them back to their nesting places in their beaks? Strip away the layers of our human desires and complex cravings and neuroses, and it seems that like birds, underneath it all often what we are seeking is a simple nest. A comforting, sustaining one that holds us and protects us, anchors us -- but all important, allows us the liberty to fly away, explore on our own, stand on a twig and sing our own tune. A nest that offers us freedom, yet that we feel right down in our bones will be there for us when we need to return.

Dreaming and perceiving

2009-05-19T08:35:00.001-04:00

The scarlet tanager is an otherworldly bird. "Scarlet" is far too tepid a word to describe the male's plumage. You can stare as long as you like at him, but your mind still flails trying to decide how to perceive the hue, how to categorize it. It is a color rare anywhere, in nature or the manufactured world. Only having seen scarlet tanagers in birding books, it was a dream of mine to see one in real life. I don't think they're all that rare, but rather hard to spot because they are a bit secretive up there in the foliage.

It seems implausible that such an outlandishly tropical-looking animal would ever exist here, even in the summer . . . but they do wise up in winter and go to South America.

The other night, a scarlet tanager came to me in a dream, joining a gaggle of the fantasy birds that occasionally rise up from my unconscious in my sleep. Next morning, I was in a small patch of oaks and pines, looking for birds. I was with an uncannily intuitive birder who, having no idea about my dream, mentioned what joy it would be to find a scarlet tanager here. Thirty seconds or so later, a bird gave a beautiful call. And there he was, a male scarlet tanager, in all his vermilion glory. I couldn't even call myself a novice birdwatcher at that point: I was just an awestruck person who happened to have a pair of binoculars in my hands.

On an ordinary day, spotting birds involves exercising facets of human perception that we often don't have a chance to use in modern life: judging depth, distance, speed, height, subtle markings, minute color variations and patterns, the way that sound travels, the optical effects and illusions different types of light create. We have a vast array of talents for looking and hearing; this, though, was perception of a whole other order. Unconscious perceptiveness. There must be so much we know without even realizing that we do.

I wish I took the picture on this blog posting. Instead, I searched the net and found this spectacular one. But despite some digging, I couldn't find out who took it so I could ask permission. Whoever you are, it's a beautiful picture, and I hope you don't mind that I used it.

Dreaming in birds

2009-05-10T21:18:00.003-04:00

Some nights I dream of birds. Not birds I have seen -- even in birding books -- but species that don't exist. They crowd into my sleep, these fantasy birds, hopping on the ground, perching on leafy branches, feasting on blossoms.

Last night, my bird had a lustrous, impossibly purple head, the black beak of a crow, and a shiny emerald green body the shape and size of an American robin's.

Perhaps these fantasy birds are my brain's way of entertaining itself. Or the product of a deep urge to be free like a bird. Then again, how do I really know these creatures are not out there somewhere? If I traveled the world, searching, might I eventually find the secret colony of all the fantasy birds I have dreamed of for years? A friend once told me about a recurring dream in which she opens a drawer to find that it contains every umbrella she has ever lost in her life, each one vividly recognizable to her. Just like that, I imagine myself stepping off a pathway into a clearing in a forest and finding my dream birds quietly going about their lives, each one of them intimately familiar to me.

The voyeurism of bird-watching

2009-05-06T06:23:00.005-04:00

It was a gray weekend here, with soft light. Tiny hyperactive, colorful songbirds are migrating through, but because the leaves have just begun to unfurl on the trees, spotting them is a tantalizing business. My ears have trouble distinguishing the sounds of one bird from another -- all that tzeezting and chipping high in the treetops -- so now I find myself compelled to stand and gaze through binoculars into the foliage, waiting for somebody to appear. And when they do, they take my breath away. So many impossibly colored and patterned warblers and orioles and small flitting things that I have never seen before in my life, vivid fast-moving flashes of tangerine, yellow, blue. I've never been able to grasp the urge some people have to hunt, but now I wonder if the thrill I feel of standing looking, scanning the scene, and locking on is somehow the same. I still can't imagine pulling a trigger, though. I can only imagine being awestruck by the beauty that is all around us if we can just find a moment to look for it.

And what a strangely voyeuristic compulsion it is to look for birds. It's spring, so there is a lot of nest building, strutting, puffing, preening, egg minding, and feasting on blossoms going on. A whole universe of activity, social arrangements, journeys. They don't know I can see them through my binoculars. They go about their busy tasks -- gathering the perfect twigs, snatching minuscule insects in midair, showing off their splendid plumage in an attempt to impress a mate -- with no idea that I am there, watching. Through binoculars on a cloudy day, a mourning dove in a cypress tree, who would be so easy to ignore because she is just like all those other doves I've seen before, is a work of art. She blinks gently, and the fine frosty pale rings around her liquid black eyes make her look innocent, fragile, and tender as she debates whether the strand of dried grass she holds in her beak is worthy of her nest.

Springtime in New England: Coda

2009-04-21T18:58:00.010-04:00

Springtime in New England also looks like this . . .

Same town as the previous post, just a couple of days apart. "If you don't like the weather in New England, wait a few minutes," is what people here say, and people here are right. (The people actually have Mark Twain to thank for that saying, according to my exhaustive research -- okay, the thirty or so seconds I spent on snopes.com.)

These snapshots are of a small piece of open space right on the harbor, pretty much in downtown Milford. It has its own beauty even on a day as gray as this. A pair of kingfishers were by the water, flying in their crazy ziggy-zaggy way and occasionally darting out to try and spear a fish. I wouldn't have even noticed them, except that I was lucky enough to be there with Frank, the director of the Connecticut Audubon Society's Coastal Center at Milford Point. He is phenomenally attuned -- in a sixth-sense gifted kind of way -- to the merest flutter of a wing. I'm sure he knows what a bird is about to do before even it does!

Kingfishers kind of alarm me, to be honest. When I first heard one, only a few days ago, I just froze, because there I was in Connecticut, hearing what sounded almost like the notes -- bone-chilling to me -- that rend the air as a laughing kookaburra starts up. Well, turns out a kookaburra is a type of kingfisher. Apparently you can still be a kingfisher even if you don't fish, live in a eucalypt a long way from the water and eat lizards and insects -- or preferably delicious barbecue morsels. I used to love seeing and hearing the most iconic (if evil-sounding) bird of my homeland, and I like the fact that I can find its cousin here on the other side of the world.

Belted kingfisher. (Kevin Cole, www.kevinlcole.com)

Laughing kookaburra.

(Pic: Fir0002/Flagstaffotos, http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)

Springtime in New England

2009-04-20T20:29:00.028-04:00

Spring in New England looks like this.

Almost overnight, everything has started to bloom. The daffodils and cherry blossoms. Yellow forsythia everywhere. Green shoots on trees, and buds about to burst. A sky almost searingly blue. Am I the only one who sometimes believes that nature must surely be putting on a display just to match their emotions? It's been a long winter of hibernation, and I'm glad to be coming back to life again.

I spent all Saturday afternoon sitting in my friend's backyard -- a bird shangri-la with about ten feeders offering a smorgasbord of thistle, safflower, sunflower, millet, peanuts, suet, you name it. Cardinals, pine siskins, goldfinches, mourning doves, grackles, downy woodpeckers. I watched one sweet little female goldfinch. She perched at the feeder for at least an hour, occasionally pecking a thistle or just looking around, soaking up a bit of sun. I mean, what better for a finch to do on a day like this?

I have a weakness for squirrels, so I put down a big handful of cashews for them as well. This one squirrel kept darting over, picking up a nut, and fleeing up a tree to devour his treasure. Eventually he decided I was no threat, and then he just sat his butt down and devoured cashew after cashew, till I worried I was committing some kind of squirrel endangerment. Look at the frenzy in that eye! I think he's even clutching not one but two nuts in his rodenty little paws.

Death and resurrection

2009-04-13T08:47:00.004-04:00

You don't need to be a Christian to appreciate the symbolism of Easter. In the northern hemisphere, you can see it in nature all around you: it is a time when the cycles of death and resurrection are merging. Winter is being overtaken, in fits and starts, by spring. The earth and branches, seemingly dead these past months, reveal that the life you had forgotten lay beneath and within them the whole time. You can see it in the sparrows nesting in the eaves of your house, bringing dry dead straw and grass piece by piece to build their nests, in which new life will soon hatch. In the ducks and geese stopping over in coastal areas on their way north. In the knowledge that the songbirds will soon arrive, that they are inching your way each night, following the stars.

And perhaps you see the pattern in your own life, too. Perhaps you know that something needs to die, be left behind, so that out of it fresh life will spring.

The nature of anger

2009-04-11T08:26:00.015-04:00

I have never been skilled in the field of anger. Feeling it, expressing it, owning it. Very rarely would I get in a verbal fight. Except with the occasional customer service person in a call center somewhere. So much easier to summon up fury with a stranger -- cowardly, but true. (And there was that memorable time I totally lost it at a cinema clerk when I discovered five minutes into the film that they were playing live music over the top of one of my favorite movies, The Seventh Seal. And I mean really lost it.)

I used to think it was a positive thing that I spared those near and dear from angry outbursts and that everyone remarked on my calmness in the face of conflict (the despoiling of Ingmar Bergman movies aside).

But is it really such a great thing, a thing to be proud of, that I am unable to focus in and feel the full effect when someone does something that really should make me angry? Where does that anger go? There is something to be said for the sheer purity of animal anger. These geese were acting out of deep instinct. They didn't take time to ponder or analyze my motivation in walking near their territory. Maybe I have something to learn from them.

The furious geese

2009-04-09T10:53:00.001-04:00

Canada geese must be among the most unpopular birds in North America. People hate the way they take over parks, gardens, harbors, ponds, the verges of roadsides -- in fact, pretty much anywhere there's a blade of grass. People complain, most of all, about the way flocks of these big birds mess all over their lawns.

Okay, maybe it's because I don't have a lawn, but I love Canada geese. The way they honk their way across the sky in formation never fails to make me smile (especially if I was walking along staring at my shoes worrying about something). The way they honk their way across the street en masse, taking their own merry time, even though a line of cars is forming. Their velvety black necks.

Most of all, I love how furious they can be. On one side of Charles Island, off Milford, my friend Amar Kaur and I had to walk past what I am guessing were territories staked out by pairs of Canada geese settling in for the spring to nest. Canada geese mate not just for a season, but for life. Perhaps these have been their territories for many seasons before this. Though we were not close to any nests, we must have encroached on their invisible (to us) boundaries, because every twenty yards or so we were chased by a different pair of honking birds, necks held rigid, pitching themselves forward.

One goose in particular was not just protective and defensive; he was surely angry. I could feel his loathing. (Tsk, not only am I endowing this bird with human emotion, I am assuming it was male.) His honks were vicious; he opened his beak wide and, I swear, poked out his pink tongue. He flew right for our faces, and it was only when Amar Kaur waved a big stick in the air that he (resentfully) backed off. I turned around to catch a picture of this especially furious goose, and there he was, still facing me with utter defiance:

When we had passed, off he and his mate bustled into the thickets of the island, happily snuffling to themselves. They had class.

The Rookery at Charles Island

2009-04-08T07:43:00.008-04:00

Yesterday I went out to Charles Island, a mass of rocks, vines, and tangled thickets in Milford harbor. It can be reached on foot only for an hour or two when the tide is at its lowest, along a narrow tombolo. Once May arrives, the island will be a no-go zone, as it is a protected rookery for herons and egrets. Getting across the tombolo, the weather was grim, the skies were like lead, and the wind was fierce. On the island, though, it was a wonderland, a wild kingdom. My lovely and intrepid friend Amar Kaur and I saw at least 100 black-crowned night herons dotting the trees. Great egrets, with their long lacy breeding plumage trailing down like evening gowns, had their nests in the treetops.

The longer we looked, the better our eyes got at perceiving the birds. At first, where it seemed there was one or two in a tree, the better our eyes became at seeing, we noticed two or three more, then others still. Makes we wonder about all the other things our eyes must skip over every day.

Out there on Charles Island, it was easy to forget we were so close to modern life, cars, roads, Dunkin Donuts, Wal-mart . . . we heard only the sounds of the waves; the trees and thick vines creaking; the bizarre barking sounds of the herons, so much like a dog; and what my field guide calls the "guttural croak" of the great egrets, though that doesn't do justice to the otherworldly sound, which to my ears is like the clatter of Australian aboriginal clapsticks.

Just as we began to get nervous about making it back across the tombolo before the tide swept back in, the herons started getting restless, too. When I was cozily back home, I looked up my field guide and found out they were heading off for their night-time feast of fish, mollusks, small rodents, frogs, snakes, crustaceans, and even eggs and young birds.

Before we left the island, I was startled, thinking I saw a dog-like face staring at me through the brushes - a coyote? a feral dog? - but it was a white-tailed deer, looking at me with cautious big brown eyes. It headed off along one of the well-worn deer tracks, followed by about a dozen others, all breath-takingly quiet and gentle.

Turkey vultures

2009-04-07T09:11:00.004-04:00

There is a cemetery near my house, a historic one where if you look hard enough you find memorials to soldiers from the Revolutionary war. It has rolling slopes of green (when they're not covered in a bed of white snow). Every time I walk by there, I see some kind of wildlife. A woodchuck once. This weekend it was a fleet of turkey vultures. They came up from behind the churchyard, deathly silent, five of them, in formation. The distinctive V-shape they held their wings in; their black outlines in the sky; a band of silvery white feathers on the underside of the wings. They barely needed to flap, just glided - rocking slightly - in the wind. When they were just above me, they went their separate ways, spreading out to search for carrion to feast on. Within a matter of a minute, they had glided so far that they were almost out of sight, and it reminded me why I wish I was a raptor, able to go wherever I choose, with only a moment's forethought.

Pic (C) Michael "Mike" L. Baird bairdphotos.com